There are some depression-related things that people, including doctors and therapists, regularly overlook. Maybe these will apply to
@MTF or maybe not, but I think they are worth being aware of for anyone who is dealing with depressive experiences.
1. Get Your Testosterone Levels Checked
Thanks to aging, the body can produce less testosterone over time. If your T drops and your estrogen is still producing at the same rate, then you end up with too much estrogen. That will affect your emotions, energy levels, physical appearance, weight and mindset. Doctors usually don't think to check this in their haste to prescribe SSRIs.
2. Pay Attention to Inflammation
Low T can lead to inflammation. Inflammation can also come from the things you eat, toxins in your environment, viruses, and a bunch of other places. When the body gets inflamed, it affects the brain too.
Review your diet. Even "healthy" diets can have inflammatory foods. For instance, I eat almost exclusively organic, grass-fed grass-finished beef, organic veggies, organic almond butter blah blah... thing is, if I have more than a spoonful of almond butter per day, I've found my body will balloon right up with inflammation. Looks like I gained 10 pounds that week. So I have to manage that. I've heard 6 grams of sugar is all it takes to cause an inflammatory response (that's like 1 cookie).
3. A Good Therapist Matters
If you get a poor therapist who doesn't pay attention to their own language patterns, then they can accidentally plant negative thoughts in your mind that will cause you to feel worse after talking with them. This has happened to me before. I didn't understand why I felt so terrible after talking with the therapist, and it wasn't until reflecting back on the experience later that it started to make sense.
It might be worth finding a good conversational hypnotherapist since they understand the linguistic aspect better, and how important it is to manage subtle verbal commands. Regular therapists and doctors usually do not have training in hypnotherapy and are not aware of the ways in which their words can direct attention to the wrong places.
The T.V. show,
Dexter featured a therapist named Emmett Meridian who used this exact approach to get his patients to off themselves. That isn't to say therapists are killers normally, but inexperience can lead to negative outcomes all the same, and you don't want to be on the wrong end of that.