When we talk about depression and mental health, it’s easy to get caught between two extremes. You’ve probably heard depression described as a “chemical imbalance” that just needs to be fixed with medication. Or maybe you’ve encountered the opposite view – that psychiatric diagnoses are just labels that pathologize normal human experiences.
The truth, as with most things in healthcare, lives in the more nuanced space between these extremes. Today, I want to share a different way of thinking about mental health.
Think about how we understand something like migraines. There’s no definitive test that can tell you whether someone has them. Instead, we recognize patterns: the character of the pain, sensitivity to light, nausea, how long it lasts, what makes it better or worse. This pattern recognition helps us understand the experience and find treatments that might help.
Mental health works in a similar way. When someone comes to me describing persistent low mood, fatigue, and difficulty sleeping, they’re not just listing symptoms – they’re sharing their lived experience. Recognizing these patterns helps us understand their experience in the context of what we know about how depression manifests.
I remember working with someone who had struggled for years with what she called “being lazy.” She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just “push through” her fatigue and low motivation like everyone else seemed to. When she learned that her experience matched recognizable patterns of depression, it transformed her understanding – not because it explained everything, but because it helped her see that her experience was both valid and understood. This understanding also led to more effective herbal support. She knew adaptogens could help with stress, but recognizing how her fatigue fit into the broader pattern of depression helped us understand why she responded so well to adaptogens with strong mood-uplifting properties, rather than the more relaxing, stress-reducing ones she’d tried before.
This way of understanding mental health through patterns rather than rigid categories opens up so many possibilities for healing. It helps us see how depression might look different in different cultural contexts, how it might interweave with physical health, and how various approaches to healing – from traditional herbs to modern medicine – might each have something valuable to offer.
In tomorrow’s post, we’ll explore how this understanding of patterns helps us appreciate the lived experience of depression – how it feels from the inside, and how different people make sense of their experience.
Until then, I invite you to notice the patterns in your own experience or in how your clients describe their struggles with mood. What patterns do you see? What stories do they tell about their experience?
With care,
Thomas