I have suffered with depression for many years and would like to say that nobody knows it.
However, as anybody who suffers with depression will know, depression is not something that can be hidden and can impact greatly on our friends and those we love.
Personally, I have always described it as a condition of complete and total joylessness which permeates every aspect of your life.
It's like being in a deep dark hole and whichever way you turn there is no way out.
Nothing pleases you, and one feels in a state of both emotional and physical paralysis, seemingly unable to do anything.
These modern times in which we live demands that any sort of ailment is treated either by surgery or by medication or by a combination of both.
Whilst medication is available for people who suffer with depression, I never found it particularly satisfactory in my state.
It acted like a sort of masking agent, making one feel as if one had been given an injection of emotional positivity, whilst depression continued to eat away somewhere in the core of whatever it is that makes up me.
Whilst everybody's different, and everyone reacts to depression in different ways, I don't think I'm alone in feeling like this.
One of the problems is that when you realise medication is not the answer, the negative thoughts that you generate when you are depressed takeover and suggest that there is nothing that can be done.
Many people, myself included, considered anything outside the established medical realm as quackery.
Now in my case, this was a big mistake.
Things came to a head when my wife divorced me because of my depressive behaviour.
I hadn't realised how difficult things had been, and this is often the case with depressives, who often don't know what "normal behaviour" is.
My divorce focused my attention on myself, and I decided that if I was going to get my life together I was going to have to take action.
I also realised that taking action had to be combined with keeping an open mind.
That meant examining every possible type of treatment for my depression, including therapy.
This required a concentration of effort.
In those moments when I wasn't feeling depressed I would sit and look at my behaviour when I was in a depressed state.
It wasn't nice, but I used the time when I wasn't feeling depressed to decide on getting therapy.
I guess this is the equivalent to an alcoholic admitting that he has a drink problem.
But the point here was that this decision gave me something concrete to cling to when I did undergo my bouts of depression.
It meant that when I was in the fog of depression I had this thought that therapy had to be employed.
Therapy was not a long drawn-out affair, and what it did was to provide me with various mental strategies to employ when I felt depression coming on.
It also gave me strategies to use when I was in fact depressed.
I'm not sure that anyone is ever "cured" of depression, but I can now claim to be able to choose not to be depressed through the various strategies I have learnt.