Kate Tolo Tries SAINT: A Five-Day Magnetic Brain Stimulation Protocol for Depression
Bryan Johnson
Kate Tolo, co-founder of Blueprint with Bryan Johnson, says she has not been herself for about four years. She had wanted to address her depression for a long time but did not want to start SSRIs. With Bryan's encouragement, she travelled to Kaizen Brain Center in San Diego to undergo the SAINT protocol, an accelerated form of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) that compresses treatment into five days. The film follows her through the week and asks whether it worked. Her own answer shifts from day to day, and she ends up concluding that she is not the most reliable judge of her own state.
The Treatment and Its Promise
The video opens by describing SAINT as a depression treatment that is non-invasive, is not a drug, and has a 79% success rate. It is presented as a sprint. Standard TMS usually runs over months. SAINT runs for five days, from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with a 10-minute TMS session every hour followed by a 50-minute break. Across the week that adds up to 50 sessions, and each session delivers about 60 "trains" of stimulation.
A clinician at the center explains that TMS has been FDA-approved since 2008 and has a standard protocol, but that SAINT is more precise. The video notes that the protocol has shown results even in patients with treatment-resistant depression, and that some people notice a difference by day five. For some, Kate says, the change is instant, "like flipping a switch."
Kate's stated motive goes beyond her own recovery. She wants the treatment to work "not just for me but for everyone struggling with depression." She cites figures: about 13% of people in the US are on antidepressants, and women are twice as likely as men to take them. Later she adds that only 35% of people struggling with depression seek treatment, often because they don't see it as serious or feel ashamed to admit it.
Access and Cost
Kate calls TMS "a really good first-line treatment if you can get access to it," and says access is the hard part. She estimates SAINT costs something like $30,000 out of pocket and says getting insurance to cover it is almost impossible. The clinician argues that medications are the first choice not because they are better, but because they are cheaper, easier, and more accessible. Asked whether the treatment could eventually reach everyone, the clinician answers "absolutely." Medicare does cover it, but only in a hospital setting, and the hope is that most insurance carriers will one day cover it too. Kate says she feels very lucky to have access and motivated to make sure people find out the treatment exists.
What Her Depression Looks Like
Before treatment, Kate describes her symptoms. She has trouble understanding herself and staying in touch with her own feelings, and she tends to undermine her own experience. The physical symptom she describes most vividly is getting "stuck." Her body seizes up and she feels she literally cannot move. Some mornings she can't find the motivation even to get up and pee, and that is how she knows it will be a bad day. She estimates it gets that bad about once a week, or perhaps once every two weeks. Asked whether she feels sad, she says she feels "numb."
At the start of the week she fills out a self-assessment. She rates emotional support as good and loneliness as average. She reports irritability, social dissatisfaction, and feeling cognitively impaired and slow. On a series of questions she answered "rarely" to all of them: whether she had a sense of well-being, felt hopeful, found her life satisfying, felt it had purpose or meaning, felt cheerful, felt life was worth living, or had a sense of balance.
Preparation: MRI, Kernel Flow, and Motor Threshold
Treatment starts with an MRI to pinpoint the brain region that will be targeted. Kate recalls wondering during the scan whether her brain, once encoded into ones and zeros, could someday be recreated from that data. If it were, she asked herself, would that brain be having a depressed experience just like hers?
She is also measured with Kernel Flow. Kate explains that Bryan founded Kernel years ago and that the two of them worked on it together. According to her, Kernel has an algorithm that predicts whether a person will respond to TMS. The team also collects resting-state data. Bryan calls in on speakerphone, calls it "the first day of school," and promises her the best week ever.
The final step is calibrating intensity. The technician stimulates until her hand visibly twitches, which gives a reading of 39. Treatment then begins at low intensity and is raised gradually, and Kate can ask to hold it at any level if it becomes too intense. Her first reaction to the stimulation is that she doesn't know how to describe it. She then calls it "electricity mixed with tapping" and notes that her whole face is moving.
Doubts About the Method Itself
Kate admits the method worries her somewhat. She thinks about times in the past when people used strange techniques in medicine, and she expects TMS will probably look archaic in the future. "But that doesn't mean it doesn't work," she adds.
