Cloudscape

See depression as a tunnel: usually it is healed by going back out of the tunnel the way one came in - but one may also heal by going all the way through it. The former may be the case when the person does not fully lose, the latter when he or she has lost all hope. The strange thing is that depression may heal itself: the chronic stress of depression causes a process of desensitization which eventually may cause it to destroy itself.

Depression usually starts with fear or stress. Fear is often still prominent through later stages, but it is usually worse in the beginning. Later, the chronic stress of this fear causes a desensitization, and the person becomes resigned to his situation. At this point fear turns into despair. Despair is actually less distressing than fear, so that the person will often try to remain in despair, leading to unreasonable negativism. This negativism is a subconscious method of the person to blunt his own emotionality further and further, as it makes them stop caring: they give up.
Eventually, if their depression lasts long enough, the person's affect will become even more blunted so that the person feels empty. Emptiness may in itself be quite distressing: it may be compared to feeling as if one can't breathe. If this distress is severe enough, the person may become totally numb so that even the distress about "not feeling anything" (except for feeling that one doesn't feel anything) falls away.
Here the person comes to a crossroads. If his condition is severe enough and he has a diathesis for it, the chronic stress he has suffered may cause the person to become schizoid. However, this is rare; there is a second possibility.
Because the person at this point no longer feels any distress, it may have made place for positive emotions, just as the ice in spring makes place for flowers to grow. At this point the person may heal, and the numbness then turns into a kind of peace: the person is relieved to no longer feel anything, and becomes content with it.