Dr. Don Wood argues depression is a functional response to unresolved trauma, not a disease. When traumatic memories keep triggering action urges that can't resolve the trauma, the mind shuts down into depression to protect itself. Treatment reprocesses those memories into lower-definition versions so they stop driving repeated urges.
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I believe depression is actually a function of the brain, not a dysfunction of the brain. Let me explain what I mean by that. In a lot of cases when I work with people, I find that they've had traumatic events in their past that they just haven't been able to resolve. When you have a traumatic event in your lifetime, your senses are all heightened. Sight, smell, hearing. So how is your mind going to record that event in memory? High definition, tremendous amounts of detail because it's so bright. Every time you recall that memory, your mind sees such high definition and brightness. To us, it looks real. So if you think about something that happened to you 20 years ago and that continues to loop in the background and your mind is not okay with it, it wants it to be different. It keeps getting you angry about all kinds of situations because it's trying to get a solution, it's trying to fix it, but it can't fix it. It's already over. So if your mind keeps using anger to get you into an action and you don't take the action, how does your mind protect you from that pain? It actually shuts down. Depression is the absence of emotions. Your mind hasn't been able to resolve the problem, so it shuts down and goes into depression. The process that I use for people with depression is to get to the root of the problem. What is the action your mind is calling for you to do? Is it possible for you to do something differently than you did 10 years ago? No. As long as the mind thinks that it's possible to make a change, it's going to keep calling for the action. So the key is to resolve the trauma. And what we're going to do is take that high definition traumatic memory and get your mind to reprocess it into a lower definition format so your mind stops calling for the action.