Searching for a Cause
Between sessions, Kate reflects on how her depression might have started. She grew up in a small town in Australia, from "the middle of nowhere," and says she sacrificed a great deal for her career. Then, as she puts it, "we did what we set out to do," which was to play on the global stage. After the virality that followed, something shifted. She had believed in larger systems, but once she was interfacing with them directly she concluded they were "all made up." She began asking what the purpose of anything was, and that period coincided with the depression. She has run through many possible causes, including losing her ambition or her motivation for existing. She acknowledges, though, that "it's hard to know what caused what."
The Grind of the First Days
The first day is more tiring than she expected. She feels tired, a little nauseated, and "out of it." She attributes this partly to being in a tiny room all day and eating differently than usual. Her verdict on the procedure: not painful, a weird and uncomfortable sensation, "but overall something that everyone could do."
On day two she thinks she might be starting to feel better and describes moments when her overall mood felt good. By the end of the day, though, she says she is so tired that she feels "pretty depressed."
Realizing What Depression Actually Looked Like
On day two Kate reaches a realization she calls "mind-blowing." She had been telling herself all along that she wasn't "the picture of depression." Only then did she ask what picture she had been imagining. She had assumed depression would look like an emo experience of sulking all day. She suspects that image came from some deeply embedded taboo that she had never examined.
Looking at herself now, she is surprised at how much she has kept going. She still functions at work and still tells friends she's fine. "My ability to act like everything's okay somehow convinced me that I am okay," she says. This ties into what she describes as a general "self-perception mismatch" with others. Earlier in the week, when she told friends about the treatment, several said they had no idea she had been struggling. She had assumed it was obvious.
Day Three: Doubt, Fear, and Impostor Syndrome
By day three, having finished her first session of ten that day, Kate's doubt grows. She worries it is too soon to feel anything, and then worries she never will. If the treatment fails, would that mean her depression is treatment-resistant? She calls that a scary category. What frightens her most is the possibility that the part of her life when "things were light and easy" and she wasn't in friction with the world is closed for good. She tries to "trust the process."
She also can't shake the feeling that she doesn't deserve the treatment. When she asked a technician what patients are usually like when they arrive, he told her honestly that most are at a last resort. They have tried many things and have little hope left. That revived her impostor syndrome, and she began to wonder whether she is even depressed. That night she says she is "spiraling" and that "the weight of it all feels unbearable," and she records herself in bed in tears.
Bryan's Perspective and the Surprise Visit
On day four, Bryan and his son Tage drive to San Diego to surprise her. By then she has done roughly 35 sessions. On the drive, Bryan explains his reasons. He describes Kate as someone who spends her whole life thinking about other people's needs, and says this is one of the first times he has seen her invest in herself. When she had complained of not feeling well, he asked questions and saw patterns similar to his own experience of depression. He told her he thought she was depressed. She denied it and said she was just stressed and tired, and he insisted. He was familiar with the SAINT research out of Stanford and suggested she try it.
Bryan describes the layers of what Kate is dealing with. Functionally, the two of them build a business together all day. Spiritually, they are trying to "give birth to a new era of humanity." Philosophically, they are grappling with what it means to be human. He speculates that she may have been depressed so long that she no longer knows what not being depressed feels like.
At the clinic, Bryan says her messages have changed and points to her "word construction." Kate denies it. When he asks about the mechanism, she describes it as stimulating a dormant, dysregulated area of the brain back into regulation. He says he has been warning everyone to be ready for a "jump-started Kate." She replies that this hasn't happened yet.
Kate says she had been very sad the previous night and that morning, and the visit "really threw me off" in a good way, giving her "a pep in my step." She then catches herself in a pattern. When they offered to stay, she worried about being a burden. Bryan read her hesitation as a sign that she didn't want them there, and then prepared to leave so as not to burden her. In fact she wanted them to stay. "I gotta stop making it difficult for people to show their appreciation for me," she says.
She is candid about her remaining skepticism. Deep down she is hopeful, but on the surface she doesn't think the treatment will work. That troubles her because she wants the video to give hope to others. If it fails, she won't know whether the cause was her specific kind of depression or the treatment itself, and she would hate for other people to lose hope because it didn't work for her.
Day Five and the Weeks After
On the morning of day five she wakes up feeling good. She has been "very chipper" since the visit and feels "lit up," though she is unsure whether it will last. After her final session, she describes a subtle shift, like a weight she had carried for years finally lifting.
