Depression - what it is ...

Depression is a mood state - being too far and for too long toward the sad end of a mood scale. A scale that each and everyone of us is on, with low mood on one end and good mood on the other. Often when depressed people are told that, it is like an injection of hope. For them to realize that there isn't something fundamentally wrong with them brings a sense of being able to get free of the black cloud and fogged brain.

If you feel miserable and bad about yourself much of the time, are increasingly preoccupied with negative ideas about your life and the world, don't feel motivated to do the things you used to enjoy or were good at, find everything an effort and sleep poorly, you have a form of depression.

Griffin, J & Tyrrell, I How to Lift Depression […fast] (HG Publishing UK 2004)

Depression is basically our viewpoint of life. For most people it is not a disease. It is not usually something rooted in faulty biology, meaning faulty genetics or biochemistry. Rather, depression is usually a product of one's outlook and one's way of responding to life experience.
Research indicates quite clearly that depression is, for most people, a product of learning. From the therapeutic standpoint that is most encouraging because what can be learned can be unlearned, and what was never learned can be taught.

Yapko, M. Breaking the patterns of depression (Broadway Books, New York. 1997)

Why are some people more primed to depression than others?

Life is an ambiguous stimulus. Life is so amorphous it becomes whatever we make it out to be. Life does not have any inherent meaning, it simply offers us opportunities to project on to it whatever matters to each of us, based on our unique backgrounds and make up.
Some projections make us feel great, some projections make us feel terrible. In this context, clinical depression is a disorder featuring an intricate system of negative projections about self, life, the universe, most everything.

Yapko, M. Breaking the patterns of depression (Broadway Books, New York. 1997)

A better explanation of depression can have huge therapeutic benefit for sufferers. They are freed from the 'something wrong with me' notion (as in illness), and coupled with the Human Givens therapeutic model, change can be fast and effective. Introducing the HG approach seminar provides an explanation and demonstration of the model.