Jonathan Rottenberg

Those are very different.

And I think many people have started to train themselves on thinking about happiness in

And I'm not sure that Thomas Jefferson was thinking that the pursuit of happiness meant that the 18th century farmers needed to find a way to experience euphoria today.

Well, historically, the idea has been that as people experience depression, they experience further damage.

Each episode of depression damages your relationships, damages your body, damages everything.

your mind.

And that leaves out the active ways that people adapt and learn from their depressive episodes and the ways that these episodes can actually be engines of meaning, engines of change, engines for a better future.

And the person is actually, I hate to say it because I think many people find this difficult to accept, the better for it.

That's deeply true.

I started out, I think, as a 24-year-old, laudably as an independent person.

But I learned through my depression how much it's okay to lean on other people and that everyone gets a turn.

I did.

And I don't think it's only me.

I think another, you could say, silver lining of depression is that you do develop compassion for other people's suffering.

And because you have, it could be that other people are suffering for a different reason, or it may be a different variety of suffering, but you are a little bit more attuned to

to that pain.

And that is, in some ways, it's a good thing because it's a way that you're in touch with a part of your fundamental humanity in a deeper way.

But that's not the only kind of irony of suffering.

I think that also from suffering deeply, you can come to appreciate not suffering in a more profound way, meaning that I wake up today and I'm not in pain, and that is –

beautiful in a way that I don't think I could appreciate before I struggled with depression and and Not to say that everyone who's going through life who hasn't experienced depression or some other mental health health crisis is sleepwalking through life I wouldn't say that but I do think that the experience of being depressed of being suicidal is something that can