Clinical Depression. You Can Defeat Your Demons!

By Bob Aronson

Depression, what is it? Why can’t you just snap out of it? Many people including family and friends who have not experienced depression have great difficulty understanding it much like people who are not addicts can’t understand addiction. In both cases we often hear advice like, “Snap out of it, you’ve got things pretty good. There’s no reason to be depressed.” Or, “You made the choice to start drinking or using drugs so choose to stop.” Oh, if it were that simple.

Here’s a cold slap in the face to bring us into reality. Depression is a mental illness, like the common cold is a physical illness. There has long been a stigma associated with mental illness held over from the days of Insane Asylums and “Crazy” people. That stigma is rapidly disappearing because so many people suffer from depression which is often a chemical imbalance that…