Philip Burguieres demonstrates the confusion felt by many people about depression. He refers to it as a disease, yet it seems that the solution to his depression was to change how he saw himself and his world. No physical illness can be cured simply by changing how we think.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ website no longer talks about a chemical imbalance as the cause of depression but instead lists factors such as “circumstances” and says that “things happen”. However, it fails to note that what determines our behaviour isn’t what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us.

People who view their flooded home as a challenge to be mastered will behave very differently from those people who look at their house and think: “If I’d been really good this wouldn’t have happened to me.” If we don’t understand that we interpret events and are free to change our interpretations, we’ll make the same kind of mistakes that Burguieres made. As a child he tried to overcome the shame he felt about his unemployed father by setting himself the absolute rule “I shall not fail at anything”. He became exceedingly good, but, like all good people, he felt that he was not good enough and therefore didn’t deserve any pleasure. These two ideas, which he himself had created, ensured that sooner or later his world would fall apart and he would suffer.

When he became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company he couldn’t let himself feel any pleasure. Moreover, he couldn’t succeed at everything he did because, try as we might to force the world to be what we want it to be, the world goes its own way and thus disappoints us. It is impossible to succeed at everything we do.

Depression is always preceded by some kind of personal disaster which shows us that there is a huge discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it is. Failing at something was such a disaster for Burguieres. When our ideas no longer fit what is going on, they fall apart. If we know that the anxiety and shakiness we’re experiencing are our ideas falling apart, we can survive a period of uncertainty until we create new ideas, but, if we don’t know this, we feel that our very self is shattering and disappearing. We are utterly terrified. By blaming ourselves for the disaster that has befallen us we can, unconsciously, create the prison of depression.

However, terrible though this prison is, it can give us the respite and protection we need while we rethink those ideas on which we’ve based our life. We can learn from depression to treat ourselves kindly, to value ourselves, and to understand that life’s inherent uncertainty gives us freedom and hope.

Depression: The Way out of Your Prison, by Dorothy Rowe, is published by Routledge