if you feel sad or depressed for no reason whatsoever, then it could be a chemical imbalance in your brain. it's more complex than that, but it's physiology not you.
most of the time, like for me, it's somethign called dysthymia.
which is a persistent low-grade depression that, due to its nature of not being acute, pretty much always goes untreated as it's explained as character pathology rather than something physiological.
that was the case for myself and many individuals i've worked with over 15+ years. i've gone through two decades of it, and it wasn't until i had a major depressive episode that i finally sought professional help.
all this time, i just thoguht i was being a pussy. but it finally got so bad that i saw someone, and they said i had dysthymia + major depressive episode = double depression.
i felt depressed from the most random things that had no cognitive basis to it. sunrises. specific people i would meet that i would feel excessively bad for. basically anything i could tell myself so i can justify my feelings of living in a gray world like a zombie.
i also was prone to wild mood swings. if that is somethign you experience, that's another good sign.
when i was 22, i was diagnosed, i started zoloft. it isn't a cure-all. it isn't something that will make you feel euphoric. it takes months to kick in. but after a while, you realize that it acts as a buffer - or rather, a mood stabilizer.
i keep detailed notes through excel and google drive of everything i do/have been doing since 2005ish. you can ask me what i did any day since then, and i'll tell you. i record my mood, my motivation, what i did, etc.
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since it's so gradual, it's easy to have a depressive episode after years of therapy and feel like nothing's worked. but this excel system allows me to see that long-term progress has been made. my depressive episodes, my mood swings, they all have lessened substantially in both intensity and frequency.
