Tags: Understanding Depression as a Signal
When clients tell me they feel depressed, I’m rarely surprised. We’re living through an era marked by collective stress and uncertainty. In the span of just two decades, we’ve witnessed the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the long War on Terror; the financial collapse of 2007; the devastating 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan; and, of course, the global shutdown triggered by COVID-19 in 2020. Any one of these events could unsettle a person’s sense of safety. Together, these events form a backdrop of instability that affects all of us, whether or not we consciously register it. In such an environment, depression can be understood not simply as an illness but as a response—a way the psyche copes with overwhelming stress by muting feelings that might otherwise be too painful to bear.
Depth psychology has long recognized that the roots of depression often reach back to early life. A toddler or a young child who experiences something frightening, confusing, or emotionally overwhelming has limited tools for processing those feelings. Instead, in a defensive move, the child’s psyche may repress the experience, burying the emotions in order to survive psychologically. This same mechanism can carry into adulthood. Depression becomes the visible sign of feelings that were once too difficult to experience and have remained sealed away.
Alice Miller’s classic work, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in English in 1981*, powerfully illustrates this connection. Miller writes that depression appears in nearly all patients, “either in the form of a manifest illness or in distinct phases of depressive moods.” These phases, she explains, serve different functions—one of the most important being a signaling function. Depression signals that something within us is calling for attention: a buried emotion, a forgotten wound, a part of the self that has been pushed aside for too long.
One of the most common sources of these buried feelings is the early suppression of essential needs. Chief among these needs is the drive to individuate—to be one’s authentic self. Yet in most families, even loving ones, certain feelings or behaviors are welcomed while others are discouraged. A child quickly learns which parts of themselves earn approval and which provoke disappointment or withdrawal. Over time, the child may come to shape their identity around pleasing the parent, often without realizing it. This people-pleasing mode can persist well into adulthood, eventually leading to a deadening of the self. When authenticity is chronically stifled, depression often becomes the psyche’s way of expressing what the person themselves cannot: something essential is being suppressed.
Depression can also arise from the sheer accumulation of strong feelings that have no avenue for expression. Anger, grief, fear, longing—if these emotions are repeatedly judged as unacceptable or unsafe, the psyche may lock them away. But repression is not a permanent solution. Hidden feelings gather weight over time, sometimes flooding the barriers meant to contain them. Depression is sometimes the first sign that those barriers are starting to strain.
Healing begins when the link between current depression and past repression becomes visible. By gently uncovering the buried experiences and allowing the long-held emotions to be felt, the protective function of depression is no longer needed. The energy once spent on keeping feelings out can flow back into living fully, creatively, and authentically.
Seen this way, depression is not merely a diagnosis. It is a messenger. It invites us to slow down, look inward, and reclaim the parts of ourselves that were silenced long ago. When we meet it with curiosity rather than judgment, depression can become not the end of vitality, but the beginning of a return to emotional wholeness.
*Alice Miller: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. Basic Books ©1997.
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