Depression is a prison whose foundation stone is the unquestioned belief that you are intrinsically unacceptable to yourself and others, and that you have to spend your life trying to be good in the way that you define "good". Setting yourself impossibly high standards, you become an expert in feeling guilty. When a personal disaster befalls you, your ideas about yourself and your life no longer fit reality.

This feels like your very self is falling apart. You try to hold yourself together by blaming yourself. Now you see yourself as unforgivably wicked. You cut yourself off from other people because they will reject you, from your past where lies the evidence of your wickedness, from your hopeless future, and from society and nature. Thus, unintentionally, you create your prison. The more you hate yourself, the worse your prison becomes.

The key to the prison is to decide to act as if you value and accept yourself. You do something nice, something as simple as going for a daily walk. You talk things over with a friend, or perhaps a therapist. You decide whether to take anti-depressants to mitigate your pain (anti-depressants are painkillers, not cures for depression), or whether you'll use the pain to motivate you to change your life. Gradually and imperceptibly, you come to value, accept and love yourself.

Thus, you discover the recipe for happiness. You learn to see yourself as being humanly fallible like everyone else. Now you work out what proportion of a disaster is your responsibility, what proportion other people's, and what happened by chance. You no longer claim to be responsible for everything, and, instead of sinking into self-absorbed guilt, you endeavour to right what can be righted.

You no longer see the world as governed by a grand design of immutable laws of reward and punishment, but see it as operating as an interplay of chance and human intention a world where you can enjoy hope and freedom. You can accept that life will always bring crises because you know you'll meet them with courage and optimism.

No longer enmeshed in your concerns about yourself, you discover how immensely interesting and rewarding the world and other people are. Involved in all this, it might cross your mind one day that you are, in fact, happy.

* For more information, visit www.dorothyrowe.com.au

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