A Depression Toolkit

Editor's note: We received a lot of positive feedback for Brie Wolfson's post "How I Got My Brain Back," so we wanted to follow up with another writer's personal account of fighting depression. Engineer Jamie Wong took an analytical approach to his dark night of the soul. He tried many solutions, from supplements to social media fasting to the teachings of Shinzen Young. His thought process, originally penned on his personal blog in 2017, is insightful for anyone struggling with similar questions.

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This is going to be a long post, so here’s the TL;DR that I want you to take away. I started experiencing my first bout of major depressive disorder in 2016, and am recovering now in 2017 with the aide of meditation and 75 mg daily of an antidepressant called Zoloft (aka Sertraline). Talk therapy, medication, and meditation have all been important parts of my ongoing recovery.

I recognize that those options are not available to everyone, and I’m fortunate to have the socioeconomic freedom to pursue all of them. I hope this post can help a few people feel like they’re not alone in their struggle. (And thank you to the two posts that did that for me: John Green's "Talk about mental illness and creativity," and Hyperbole and a Half’s “Depression part 2.")

And because it will become blindingly apparent through this post, yes, indeed, I have gone full Valley: I’m an engineer in San Francisco working at a startup, attending meditation retreats, seeing mental health professionals, and went to Burning Man last year.

With that in mind, let’s go: