Sometime in late 2014 or early 2015, when I was at my rock bottom with depression, a psychiatrist asked me a question that changed everything. His name was Dr. Mohan Advani (he’s since passed) and I’m eternally grateful to him.

“I have one final question for you, Keely,” he said from his chair. “If I offered you an all-expense-paid trip to Europe, would you accept?”

“If I told you, ‘Listen, I get that you’re in a tough spot right now. You’re struggling to get out of bed, you have no energy, no vitality and you’re on the edge of hopelessness. I feel for you. I know that money is a stressor, so I’ll pick up the tab and you can go do what you need to do to feel better,’ would you say yes?”

Immediately, I said that I would. There was no, “Well that would be inappropriate or a burden to you,” no mental processing or obstacle finding.

There was someone offering me something I longed for and an answer that arose instantly.

“Obviously I’m not going to do that,” he continued, “But your response finalizes my assessment.”

“You don’t have clinical depression.”

“If you had clinical depression,” he went on, “It wouldn’t matter what anyone offered you. You’d be just as depressed on a vacation in Europe as you would be waking up in your own bed and going to work every day. Outside circumstances wouldn’t matter because your internal struggles would remain the same regardless of where you were or what you were doing.”

He went on to refuse to write me a prescription for antidepressants. “It would be unethical,” he said. “You’ve been on antidepressants for seven years now and tried multiple different kinds. Your personal assessment is that your depression has gotten worse, not better, over that time. Pills aren’t going to work for you.”

“Change your life, then your depression will sort itself out. This is situational depression and, while the symptoms are the same for clinical and situational depression, the treatment plan is different.”

“It’s time for you to try a treatment plan that has a chance of working.”

Seven years in and he was the first one to ever say anything like that. Every other doctor I had seen told me a different story, “Your task is to find the right medication,” they’d say. “Not every pill works for every person, but there’s one out there that will work for you.”

What was different is that Dr. Advani didn’t squeeze me into a 15-minute time slot, which is what every other psychiatrist had done. For the cost of my $25 copay, he gave me a 60-minute session four weeks in a row.

Dr. Advani did true detective work with me. He gave me homework. He listened to my answers. He mulled over my entire history. Then he reached his conclusion.

The conclusion that he reached for me was different than the conclusion he reached for a friend who also saw him. He happily wrote her a prescription for antidepressants because, in her case, he believed they were beneficial.

He wasn’t anti-med or anti-establishment. He was pro-root-cause-resolution. And he wanted to give me a fighting chance of actually sorting out my particular root cause.

This story – it’s a message I want to shout from the rooftop about depression. Depression is exactly one thing: a word that we as a society have agreed to use to describe a set of symptoms.

That’s it. What we call depression is a set of symptoms. If you have those symptoms, you have depression. If you don’t have those symptoms, you don’t have depression.

For you to resolve your depression, you may need to cut all chemicals out of your life because your body is having an immune response that’s ravaging your system and inflaming your brain.

For someone else to resolve theirs, they may need to move to Thailand. (That’s what I did, by the way. And it worked.)

Your neighbor might be better off with a pharmaceutical intervention, while your uncle would be best served by a regular exercise routine. Your hairdresser might be trapped in her cycles of depression until she finally addresses the trauma that’s plagued her ancestral lineage for generations.

I don’t know. It’s different for all of us. This isn’t a musing about providing answers. This is a musing about connecting to hope. Dr. Advani gave me hope. Maybe my story will give you or someone you love hope. There are few things in the world that would delight me more.

In hope,

Keely