Paul Shire

Very few know this, but I spent the majority of my early adult life suicidally depressed. During high school, I was in and out of mental hospitals and rehabs for suicide attempts, drug abuse, refusing to get out of bed or eat for days on end, etc. By my mid 20's, after thousands of hours journalling, podcasts, and reading; tens of thousands of dollars on therapy, workshops, and coaching; and effectively a complete overhaul of my life, relationships, and beliefs, I had mostly cured it. I actually went back to school to become a therapist, hoping to share all the things I'd learned in overcoming my dysfunction. But within 2 years I dropped out after getting totally blackpilled on the prospect of ever making any measurable impact. The statistics and my own personal practical experience on helping others with mental illness are abysmal. Almost no one who has depression ever gets better. And the few that do, don't really need revolutionary new strategies. The tools that presently exists are more than sufficient. Upon reflection, I think I've figured out why this is. It's because a pre requisite to having depression is almost always a deeply ingrained habit of obsessing over everything wrong with yourself or the world and rejecting any and all possible solutions as "not good enough". And more importantly, to consider this as the only logically correct and morally good way of seeing things. If you suggest to a depressed person that this--or any other of their often numerous dysfunctional core beliefs, behaviors, or expectations--is irrational, unproductive, or otherwise unhelpful, it is at best ignored and more often seen as a personal attack and actively resisted due to how fundamental it is to their identity. It is not until they are willing to ask themselves "what if my problem is my fundamental values, beliefs, and expectations about the world?" that they ever make a single modicum of progress. And as soon as they do this, they basically always eventually get better. While pretty much everyone who doesn't, never changes. And more importantly, the former get better no matter what you put in their way, while the latter don't no matter how much you try to make it easier for them. Maybe there is value in communicating this fact. But what people do with it once they hear it, only they have control over.