Service · 04
Depression Therapy
For when the colour has gone out of things — when the world has gone flat, and the energy to even want anything has thinned. Depth-oriented work that listens for what depression is asking us to hear.
On the work
How I think about it.
Depression is often described as if it were a malfunction — a chemical imbalance, a faulty thought pattern, a thing to be corrected. Those descriptions are not wrong, exactly. Medication helps many people, and rightly so. But they are also partial. They tend to leave out the question that, clinically, matters most: what is the depression actually doing?
Sometimes depression is the way a person has learned to hold grief that has nowhere else to go. Sometimes it is a kind of silent protest against a life that has become unliveable in ways the person has not yet been able to say aloud. Sometimes it is the consequence of having had to make oneself smaller than one is, for too long. The shape varies. What is consistent is that the depression is, in some way, faithfully reporting something.
Psychoanalytic work with depression makes room for that report. It does not try to talk you out of how you feel, or out of how unmanageable the day-to-day has become. It begins by letting the feeling be heard — slowly, in detail, with another person who can stand to listen — and then, over time, begins to find what is underneath. Often what is underneath is older and quieter than the depression itself. Often, finding it changes the weight of the whole thing.
When this might help
Signs worth taking seriously.
None of these on their own is a diagnosis. Together, they may be worth a conversation.
- 01
A persistent flatness or heaviness that doesn't lift, even when good things happen.
- 02
Loss of interest in things that used to matter — work, people, the projects that used to feel like yours.
- 03
A sense of self-criticism or worthlessness that runs underneath everything, often unprovoked.
- 04
Difficulty sleeping, eating, or doing the basic tasks of the day in a way you didn't used to find difficult.
What to expect
The shape of the work.
01
Slowing down
Depression often arrives with pressure to fix it quickly. The first thing the work does is slow down — long enough to actually meet what is there, instead of rushing past it.
02
Listening to it
We treat the depression as carrying information, not only as a problem to solve. What is it tracking? What is it protecting? What does it know that the rest of you has not yet been able to.
03
Movement, at its own pace
The lift, when it comes, tends to come in pieces — a slightly easier morning, a feeling that returns, a small thing wanted again. The work continues from there.
Begin
The first step is a conversation.
A complimentary 20-minute consultation by phone — to hear what brings you, and to see whether we might be a fit. There is no obligation.