Patterns in Stories of Lasting Healing from Depression
What can we learn from people who find deeper and more lasting healing from depression? A whole lot, it turns out. Introducing an in-depth examination of themes across stories of sustainable healing.
Originally published in Public Square Magazine. Photo by Rachel McDermott on Unsplash
What can we learn from people who find sustainable healing from depression? This has been a question burning under my fingernails ever since learning about a remarkable researcher named Kelly Turner.
Dr. Kelly Turner noticed something usual in her early studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Across the 1,000+ known cases of “spontaneous” or “radical” remission from cancer (where someone finds lasting healing after being told by their doctor that they were going to die), very few questions were typically asked of the survivors themselves. So, she set about doing just that—conducting interviews with initially just 20 people and ultimately gathering many hundreds of stories all around the world.
Her findings are summarized in the bestseller, Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, now translated into 22 languages—along with Radical Hope: 10 Key Healing Factors from Exceptional Survivors of Cancer & Other Diseases. Dr. Turner’s work has been an inspiration to many families facing cancer—and a reminder to the rest of us not to overlook important things that can be learned from especially encouraging cases.
Fixated on the hardest realities. If you’ve ever studied the history of psychology, you can appreciate how much the entire mental health field could benefit from this kind of reminder. Even those who love psychology know it's had a fixation on lurid and worst-case scenarios for a long time. That’s precisely why positive psychology (ala Martin Seligman, Barbara Fredrickson, Ed Diener, and many others) has also been so refreshing.
Even so, this focus on the negative has been so captivating for so long that it’s common to find mental health professionals who are convinced that no healing from depression (or other mental health conditions) is even possible. “People don’t get better from this,” one doctor told me once. So convinced are some about the impossibility of healing that when they hear a story of someone claiming to have experienced healing, their first inclination is to doubt that they ever experienced (real) depression in the first place.
This is partly what has motivated me to take a similar approach as Dr. Turner, but applied to the surprising numbers of depression healing stories out there. For many years now, I've been gathering accounts of deep or lasting healing from depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. Some are people I've interviewed; others are individuals who have published memoirs, blog accounts, or videos on Youtube. So many of these stories are profoundly inspiring. I used to collect basketball and baseball cards—now I collect stories of profound and beautiful healing.
So, what can be learned by looking across these many personal stories of deeper emotional healing? In what follows, I will act as a “tour guide” as we walk through some of the most interesting patterns arising in an analysis of nearly 80 stories of people sharing about their own experience finding deep and lasting healing from serious cases of depression. This research was funded and made possible by Impact Suite and Malouf—which developed the Lift app for depression and anxiety. I presented a small summary of these findings in a 2022 Liahona article entitled “New Hope for Deeper Healing from Depression and Anxiety.”
The extent of deep and profound pain. Fair warning: some of these stories may be surprising to hear and, in some cases, challenging to ideas held by many (including the belief that true depression is inherently chronic). For that reason, I begin this introduction by giving you a glimpse of what people say about their own initial experience of profound pain, followed by a glimpse of the eventual happiness they speak of finding. The reality of the agony faced by narrators of the stories included in this analysis was real (and don’t forget, these are the same people who eventually found deeper, more sustainable emotional healing):
“I had been fighting with severe clinical depression; it robbed me of my life, of enjoying my husband and children.” (2)
“For ten months, I was assailed by out-of-control anxiety attacks which alternated with dark, suicidal depressions. Each day felt like an eternity as I struggled to stay alive in the face of overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and despair. ... Having run out of options, I felt as if I were trapped in a dark tunnel in which both ends were sealed off, and a sign on the door read, ‘No Exit.’” (4)
“The sky turned threatening. Bleak, dark, so dark. Empty. No motivation. Wanting badly to surrender, retreat—from life, from people, from work, from responsibility. I never imagined that there could be emotional and psychological pain so overwhelming it made me desperate for relief. I could and do understand how many people turn to various kinds of escape … Some days, I was gasping for breath and hoping not to drown.” (6)
