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Understanding Depression
Depression can take many forms, and is always unique to the person.
For some, it feels like a deep sadness or emptiness. For others, it’s an exhaustion that makes even small tasks feel impossible.
Sometimes, it’s not sadness at all – just a sense that life has lost its colour.
It can appear after a loss or slowly build over time, without a clear reason.
Whatever the form, depression is often the mind’s way of speaking when words have been too difficult to find.
Counselling & psychotherapy offer a space to listen to what depression might be saying – about loss, meaning, or the conflicts within us.
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What Causes Depression?
Depression rarely comes from one cause.
It can arise from grief, disappointment, childhood experiences, or the pressure to appear “fine” when we’re not.
Sometimes, it’s a form of protest – a refusal to keep living in a way that no longer feels true.
In psychoanalytic theory, we understand depression as a symptom that means something. Something to be understood, and worked through.
By exploring its roots, therapy helps uncover what has been buried beneath it.
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How Does Therapy Help for Depression?
Therapy provides a safe and consistent space to speak – to put words to feelings that may have been carried alone for too long.
Through this process, the heaviness can begin to shift.
Understanding and working through replaces confusion. Connection replaces isolation. It’s not about quick fixes, but about slowly rebuilding a relationship to oneself and to life.
Our psychotherapists work with care, depth, and confidentiality, helping you find meaning and possibility again.
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We are a patient-first professional counselling & psychotherapy service in Dublin.
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What the Research Says
2015 — Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression (Driessen et al.) [1]
A large meta-analysis (54 studies; 3,946 participants) found short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy was significantly more effective than control conditions for treatment of depression.
2015 — Long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression (Fonagy et al.,) [2]
In a controlled trial of people with long-standing, hard-to-treat depression, those who received long-term psychoanalytic therapy improved significantly. The difference wasn’t always obvious immediately, but it became clearer over time. Suggesting the benefits can build and strengthen over time, and in the follow up period.
2013 — Seven different psychotherapies all beat waitlist (Barth et al.,) [3]
A large meta-analysis (198 studies; 15,118 adults) compared seven psychotherapy types for depression and found each one outperformed waitlist with moderate-to-large effects. It’s useful because it highlights that a range of approaches are effective in treating depression.
2017 — Intensive Short-Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression (Town et al.) [4]
An controlled trial in treatment-resistant depression found intensive short term psychodynamic therapy produced large advantages over routine secondary care and a much higher remission rate.
Research Summary
These studies were chosen because they give a clear snapshot of what the wider research suggests.
Psychotherapy is linked with meaningful improvements in depression. Evidence also suggests psychoanalytic approaches can help in more long-standing or treatment-resistant presentations.
Results vary from person to person, but overall the research points in a consistently positive direction.
FAQ
It can be tempting to look for the “right” label – depression, burnout, stress, grief – because naming things can bring comfort. But labels only ever capture the general shape of an experience. They miss the most important part: the part that’s entirely personal. The question that matters most is always singular: how this is happening in you.
If you already know you’re not yourself, or something isn’t right, there’s little value in searching for the perfect label before taking it seriously. The real question isn’t “does this qualify?” It’s: what has changed in my life, my energy, my sense of meaning, my connection to others, my relationship to myself? And just as importantly: what keeps repeating?
What matters most is a willingness to be curious, and a willingness to work on it. If you’re struggling and you want to do something about it, that’s enough. You don’t need permission from a label to begin.
Because depression isn’t always an overflow of sadness. Very often it involves a loss.
Numbness can be what happens when something has felt too much for too long and you’ve had to keep functioning anyway. The body adapts by turning the volume down. It doesn’t just dull pain; it can dull interest, desire, spontaneity, even closeness. Life carries on, but it can feel muted, like you’re watching yourself from a distance.
And sometimes emptiness is its own kind of signal. Not “nothing is wrong,” but “something is missing.” It can be hard to name what that is at first, because numbness involves an absence.
So if you don’t feel sad, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not struggling. It may mean the struggle has taken a different form.
Depression can make small tasks feel difficult because it changes the meaning of action.
In typical life, you do things because they lead somewhere. There’s a sense of payoff. A relief, satisfaction, connection, progress, even simple comfort. Depression dulls that. You can still know, logically, that “I should get up” or “I should reply,” but it can feel as if the emotional engine that usually carries you forward isn’t engaging. So every action starts to feel like pushing a car with the handbrake on.
And when things take effort, people often respond by getting harder on themselves. You start negotiating with yourself, criticising yourself, trying to force motivation. That inner battle can be more exhausting than the task itself.
So it’s not just low energy. It’s that the world stops offering reasons that feel real – and you’re left doing things by sheer will.
If we could fully explain why we feel the way we do, or why we keep doing what we do, we probably wouldn’t be suffering in the same way.
People often come to therapy because words have failed them, not because they’ve already worked it out.
Therapy starts exactly there – at the point where you know something is wrong, but you can’t yet say what it is.
Yes – very often. The important thing is that it’s never one-size-fits-all.
Depression is always singular. It’s shaped by a person’s history, their relationships, their way of coping, their way of speaking to themselves. For one person it comes as sadness. For another it comes as irritability, a short fuse, impatience, a sense that everything and everyone is too much. For someone else it could come as self-criticism.
So the question isn’t “does depression look like sadness?” It’s how is it showing up in you? What tone does it take — anger, numbness, blame, withdrawal, perfectionism, shutdown? That personal experience & pattern matters more than a label.
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