Depression is a colloquial term for what is depression? Actually, this is not a good question to answer. There is only one type of depression in your opinion, in my opinion there are more than 50 different mental illnesses and each one is different. The medication regimen is different for different depressions. However, I am relatively certain that all of these disorders are curable, at least in my case. There should be some biological basis for depression, but science has not yet discovered and confirmed it. What is certain is that depression must have a psychosocial component. Early depression is treated mainly with medication, and the fundamental solution in the long term is to identify the psychological causes and eliminate the influence of psychosocial factors on individual thinking. This will require some general knowledge of psychology, which is in the course material. Today someone asked a question about the psychological aspects of depression, so below I would like to share how to look at depression from a psychological perspective. Depression is a kind of “self-harm and self-destruction” from a psychological point of view. You have no appetite, you don’t sleep, you spend your days like years, and you often think about ending your life… So, to be happy, you need to figure out why you are hurting yourself? This is much harder than medication, you need to find a real psychiatrist to help you solve it, not just any doctor can patiently find the reason, do not say that psychotherapy is not effective because you have not met a good psychiatrist. The reason for hurting oneself, if explained from a psychoanalytic point of view is generally: the original self and the ego are too contradictory, the original self wants to destroy the ego. In layman’s terms, the real-life me is not the me that you really want. For example, you are a very pure, very good person, but in real life, you are forced to lie every day, and over time, you will hate yourself, and then you may hurt yourself physically, and you get depression. This is the result from inside the psychoanalytic school, not necessarily right ah, but I personally feel some truth. Why do you want to destroy the ego? Because the original ego is ugly! The ego wants to destroy itself because it feels wrong and hopeless. Maybe the original ego is waiting for the ego to change, and the ego has remained the same, maybe the original ego also needs to adjust! The more I talk about this, the more abstract it is, so I’ll just say it here, even if it’s a throwaway. So if you want to be completely cured of depression, you first have to understand your original self, and most people nowadays don’t understand their original self. The original self is the animal self, the self in the subconscious world, which some people call the instinctive self, and some scholars say as the selfish self. There are no less than 20 different terms that have been translated for this concept. Many professional doctors, too, do not have a clear meaning. I only thoroughly comprehended it when I was studying in Germany, and I personally understand it to be the real me. The original me concept is very abstract, so take your time and experience it! You want to beat depression, you have to understand your true self. Having said that, I have to remind the other extreme, friends simply understand some of the meaning of the original self is good for healing, for example, we understand that high-speed rail is comfortable, you can buy a ticket to ride the high-speed rail, enjoy the speed of the high-speed rail, know that there is no need to figure out the structure of the high-speed rail, much less the need to build the high-speed rail yourself. But some groupies want to learn to become psychiatric professionals themselves and then solve their own problems once and for all. If you follow the high-speed rail thinking, you just have to know what a high-speed rail is probably and then you can go use it. Again the best thinking is to understand some of the original self and then just find a professional doctor who will give you the adjustments, you don’t need to understand the logic and principles behind it. If you want to train yourself to the level of a professional, that one will take a long time to comprehend and put in the hard work. But the great psychiatrists were mostly patients who cured themselves and founded a school of psychology, but there have not been many of these great people in a hundred years. Psychoanalytic therapy tends to harmonize the original self and the ego. Let me give you an example, so you will understand. We often meet girls who have a phobia of getting married, and some of them run away from marriage for no reason. These girls, if they do psychological counseling, will find out from a deep analysis that her original self is against this marriage, and the original self does not like these kinds of guys. Of course, the ego does not know this idea of the original self, and then, the premarital phobia appears. The original self expresses its will in the “language” of inner fear, which the ego interprets as a disease. The contradiction is irreconcilable, and the ego asks the original self to take medicine, and the original self refuses to take medicine. Thus, we find that the original self is difficult to understand because the original self does not know language, it does not use language in a general sense to prompt the ego. So most people do not understand their original self, so many people in the clinic do not know why they are depressed, why they have headaches, why they have insomnia? There is no way the most common language of the original self is the non-verbal expression of pain, depression, insomnia, panic, etc. In professional terms: the expressions of the original self are the symptoms. In other words, physical symptoms are one of the languages of the original self. Any medical symptom (in this case, a symptom that has no biological cause, i.e., all tests are normal) can be an expression of the original self, and one of the most common languages is depressed mood, which you just don’t understand.