"I can hardly eat, sleep, or think straight. The only thing I can do is cry unending tears." After the birth of her first child, her husband discovered her in the backyard, "clawing the earth furiously with my bare hands, intent on digging a grave so that I could bury myself alive.” (40)
“Grief and sadness clung to me like it was part of my own flesh.” (42)
“I was in hell.” During 26 months of hospitalization, this woman was, for a considerable part of this time, “one of the most disturbed patients in the hospital.” (43)
“Days passed with me in bed, overwhelmed by a sensation of falling, spiraling, and spinning into a pitch-black tunnel day after bleak day. ... It felt as though every nerve in my body was popping. Imagine large strong hands slowly applying pressure while breaking a family-size package of uncooked, dry spaghetti. I was the spaghetti.” (47)
One woman’s depression felt so severe that she felt it might “vaporize her into millions of tiny molecules.” (66)
“I was struggling with grief and bereavement when my husband unexpectedly ended our thirteen-year relationship. I was devastated, suicidal, and felt completely alone. I had severe anxiety, waking up every morning with horrible dreams and panic attacks. I was also constantly crying, unfocused, and had no appetite.” (77)
“I just want the pain to stop … Let’s just say if a car were coming towards me, I wouldn’t scream, I wouldn’t cry, I wouldn’t run, I would just stand there.” (94)
“When I got depressed or anxious, I used to feel like a dark curtain was being drawn over my brain. It seemed almost physical.” This man remembers praying, “God, please help me make my mind stop torturing me,” and how a new day felt, “The alarm goes off, or you are probably awake before it even rings. A new day, and it is nanoseconds before you feel that dread in your stomach, that fear of what the day will bring. I’ve had these mornings in abundance. I know that feeling like I know that water gets wet.” (96)
One man’s wife recounted in an interview with the couple, “Something was different. I saw him on the floor, and I knew it was depression.” She went on to describe “5 years of really, really dark depression,”—recollecting that during these years, “he suffered greatly, and had multiple symptoms of depression, including daily suicidal thoughts. He was in a deep darkness.” (108)
“The sky turned threatening. It was bleak, dark, so dark. Empty. I had no motivation.”
In addition to the sheer intensity of their prior experience with depression, many of these people suffered for many years, even “decades of unrelenting depression.” The instigators and contributors to this agony are widely varied, with people speaking about a wide variety of circumstances—from brutal and intense trauma (trafficked at 7 years old) to current circumstances influencing their emotional burden (painful health challenges, etc.). There is so much more to the painful backdrops that couldn’t be included, but one woman’s story illustrates the complexity well:
"I was an empty shell … thirty years old and ready to die. I didn't know who I was. I had been drinking since I was thirteen and drugging since I was sixteen. I had my first death wish at age twelve and tried to kill myself, but I was too scared to jump off the pier. I sat on that pier half the night, crying and praying for an end to my miserable life. I tried again when I was fifteen. That time I took seventeen downers, wrote half a dozen good-bye notes and was astonished to wake up the next day and find that it hadn't worked. I was supposed to be dead! ... The hopelessness of that moment still tugs at my heart. ... My third and most serious suicide attempt was at age twenty-four. My drug-addicted husband had beaten me for the hundredth time—punching me and kicking me until I was half-senseless. My two babies were sleeping peacefully in their cribs. I went into my bedroom and swallowed the remainder of my new tranquilizer prescription—about twenty-four pills. I woke up in the intensive care unit three days later. … I withdrew into myself even more than before. ... Only with daily use of marijuana and beer could I function at all."
"I went in and out of depression for the next six years and the thought of suicide never left me. I hated myself so much. Eventually, I just hung on for my babies who were getting bigger every year. I felt that I would live until they could fend for themselves, and then I would kill myself and get it over with once and for all. I was so sick and out of touch that I thought my children would be able to handle losing their mother to suicide when they reached ages six and seven. ... I spent some of the time on the bathroom floor, begging God to help me, asking why God wouldn't help me. But most of the time I was in bed with the pillows and the covers over my head alternately sleeping and crying. I had reached that awful impasse of being too afraid to live and too afraid to die. Having tried everything to help myself, and having failed, I had reached the bottom. I was thirty years old, and I had wasted my life." (12)
This same woman later spoke of how well she was, including how she had "recently graduated from the State University with honors," and that she was "currently in graduate school," with a "goal is to be a therapist.” (12) It’s this contrast between before and after which is so striking—and which makes these narratives so exciting to study.
