Last November, Purple Ronnie creator and the creative force behind Edward Monkton wrote a brilliant and honest account of his experience of depression, published in TimesOnline.

You land on the Moon and bounce from step to 12ft step in your giant gravity boots. What a sensation of freedom and excitement! But then, too late, you notice that you forgot to lace the boots up. They slip off your feet and you spiral upwards and outwards, away from the Moon. With a sudden surge of hyper-vertigo, you realise that the rest of your life will be spent spinning alone, weightless, through the dark emptiness of space.

From memory this is the first candid piece that comes so close to explaining what, for many, is indescribable.  Despite it’s prolific nature it is not openly talked about or even accepted as a tangible illness that requires a tangible solution.  Caused by stress triggered by all sorts of experiences from loss and illness to abuse and addiction, (and often just life itself), the fact that many don’t understand how they feel or why they feel this way makes it all the harder to heal from.  We love Elizabeth Gilberts account in Eat, Pray , Love:

Depression and loneliness track me down after about ten days in Italy…..They they frisk me.  They empty my pockets of joy I had been carrying there.  Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that…..”It’s not fair for you to come here,” I tell depression.  “I paid you off already.  I served my time in New York.”  But he just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favourite chair, puts his feet up on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke.”

Many people say they would avoid medication, but often this can be the only hand that reaches down to you when you’re in the abyss.  Despite a myriad of side effects, antidepressants are prescribed at alarming rates.  As reported by Scientific American, a controversial article just published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that

antidepressants are no more effective than placebos for most depressed patients. Jay Fournier and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania aggregated individual patient data from six high-quality clinical trials and found that the superiority of antidepressants over placebo is clinically significant only for patients who are very severely depressed.  For patients with mild, moderate, and even severe depression, placebos work nearly as well as antidepressants.

Is there another way? Alongside a number of what are considered “alternative” or “holistic” therapies, Aromatherapy has proved to be a relief and a tonic for many people suffering from depression, either as a complement to other treatments (both medical, emotional, alternative and psychotherapies) as well as full-blown alternatives.

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