Stop Fighting Your Depression: What Depression Is Trying to Tell You.

I want to start by asking you something.

And I want you to really sit with it.

Have you ever woken up in the morning and felt... heavy? 

Not tired. Not sick. Just heavy. 

Like something invisible is pressing down on your chest. Like you're moving through life, but you're not really there. 

Like everyone else seems to know why they're here, and you're the only one who missed the memo.

You go through the motions. You show up. Maybe you even smile. But inside — inside there's this quiet, persistent voice that says: Is this it? Is this all there is?

If that sounds familiar, I want you to know something.

You are not broken.

You are not weak.

And you are absolutely not alone.

Welcome to this podcast series.

I'm Dr. Ardeshir Mehran, psychologist, depression, anxiety, trauma expert and someone who has sat with many of people in their darkest moments. 

And today, I want to talk to you about something that might completely change the way you see yourself.

I want to talk about depression. But not in the way you've heard before.

Thank You for Listening.

Timeline

Big Idea: "Depression is deprivation. Depression is data." Shift the question from what's wrong with me? to what's missing?

7 Emotional Rights introduced — Elemental needs, present throughout human history, that we are born to experience

Right 1. I Belong: Deep connection; 50% of CEOs report loneliness; we're trained to achieve, not connect

Right 2. I Am Complete: Freedom from past shame, trauma, regret; being present and whole right now

Right 3. I Am Boundless: Physical aliveness; moving, breathing, full-body presence; what no medication can replicate

Right 4. I Matter: Being seen, included, respected; invisibility as emotional violence 

Right 5. I Make: Engagement and meaning in work; 2/3 of Americans disengaged; disengagement → depression; here's why

Right 6. I Am: Speaking your truth without apology; silencing your real voice causes inner death

Right 7. I Soar: Life direction, calling, legacy; Maya Angelou quote: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you"

 The Transformation: Living the 7 rights doesn't cure depression; it ignites fuel. You wake up pissed, restless, alive

 Closing message: "You are not depressed, you are unfinished." Depression as proof you care and have been tolerating a life not right for you

 Call to action: Ask a different question, be honest with yourself, don't wait for perfect circumstances

 CONTACT DR. ARDESHIR MEHRAN

Website: https://ardeshirmehran.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-ardeshir-mehran-a3457/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