The possibility of deepening healing. Every story included in this analysis was selected based on two fundamental criteria: (1) as evident above, clear indicators of real and serious depression (not just a few bad days), and (2) equally clear indicators of having experienced some degree of deep and lasting healing [numbers in parenthesis correspond to the participant # in the study]. See for yourself the kind of peace and healing people in this review found:
“It was as if a heavy curtain was drawn back from the window of my soul, and I could see my true self in the light for the very first time. For the first time in my life, I felt settled, calm, and peaceful.” (46)
“Today is my birthday, and it’s the first birthday in a long time that I truly felt like celebrating. I now have a life that I love, and wake up grateful for it every day. ... Today, my life is amazing. It’s not just an improvement over my old life but rather a completely new universe. I don’t really know how to explain it; I never knew that life could be like this! Life is easy and enjoyable; it’s not a daily struggle to convince myself to get out of bed and get myself motivated to do simple tasks. I will catch myself smiling or singing for no reason. I’ve laughed and danced more in the last month than I have in the last 10 years combined. I am so excited to be alive. I didn’t even know that it was possible to feel this much joy and contentment. What’s wild is that I know my body is still healing, so things are just going to get better!” (51)
“It's hard to put into words what coming out of depression feels like. All I know is that I feel right now in a way that I thought I'd never be able to again.” (65)
“I am totally healed from depression. I have never struggled with depression for over two decades now. I’ve gone through some hard times since then, some really difficult times. I’ve felt sadness and anger at times. Those are temporary emotions, so [they are] very different from soul-killing depression. I have learned how to be healed from depression. When the blackness of depression creeps anywhere close to me, I now know how to fight it and win … really win … not just push it down, put on a happy face and act like everything is okay. I’ve learned how to actually be profoundly happy, content, and at peace deep in my soul. Yes, it is really true. I’m not faking it. I am healed. I believe that everyone is capable of being healed from depression as well.” (69)
“I have no depression in my life whatsoever — literally none. I have sadness, and joy, and elation, and satisfaction, and gratitude beyond belief. But all of it is weather, and it just spins around the planet. It doesn’t sit on me long enough to kill me. It’s just ideas.” (73)
"Now, thankfully, I don't get depressed." (78)
“I was completely healed—totally free of all those things.” (101)
“Life has never been this good before—I enjoy my life and feel peace.” (102)
“My life is now full of purpose, I appreciate things more, and I am much happier than I ever was. I’m in a good place right now.”
To be clear, these are not intended as pre-post outcome measures since they are not presented here as before-after glimpses from the same stories. Rather, I’m referencing here especially notable examples from different stories to paint a picture of how vivid the shift has been in these people’s lives—which is a characteristic of all of these stories. This is especially evident in the contrast within individual stories, for instance:
One man described his life as starting with a “seemingly endless sea of pain, fear, rage, guilt, grief, and loneliness.” => But he eventually describes coming to “live a life of deep peace and boundless joy.” (44)
Another individual said, “I was so depressed that I could hardly motivate myself to do anything” [telling loved ones] how horrible I felt and how hopeless everything seemed,” adding that “they were so afraid that I may try and hurt myself.” => “About four months ago, I remember telling friends that I felt ‘normal.’ Not manically happy or incredibly depressed, but content. I told them that I don’t think I had ever felt that way before. The feeling hasn’t left. I have now been off of all my psychiatric medications for two months. My job is going great, and I feel blessed.” (71)
A third said, “Suicide was never an option for me, but I thought about it and fought against those thoughts for years. In the meantime, I had my good days along with the not-so-good ones. The last 5 years got worse and worse. I finally gave in to the fact that I would end up feeling tethered to a life I hated every day of. ... I may never like life again, and this must be what enduring to the end means. I never thought I would like life or enjoy any of it again. I never thought the words I love life would ever come out of my mouth from an automatic thought” => "I can't sit back and hold this in any longer. People need to know! Depression and anxiety do not need to be a lifelong sentence of misery! Healing—it is possible! I am living proof!!” (109)
A healing work in progress. To be clear, while some of these people talk about their healing as completed and finished, others speak of a degree of substantial healing they are still seeking:
“I pray for healing. Mine has reached a point that, at one time, I would not have thought possible, considering where my long journey started.” (36)
“I do struggle from time to time ... and have learned to be patient. I do believe I will be completely healed from ALL mental health issues.” (102)
Among those still seeking deeper healing, however, they still speak of the state they are in as new and different:
“As I changed my life in this way, my depression and anxiety have massively reduced. It isn’t a straight line. I still have bad days—because of personal challenges and because I still live in a culture where all the forces we’ve been talking about are running rampant. But I no longer feel pain leaking out of my brain uncontrollably. That’s gone.” (21)
“Life has not become less demanding, but it cannot harm me as much anymore—and this makes all the difference.” (46)
Describing his difficult moments, one man insists that this is “not an experience of depression. I had that for years, but now, when the rain comes, it rains, but it doesn’t stay. It doesn’t stay long enough to immerse me and drown me anymore.” (73)
“I’m a very happy person now. ... I still have ups and downs, of course, but I think no more than anyone else.” (43)
For a condition where relapse is common, the people I studied often point out they are not relapsing anymore. Yet as you can see, this state of deeper healing should not be idealized or overstated either. Every one of these people acknowledges some hard moments and times. But consistently across participants, these times are also qualitatively different than where they were before.
