Therapy, and even psychiatric treatment like antidepressants, are not the same thing as gaslighting yourself.

When I tried an antidepressant for the first time, I thought the same thing you do. "I don't need medication! I'm sad because everything is terrible, and getting worse!". Everything was terrible. Everything was getting worse. The worst day of my life would come about a year later; I wasn't wrong that I was in very deep trouble. I was poor and getting poorer, my life had been decaying for years, and I could see that I would be out on the street very soon if my course didn't change, which was true (I found a place to go with a matter of hours left before I'd have been pitching a tent).

What I WAS wrong about was that that meant I couldn't be depressed, in the sense of "having major depressive disorder".

Antidepressants DO NOT make you happy. They don't make you ignore your problems. The day they kicked in for me, I was every bit as aware of the situation I was in as I had been when I began taking them a few weeks before. I still knew I was in deep trouble, I still had many things I wanted to change about myself. My values were not any different.

The difference, though, is that I wasn't drowning. This comic - https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vac... - describes my feelings almost exactly. It was like the difference between being inside a wildfire, and standing on a hilltop with a vantage point on it. The problem is still there and you still want to solve it, but you can pause, strategize, and turn the volume down enough to hear yourself. Now, in my case, it turns out I had been depressed in some form for most of my life, so this was a profound revelation to me. You mean most people's internal voices don't spend days abusing them for every small error? You can just like, go about your day and not have an internal voice telling you how worthless you are? I genuinely did not know that that was possible.

What people who "don't get it" don't realize, I think, is that major depressive disorder - the "chemical imbalance", in layperson's terms - can both occur on its own AND as a response to ongoing life stresses, in the same way that lung cancer can be genetic OR a response to toxic air. And depression is, somewhat by nature, self-sustaining once it is established: depression interferes with you doing precisely the things you'd need to do to not be depressed. Working on things you're invested in, exercising, getting social contact and support, all of these things are far harder when you're depressed than they would be if you weren't.

When you get on an antidepressant, you're not making your problems go away. You're just helping yourself interrupt the feedback loop that traps you within those problems. You still have to solve the problems, and that's why you still go to therapy. But therapy + antidepressants are more effective than therapy alone because it is far easier to apply what you learn in therapy when your mind isn't tearing itself apart with fear and pain.

Today, my depression is much better managed, because I've had a long time to learn to understand it from a position of safety. I still spiral into it sometimes. But the loops are not unbreakable now, because I'm trained to recognize them and interrupt them. Because of my time on medication, I know what part of my mind that screaming abuse comes from, and I can better separate it from myself. I'm better, on any axis you care to measure: I'm 60 pounds lighter, make ten times the income, have more experiences, am better-liked, have had more fulfilling and durable relationships, whatever. And if I had not gotten on a medication, I would've been rotting in the ground for about six years now.

(That is not to say that we don't need broader societal reforms to fix what is putting all of our brains under enough stress to cause damage. We should absolutely pursue those, and we should expect our world to get sicker until we succeed, in the same way that a polluted city should expect cancer rates to increase. But that's not mutually-exclusive with antidepressants being an extremely valuable part of individual recovery, in the same way that regulating pollution is not mutually-exclusive with treating someone's cancer.)