There's a key message that I want to share with you today. That depression is not a flaw, it is a compass. And I want to start by asking you a question. And I want you to really sit with it. Have you ever woken up in the morning and felt heavy, not tired, not sick, just heavy? Like something invisible is pressing down on your chest, heavy on your heart, like you're moving through life, but you're not really there. Everyone seems to know why they're there, they're smiling, they're looking good, but you're the only one who somehow missed the memo. Do you ever feel like that? You go through your emotions, you go through your emotions, you show up, maybe even a smile, but inside there's this quiet voice, persistent pain that says, Is this it? Is this life that is offering me? And why can't I just shake these hard feelings? If this sounds familiar to you, I want you to know something: that you're not broken, you're not weak, and you're not alone. There are many people who feel like that every single day. Welcome to my podcast series. This is Dr. Arishir Mehran, a Californian-based psychologist, trauma, anxiety, and depression expert, a researcher, and someone who has sat with many people in their darkest moments. And today I want you to know there are key messages that have to go from darkness to light, and what might completely change the way you see yourself. I want to talk about depression, but not in a way that many other psychologists and practitioners talk about it. It's a way that you probably never heard it before. And let me tell you what I've learned over my last 30 years of clinical and practice and research. I'm a trained psychologist from Columbia University, doctorate, masters. I did my internship at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital. And I worked with doctors, lawyers, leaders, high achievers, CEOs, at least. When we are depressed, we feel depression, that means we are living an unfinished life. Let that sit for a second. What does it mean to be unfinished but not broken? Not diseased, not chemically defective, but living a life that feels unfinished with respect to our emotional needs. Unfinished with respect to what you were meant to experience and express to live a happy and fulfilled life. For decades, the mental health work has told us that depression is an illness, that there's something wrong, probably, with our brain chemistry. And they give us an amazing list of symptoms of depression: sluggishness, heaviness, lack of focus, low energy, and so on. Very often they give us medication, a pill. I want you to hear me that I'm not dismissing medication for those who genuinely need it and benefit from that. But here's the problem: we have gotten the story backward, cause and effect backward. When we feel depressed, it's not because there's something wrong with us. We feel depressed because something is missing. Depression is deprivation. Here's the difference. Depression is something is missing, and that's the difference, a huge difference. In other words, depression is not a disease. Depression is data, it's a signal. So if your soul knocking on your door and saying, hey, something matters to you, you need to pay attention because it's not in your brain, in your chemical imbalance. It means there's something in the quality of how you lived your life up to now. You need to pay attention. So let's flip this story. When you change that question from what's wrong with me to what I'm missing, what's going on in my life, everything changes. And I know this personally. Smile in my face, strong, running marathons. I was always a star student, and I was the life of the party. In fact, many people call me Dr. Arishir Meron, PhD, L O P, life of the party. And people came to me for advice, but privately, I was lost. I was lonely. I was depressed. I felt that I was the healer who could not heal myself. Things only shifted for me when I stopped asking how to fix my depression. And instead, I asked, what was my depression actually telling me? What was my depression was actually telling me? That question changed my life. And that's the question I want to explore with you today. Over 30 years of research, clinical practice, and many people I have identified seven core emotional needs. These seven emotional needs, they are as elemental as our DNA. And they've been with us through the human history. These are not discretionary. Parents, teachers, our partners, leaders in our businesses, they don't give it to us. We are born to experience them all the time in our lives. And when we don't, that's where depression comes in. I call them our emotional rights. And it's very intentional I call them our rights, or just like our civic rights. And this is what I know for certain. When you are not living these rights, two or three of them, if you're consistently missing or unmet in our lives, you will feel depressed every time, predictably. So let me describe what these needs are. I'm going to mention them in an order, but the order is the arbitrary. As I go through these rights, I want you to take a moment and ask yourself, how am I feeling these rights in my life right now? The very first one is the right to belong, a deep connection. I say I belong as a statement of affirmation. This is about real connection, feeling safe, feeling a bond with another human being, love that is given and received. Up to 50 of USCOs report feeling lonely. Those are people with power, wealth, teams, and many individuals around them, and they are lonely. This is not lonely at the top, this is lonely at the quality of their lives. And we know that at the senior level high achievers, depression is anywhere between 35 up to 65 based upon their different studies. We can say it's high in the people of leadership in the status. This is about how we are raised to connect with other individuals. In other words, we are trained, we are motivated to achieve, to compete, to produce, but not to connect. Not really. And so we are get very good at being around people, but not get good at completely connecting with them. That's a big difference. Connection is not a luxury, it's oxygen. Let's go to the next one. Having a sense of being complete, which I call it a sense of I am complete. This means your sense of self is not strangled by your past, regret, shame, burden, trauma. I've seen it so many times that people carry the weight of who they used to be, of the pain that they could not leave behind. And they're still fighting yesterday's battle. It's like dragging an anchor behind you every time you want to go far. You cannot be fully present in this moment if you are impresent in the moments that they no longer exist. You are here right now, whole. Can you allow yourself to feel it and be in your power in this very moment? People who are depressed, they have a sense of time, but they've missed a here and now. They are somewhere in the past, somewhere in the future, but they don't have a sense of I'm complete, I'm full, and I'm enough right now. The third one, which is interesting, I call it I'm boundless. This is about your body, your physical presence, your connection to your own aliveness. My colleague Laura Putnam has