As you can see, not everyone who speaks about deeper healing talks the same. Some describe depression as something in the past, while others still refer to it as a condition they are “living well” with in their life. As one man said, "Depression doesn’t define me; it isn’t my identity; it just describes my personal odyssey. … We live with depression as a temporary mortal companion, with healing underway already in mortality.” (6)
Even if complete healing remains a journey, every one of the people reviewed here described having found deeper and more sustainable healing. And there was a sense of confidence, hope and joy in pursuing even more. “I’ve always been fascinated by the few souls I’ve met through my life who seemed to be truly happy,” wrote one person. This person continued:
Even when their life was in a shamble, their smile was genuine, and light beamed from within them. Have you ever met people like that? If you have, you’ll never forget them. Even if you forget their name, their face will always linger in your mind when you think of what happiness is. (26)
After recounting his journey of recovery, another person said, “I had no idea I could ever be that happy.” (25)
In summary, participants needed to show some clear evidence of having suffered from real depression and found some degree of real and lasting healing. Any sign of chronic, enduring disorder was the main exclusion criteria; if that was spotted, they were not included in the review.
The variety of stories gathered. All this is important foreground to the project being reported here—a project that will be ongoing as I collect more narratives of healing from depression and anxiety. (Although anxiety often figures prominently alongside and interwoven in many depression narratives, stories that center explicitly or exclusively around anxiety will be reported separately in a future analysis. Although most experiences here reflected unipolar depression, there were a few cases of bipolar depression in this review as well).
Naturally, the stories gathered vary a great deal. Some of these accounts are more plainly autobiographical and largely centered on sharing raw experiences, while others are interwoven with life lessons and advice to other sufferers. Sometimes they are shorter, and sometimes longer—with a whole library of beautiful memoirs that I've been able to gather and review.
This points to one of the central limitations of the project. Ideally, each and every person could have been interviewed personally, so they would all field the same questions. I did these kinds of interviews with approximately 20 people—but the rest of the stories were gathered through a variety of other means. Practically speaking, that means I can only know what I can know from what they opt to publish—with areas that remain out of reach. That makes any kind of more standardized, statistical assessment at this point impossible.
This sampling approach also disallows other questions that could clear up the relative influence of certain factors in someone’s recovery. As it stands, I was often left to evaluate independently whether something that took place in their story of recovery pertained to that healing—or was a fruit and manifestation of that healing.
All this is to say, none of what I share will be convincing empirically to those wholly doubtful of the possibility of deeper kinds of emotional healing from even serious depression. Yet my central goal is not to persuade people through data like a conventional study. Rather, my aim is to illustrate what the pathway of deeper, more lasting, and sustainable healing actually looks like in real color and detail, based on the experiences of those who have actually found it.
To those still doubtful, I would add that virtually every one of the individual themes described below has been confirmed in plenty of other empirical research (see my own reviews here and here).