In a later check-in, she describes a "night and day difference." The absence of depression feels like "life is okay." She no longer finds herself at the end of the day wanting to stay up late, eat junk food, or self-sabotage. She adds that her HRV has been steady since treatment compared with other weeks.
The recovery has not been linear. Two nights before the day-five check-in, depression came crashing back while she was with Bryan and Tage, and all her positivity vanished. Since the visit, bad events in her life have sometimes made her dip deep into depression again. She now finds those dips useful, because she can feel how different they are from her new baseline. She also recounts a week of PMS when she feared the depression had returned; once her period began, she felt much better again.
When people ask whether she's better, she says she isn't a reliable person to answer. So she asked those around her, and they told her she's different and that TMS worked. Weighing all of this, she concludes: "I think genuinely TMS worked, which is mind-blowing." Watching footage of herself from before, she thinks she looked "duller."
Looking Back, and Advice
Asked what she would have done differently, Kate says she wonders what would have happened if she had done this sooner. Still, she feels she was so out of control, "just scrambling to get by," that she couldn't realistically have organized it earlier. It would have been nice, she says, to have done it a year ago rather than waiting through years of depression.
Her advice to others centers on denial. The faster you get through the denial phase, the faster you move toward recovery, because staying in denial means denying yourself reality, and without reality you can't put solutions or support in place. She suggests telling a doctor what you've been experiencing and asking what they think, or asking people close to you, as she did. She cautions against over-diagnosing or overcomplicating things, and recommends reducing your situation to "the true raw facts and data." The video closes by telling viewers struggling with depression that they are not alone and encouraging them to reach out to someone they trust.
It's going to feel like a tapping sensation. Three, two, one. How do you feel? I don't even know how to describe that.
There's a treatment for depression that isn't invasive, isn't a drug, and has a 79% success rate. It's called the SAINT protocol, and it only takes 5 days.
Internally, deep deep deep deep deep deep deep deep deep deep down, I'm hopeful, but like surface level I'm skeptical. I'm like, I don't think it's going to work.
I'm the co-founder of Blueprint, building it alongside Bryan for the past 4 years. Building Blueprint is one thing, but me taking care of my mental health is another. With some encouragement from Bryan, I decided to try TMS. For some, the change is instant, like flipping a switch.
In the US, about 13% of people are on antidepressants. Women are twice as likely as men to be on them. I wanted this treatment to work, not just for me, but for everyone struggling with depression. So I packed my bags and headed to Kaizen Brain Center in San Diego, hoping to come back a different person.
I have a really hard time understanding myself and like being in touch with my own feelings, and I also am susceptible to always like undermining my own experience. But when I look at my experience over the last like 4 years, I have been, I haven't been myself. I've been wanting to do something about it for a long time, but I haven't wanted to do SSRIs.
And TMS is a really good first-line treatment if you can get access to it. It's just one of those things, it's like kind of hard to get access to. This is also incredibly expensive. I think it's something like $30,000 out of pocket, and to get insurance to cover it is almost impossible.
What physical symptoms do you feel? I get stuck. It's like my body starts to seize up and I like, I literally feel like I can't move. Sometimes I wake up and I can't even pee. It's like the craziest thing, like you, I can't even get the motivation to go pee. That's when I know it's going to be a bad day, is like when I wake up and I feel like humpe.
How often does that happen? Maybe like once a week that bad, maybe once over two weeks that bad. You think you're sad? I think I'm numb.
TMS uses magnets to activate parts of the brain linked to depression. First, I needed an MRI to pinpoint the exact area of my brain that would be targeted during treatment.
As I was getting my MRI, I was thinking that they have to take my brain, then they code it into ones and zeros, and like, in the future, can we then take this CD and then recreate my brain from it? And then is that brain having an experience, a depressed experience, just like me?
The SAINT is a very specialized form of TMS. Yeah, so TMS has been FDA approved since 2008. You know, there's a standard protocol, but the SAINT is more precise. Yeah.
The SAINT protocol showed results even in patients with treatment-resistant depression, some noticing a difference by day five. But it's not the first choice. Medications are, not because they're better, but because they're cheaper, easier, and more accessible.
Do you think this could be something that eventually is accessible to everyone? Absolutely. Medicare does cover it, but in a hospital setting. But I think the hope is that one day most of the insurance carriers should be able to cover this.
I really am so lucky to get access to this, and I feel motivated by wanting to make sure that like people legit do find out about this treatment. Yeah, hopefully it works. It'll be a bummer if it doesn't.
I went through like five different stages of emotions today. I caught up with some friends this morning, and some of them were like, wait, what? I had no idea that you were going through this. I generally have this like self-perception mismatch, I feel like, with people. So I thought it's been quite obvious that I've been struggling over the last couple years, but apparently it hasn't been.
I felt really optimistic about tomorrow, and then about 5:00 p.m. today I start to crash. Yeah. Oh man.
I've forgotten what it's like to live the Kate life without this darkness that's always kind of like around the edge, waiting to completely overturn and overwhelm my life at all moments. Yeah, yeah. I'll believe it when I feel it.
It's 5:47 a.m. and I got to go get, cuz I got to go to treatment.
Depression is one of the most common mental illnesses, yet only 35% of those struggling seek treatment, oftentimes because they don't see it as serious or feel ashamed to admit it.
Emotional support, I'm good. Loneliness, I'm average. Anger, physical aggression, I'm good. Anger affect, I am average. Like, I'm kind of irritable a lot. Life satisfaction, I'm satisfied. Socially, I'm dissatisfied. Cognitively, I feel impaired. I feel slow.
I answered rarely to the following questions: that I had a sense of well-being, that I felt hopeful, that my life was satisfying, that my life had purpose, that I had meaning, that I felt cheerful, that my life was worth living, that I had a sense of balance. I answered all those rarely.
We are doing Kernel Flow. So Bryan founded this company many years ago. He and I worked on this together, and they have an algorithm that actually predicts whether or not you will respond to TMS. So that's what we're going to be doing right now, and then we'll also grab some resting state data.
Bryan's calling. Should we pick up? You're on speakerphone and you're on the record. I'm so excited, today's the day. Today's the day. It's like first day of school. It is. Can you see me? Oh cool, that's so exciting. Exciting moment of life, and I'm sending you all the positive energy in the world. This is going to be the best week ever.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Oh man, look at that, it's real strong. It's the mark, the mark of the beast. Everything started to feel real.
Thank. The final step was figuring out the exact intensity needed to stimulate my brain.
So we'll go with the first twitch. Ready? Yeah. 1, 2, 3. Twitch. Yep, perfect. You can go to the upper grid and see if there. I twitch? Yeah. Whoa, I didn't even know you would see it. But you twitch. 39.
We're going to start at low intensity and slowly work our way up, but at any point you feel like it's a bit intense, just let me know, and then we'll kind of stay consistent at that intensity and slowly work it up. Okay, ready? Yes. 3, 2, 1.
Well, how do you feel? I don't even know how to describe that. Yeah, it does. Oh my god. It feels like electricity, mhm, mixed with tapping.
You'll get about 60 trains at each session.
Very, my whole, my face is moving. Right. Gosh, so weird. One down, 49 to go.
Yeah, it does definitely worry me, cuz I think about like times in the past where people would use crazy techniques to do all kinds of sh medicine. Is this going to be like seen as some archaic thing in the future? Probably, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
So I had sacrificed so much in life for my career. I mean, I came from like the middle of nowhere in Australia, like ttin, like random ass town, and then all of a sudden we did it. We did what we set out to do, which was like play on the global stage.
After all that virality, it unlocked this feeling inside me where I was like, nothing in the world matters. Cuz beforehand, you know, I kind of believed in these like greater systems, but once you kind of get to that system and you're interfacing with it directly, you realize that it's all made up. And so I went through definitely like that time as well. I was like, what is the purpose of anything?
And it coincides with the depression. And so for a long time I tried to figure out what caused this, and I ran through all the list of things, and one of the reasons, I was like, oh, maybe I've just lost my ambition, my motivation for existing. It's hard to know what caused what, though.
All righty, number two. Number two.
Normally TMS therapy takes months, but with the SAINT protocol, it's an intense sprint: 5 days, 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Every hour, a 10-minute TMS session followed by a 50-minute break. 10 minutes on, 50 minutes off, repeat all day.
It's wild to think that a non-invasive treatment with almost no side effects could completely change my life.
I'm feeling pretty tired, to be honest. I'm feeling a little nauseated and sick right now. Yeah, I could imagine that by like session 50 I'll be toast.