a wonderful quote. She says that we are born to move and told to sit. We need to literally think about our body. Most people feel cut off from their body and experiences their body as a vehicle of moving the brain from one place to the other. So when you ask them how they feel, what they know about their body, they talk about their chest, their belly, pain in their back and their thighs, but they don't have a sense of full body empowerment. So we need to connect with our bodies. When we move, when we breathe, when we are present in our own skin, something opens up. We feel more powerful, we feel more alive. We can take breath that they feel refreshing. This is something no medication can replicate. The next need, I call it I matter. This one is profound and often misunderstood. I matter doesn't mean that I'm important because of my title or my salary or my status. That means I'm seen, I'm invited, I'm included, I'm respected, I have dignity, and I'm human being just as I am. One way to know it about I matter, for those who work in team settings, environments, communicate, communities, pay attention next time you're in a group setting. When different team members enter the room, notice if anybody turns around, have eye contact with them. Call their name, ask their opinion during the meeting. There are many people who feel invisible in our society, and that is soul crushing. And the invisibility is a form of emotional violence. When someone is not seen, something inside begins to die. Almost every mass shooter in this country, in the US, I'm talking about, when they study them and report about their motivation, there was something that came out, it's very heartbreaking and tragic. They talked about being invisible. And through their act of their act of hideous, unimaginable violence, they were trying to say, hey, I exist. Mattering is a key emotional need. So ask yourself right now: do people see you fully as you are? And for you to bring that to people around you, your partner, your kids, your family members, mattering doesn't cost us anything. And it can mean everything to those around us. The next need is about I make two-thirds of Americans, working Americans, report year after year by Gallup survey to be disengaged from their work. Two-thirds. This means we go to work, do the work, but feel this is not my work. I'm not engaged, I'm not motivated. I if I have the choice and I could take care of myself, my family, probably I would be doing something different. When we are disengaged and we do this day and day out, we go numb. We notice from multiple studies that disengagement has direct relationship to depression and to anxiety. When we check out, we start to spiral downward. We are not put on this earth to just clock in and clock out. We are here to contribute something that is meaningful to us, to people around us. That is our legacy, our fingerprint. We are here to make our mark on this world. Ask yourself: are you making your mark? Let me go to the next emotional need, which I call it I am. This is about you speaking your truth, your conviction, your actual self without apology, without censorship, and you being real and telling your truth. Many people, I was one of them, we learn to speak in code, to hush our power, hush our needs, our voice, our longings, our beliefs. When we do that, we suffer. So many people play it safe. They step back, they appease, they shrink, they edit before they speak. Every time they are in front of somebody that matters to them. And every time we silence our real voice, something in our heart diminishes. There's a small debt we have when that happens. This is about you owning who you are. Your truth may not be the best truth, but it's your truth. Say what you believe, state your needs, know your backbone, and then with love, let people decide if they can handle it, they want to hear it, or if it's any good idea. This is not about arrogance. This is about self-respect. The final one is a need I call eyesore. That by the time we reach around mid-30s, we start to feel the motivation and the power or the agony of eyesore. Maya Angelo, the American philosopher, poet, writer, has a beautiful statement that captures this. She says, There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. An untold story inside you. We all have a story. Eight billion people, eight billion story. The question is, do you know your story? This is about life direction, the calling that you feel inside the story and legacy that you are here to tell fully. Things that they shouldn't have done, and they did it. And the love they didn't express. And this is about when people start to say and use words like someday I will do this. When I retire, I will do this. When I get promoted, I do X, Y, and Z. This is about you owning your calling, your story right now. Don't be the person that thinks back and says, Ah, I wish I did that. So here's what happens when you start to leave this seven. Here's what happens when you start living these seven emotional needs. Something unexpected occurs. You will literally wake up one morning. You literally will wake up one morning and realize you're not depressed anymore. Instead, you're pissed. You are angry, in fact. You're pissed because you wasted times, you played small, you waited, you're now impatient. And you become in you become restless in your body in the best way possible. You do not wait, you cannot wait, and you don't want to put up with life, with arrangement with individuals that they don't allow you to be your fuller you. This is not a disease leaving your body. Depression is not a disease leaving your body, that's the fuel igniting. So that is about who you actually are. Depression reveals you, it's not a disease to heal. So let me close with this. If you're in the dark right now, and the heaviness that I described earlier that feels familiar, I want you to hear me that what you're feeling is not a flaw, it is a compass. And depression, your depression is a proof that you are in fact not broken. Depression is a proof that you care, and depression is that you have tolerated life that is not right for you for so long. And something inside you knows it, knows it for sure, and is your soul aching, says, Wake up, claim who you are. You are not depressed, my friend. You are unfinished, and unfinished means that you still have time, plenty of time, and that your story to tell to others, to write a story. There's the version of you that you haven't seen fully, others haven't seen it. To me, actually, it's quite exciting. It's daunting, but exciting. That's the version of you is not far away, is right in front of you. You just need to ask a different question. You need to be honest, be real with yourself, and not wait for the perfect time, perfect circumstances, perfect job, perfect partner, or perfect medication. Is it right here? You already know the pain, the pain will guide you to that, and that's the work is open to you. And to me, having done this work is the most hopeful and powerful, liberating work you can ever do. Thank you for being here. And I want to see you doing your journey. You will enjoy it, my friend. See you at the next podcast.