On a personal level, reading the stories of these people has been thrilling and exhilarating—touching beyond belief at times. Special thanks to Christian Lippert and Debbie Lathrop for assisting in the review of these memoirs. And I'd also like to express appreciation to the many people who agreed to interviews and who continue to share their stories with me as part of this project.
What I am sharing in what follows is approximately 120 pages of analysis based on lessons and insights from across 77 stories. What you will be hearing in these reports is my best attempt to paint a picture—a word mural of sorts—of the major patterns I’m seeing in these stories so far, including
Retaining Hope in the Possibility of Deeper Healing. Consistently across stories, you witness a central role for some kind of hope that anything can be fundamentally different—with recurring evidence at how that influences the progress people make emotionally. This raises important questions about the increasingly common professional judgments about depression as an intrinsically chronic disability.
Learning and Changing as a Catalyst for Emotional Healing. Learning and growing in different ways also appears to make a significant difference in deeper emotional healing. That includes changing inside and in the details of our external life habits. Here, we explore what participants say about the "Big Three" of nutrition, exercise, and sleep—as well as the basic elements of schedule and financial order.
The Many Varieties of Internal Work as a Catalyst for Emotional Healing. Of equal importance to the many kinds of external lifestyle adjustments is the wide scope of internal shifts that take place for people who find deeper healing. These include the less noticeable "Big Three" of mental diet, mental activity, and mental rest, along with that surprisingly challenging ability to be present in different life situations, including the painful ones. Learning to work with thoughts and emotions differently also appears to make a substantial difference for healing.
Relationships That Heal & Healing Relationships. If not already a well-established classic observation, it's become almost cliché to acknowledge the centrality of relationships in human health, both physically and emotionally. That's clear in this analysis as well. By "relationships," of course, we're referring to the healthy and nurturing kind. Traumatizing and abusive relationships can set anyone back emotionally, and navigating away from toxic connections and through the residue of past trauma was clearly demonstrated again to be crucial for deeper healing from depression.
Higher Connection and Deeper Healing. Since most of these other patterns identified here are commonly discussed by mental health professionals, the salience of spirituality in people's healing stories has been the stand-out surprise of the study so far. Although I'm a person of faith myself, I'm not accustomed to seeing priority attention to God within modern mental health discussions. But over and over, people who had found deeper and more lasting healing describe profoundly transcendent experiences that shifted how they related to God and life as a whole—moments they repeatedly described as consequential to their healing journey. Among other things, these people described no longer feeling alone—and, indeed, feeling precious, loved, and guided in a life they newly experienced as profoundly meaningful and purposive.
Increasing Emotional Freedom, Reducing Long-term Dependence. We all know illegal drugs and alcohol can have a devastating impact on people's emotional health, especially when long-term dependence arises. That's not controversial in the least. But we have been encouraged to see a reliance on legally prescribed psycho-active medications differently, and for good reason. Many of these prescriptions have proven helpful to people in coping and managing in the short term. What's clear in many other long-term accounts, however, is that a path of cautious and gentle tapering off antidepressants can be a helpful catalyst to deeper emotional healing. That's something I've observed in interviews for many years, and it came up again clearly and consistently in this review of accounts. Although this topic has received growing attention among researchers, it has received far less attention among the general public.
I finish this exploration of themes with some concluding thoughts about broader patterns and takeaways, however preliminary. By definition, my attempt will be incomplete since each of these people has a profoundly rich experience that even a biography-sized volume wouldn’t quite tap. And once again, I’m necessarily only drawing on the portion of their experiences that I was able to see. In some cases, direct quotes have been edited for readability (in other cases, italics are added to part of a text for emphasis).
That’s partly why I’m presenting this as a snapshot of what I’ve been able to review and learn so far, rather than something final and definitive. My goal is to continue gathering more stories. Of this writing, I have a number of additional stories to add to this growing analysis, which I hope to update over time. Please send more stories my way—or any feedback or interest in collaboration as well (jzhess@gmail.com).
I especially hope what follows will be encouraging to anyone currently grappling with the heavy weight of depression—and to those who love them. You deserve more hope and happiness than you have likely found to this point. I believe that with all my heart. And I'm convinced that God wants to lead those earnestly seeking to follow His ways to deeper healing much faster than you know. I hope some of what I share here will persuade you of the same and that you will begin to find healing miracles in the new year ahead.
Thank you