That was way more tiring than I expected it to be. I don't know, just being in like a tiny room and being cooped up all day and not eating the same thing that you typically eat, I just felt kind of out of it. Not painful. Weird sensation, definitely like uncomfortable, but overall something that everyone could do, which is cool.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
I think I started to feel like today I might be starting to feel better. I definitely had moments where I felt like my overall mood was just like nice. Long.
That is day two wrapped. Let's go home. All right, bye.
If anything, right now I feel so tired that I feel pretty depressed.
This whole time I've been feeling like I'm not the picture of depression, and only just now, today, like an hour ago, did I realize, like, what is this picture of depression that I've been imagining? I think I thought it was going to be some emo experience where I'm sulking about all day or something like that, which is probably just some deep taboo thing that's been embedded in me, and what I think depression is, not having examined this.
I'm stopping and I'm looking at myself, and I'm surprised at how much I've been able to just like keep going in everyday life. I can still get by at work. I can still interact with friends and tell them like, it's fine, I'm fine, everything is okay.
My ability to act like everything's okay somehow convinced me that I am okay, which is like a mind-blowing thing to just come to this realization now.
It's day three and I just completed my first session of 10 today. And as the days passed, my doubt crept in. Maybe it was too soon to feel anything. But what if I never did? Does that then mean that my depression is something like treatment resistant? Which is a, that's a scary category to fall into.
For that chapter of my life where things were light and easy and I wasn't at friction with the world, for that to be done and closed, and I can't get myself back into a state where I feel like life is full of possibility, for that to be closed forever in my life is a terrifying thought. Just got to have faith in the process and just trust the process and hope that it will work out.
I also can't seem to shake this thought that I don't deserve this treatment. Today, one of the technicians, I was like, oh, so, you know, who do you usually see in here? Like, what's their affect like? Like, what is their kind of mood like when they come in? And he was very honest that most people are pretty, pretty last resort, that this treatment is really at the end of the line for them, and they're seeking out something after trying a lot of things and with no hope left. It made me question again, like impostor syndrome, perhaps I'm not actually depressed after all.
I'm spiraling tonight. The weight of it all feels unbearable.
I'm in bed, and I was just going to text crying and be like, oh my God, I feel so depressed, and I thought I'd share that with you guys. I feel very good.
Yeah, okay. I'm going to go try and make myself feel better by showering and getting ready for the evening. All right, bye.
Right now we are driving to San Diego, and we're going to surprise Kate.
I'm going to visit Kate with Talmage because Kate is an amazing person. She spends her entire life thinking about other people's needs, and so this is one of the first times I've ever seen her actually invest in herself, and I want to support her and be there for her.
A while back, you know, she was complaining that she just wasn't feeling well, and I started asking some questions, and the patterns I saw were very similar to what I was experiencing when I was depressed. And I said, Kate, I think you're depressed. And she denied it, you know. She said no, it's just I'm stressed and, you know, tired or whatever. And I said no, I think you're really depressed, and I said I think you should do something about it.
I've been familiar with this research out of Stanford University called the SAINT protocol, and so when Kate and I were talking, I said, Kate, you should go to SAINT. And so she's now, this is day four of her therapy, so by the time we get there, she will have done around 35 sessions.
There's so many layers to what Kate is going through. I mean, functionally, we build a business all day together, and then spiritually, we're trying to give birth to a new era of humanity, and then philosophically, we're grappling with new ideas of what it means to be human. When you're not feeling well, it's pretty hard to tackle all of the things. It's possible that she's been depressed for so long she may not know what it feels like to not be depressed.
Hello! Hi! I'm a surprise. Do you want it? I don't remember. Oh my God, I don't know. There, a surprise. Hi Kate. There you go. I wasn't expecting this. Hi. Hi. No, I wasn't. Oh no, even better.
I'm trying to think, is there anything embarrassing in this room? Don't worry about it. It's important we capture it as is.
I was saying your messages have changed. Really? Yeah. No, they have not. Yes, they have. No, they— Yes, they have. They haven't. Your word construction.
Hey, hey, what's going on? How you doing? You have a surprise. Do shut up. How you doing, doctor? Good, good. My son, Talmage. Hey, nice to meet you. Good to meet you. Meet you.
Isn't this crazy? Like, what is it doing? Do you know the mechanism of action? But it's like stimulating an area that is like kind of dormant and dysregulated into regulation, like jump. I've been warning everybody to get ready for a jump-started Kate. Oh yeah. But that hasn't happened, right?
