Yesterday, purely by accident, I came across a year-old post by Daily Kos community member, shyewoods. This member has not posted a comment for eight months now, and may no longer be active on the site, but there are possibly others who may find the observations below the fold helpful.
This member was affected by the suicide of Robin Williams, and was finding depression taking over their life and feeling that it was necessary to live with those depressive feelings because, “we could not will the depression to go away without departing from what makes us who we are,” going on to say, “I would not not be who I am (without depression).”
Although it may sound silly to say so, let me point out that, if we are happy all the time, we can never know what happiness is. It is only by having feelings other than happiness that we can truly experience what we call “happiness”. In other words, this is a roundabout way of saying that depressive feelings are not only normal, but necessary.
The experts identify two separate forms of depression, Reactive and Clinical, of which for our purposes here, Reactive is most important. As the term implies, this depression is in response to readily identifiable external factors, such as loss---a loved one, a job, a relationship. It can be tied to a number of factors which may have importance to different people in different degrees, such as PTSD, performance anxiety, self-esteem issues, etc. Only if the external trigger cannot be readily identified is the depression considered to be Clinical in nature. In such cases, we search for internal triggers which frequently lead us back to the external triggers.
So, the question becomes, when is depression a problem? It becomes a problem when the individual feels it is a problem---when depression robs us of sleep, of appetite, or when it impacts our relationships or job performance. When we first come to the recognition that depression is getting out of control, it helps to bring our problem-solving skills into play to identify the source of the depressive feelings. (We can also seek out the help of others who we feel may be more effective problem-solvers). It's interesting to see how simply identifying the trigger(s) can frequently shrink the problem all by itself.
It should be obvious that we do not simply want the depression to go away, which is why I don't recommend use of medication as a first and/or only choice. We want to understand our depression, manage it so it doesn't manage us, and recognize that nothing lasts forever.