Like, you're very high. Kate, stay still. You say it, or no? I wish I was. You got— yeah, I know. Me too.
So this morning I was depressed. I was very, very sad, and last night, so all of last night and then this morning, I was really, really down. Yeah, this visit really threw me off. I definitely feel like I got a pep in my step. Is that what they say?
Was there a part of you that kind of wishes you weren't visited today? No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, no, I loved every second of that.
Cuz I was like, oh, you driving back tonight? And they were like, well, we can, well, we're thinking we could stay, we could go. And in my mind I'm like, oh my God, I don't want to burden them with staying. Then Bryan takes that and sees it as a signal, as, oh, Kate doesn't want me to stay. But that's not at all. I just don't want to be a burden. And then he's in return leaving because he doesn't want to be a burden on me.
All that to say that I really appreciate being visited today. There's no part of me that didn't want that, and in fact, of course I wanted them to stay. I got to stop doing that. I got to stop like making it difficult for people to show their appreciation for me. I get in the way and I'm like, oh, don't do that. Anyway, we'll play cornhole and forget about our emotions. Yeah, cornhole that out.
It's just, internally, deep deep deep deep deep deep deep deep deep deep down, I'm hopeful, but like surface level I'm skeptical. I'm like, I don't think it's going to work. That's what I honestly do think. I'm like, I don't think this is going to work, and I think it's kind of sh that I don't think it's going to work.
Because, hey, I want this to be hopeful for everyone else out there, and like, I don't know, if it didn't work, is it because of my specific kind of depression, or is it because the treatment isn't good enough? You know what I mean? So I would hate for other people to lose hope just because it didn't work for me. So that's really sad.
Oh, you did it.
Good morning. It's day five. I'm at the end. Okay, to be honest, I woke up and I felt pretty good. Yeah, honestly, since Bryan and Talmage came and visited, I've been very chipper, so we'll see if that lasts today. But I feel pretty good. I feel definitely lit up. I just have my last treatment.
Something shifted. It was subtle at first, like a weight I'd been carrying for years was finally lifting.
How are you feeling? I felt amazing. Like night and day difference. The feeling of depression having gone away is like, life is okay.
I didn't find myself at the end of the day like wanting to stay up late, eat shitty food, like self R in some way. Like, my HRV has been steady this entire time since treatment. Like, this is the last week versus all the other weeks. So I was really
hopeful and then two nights ago I just had it come crashing back down on me and I was here end of day and I was with Bryan Tage and I just was like uh-oh, like it's back, and I was really emotionally crushed by it, like all of that positivity toward my depression went away.
People want to know am I better, and the funny thing is I think I am not a reliable person to answer that question, so I asked people around me and they were like yeah, you're better, and I was like you think that TMS worked? They were like yeah, like you're different.
So day four Bryan Tage came and visited me and I feel like that marked the change of my overall mood being so much better, and then I've had these drops since then where something bad will happen in life and I'll dip deep into depression and I actually feel the weight of it, and it's actually very helpful because I feel how different it is.
And then also last week I was PMSing for the entire week and I just felt like the entire time, and I was thinking oh my God, am I depressed again, and then immediately got my period and I'm out of it, and so now I feel so much better and I think genuinely TMS worked, which is mind-blowing.
Is there anything you wish you knew before starting this journey or perhaps would have changed?
I don't think so. I think I was thinking oh, what if I had these it sooner and what if I had done the treatment sooner, but I think I was so out of control, like I was just scrambling to get by, that I didn't feel like I was capable of getting my butt in gear and organizing this sooner or doing anything like that. So it would have been nice had I done this a year ago as opposed to waiting for so many years of going through depression.
Yeah, in watching back footage of myself during that time period, I feel like I looked duller.
Interesting. What advice would you give to someone who is going through depression?
I would say the quicker you can get through the denial phase, the quicker you'll be toward recovery, because if you hang out in that denial phase you're almost just denying yourself reality, and without that you can't actually stop to get solutions in place and support from people around you.
So I would say if you can, maybe talking to your doctor, just saying I've experienced these things, what do you think, you've seen me, asking people around me. Of course you don't want to over-diagnose and overcomplicate things, but if you can distill things down to just what is the true raw facts and data, then yeah, you're a step closer to feeling better.
If you're struggling with feelings of depression, know that you're not alone. Support is there if you need it. Reach out to someone you trust for help.
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