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Why I Never Stopped Looking for Answers to Depression
I Was 21 When Depression First Hit Me
When I was 21, I was doing a lot.
I was very seriously into bodybuilding. I was building my body up and I took it very seriously. I was also heavily involved in Wing Chun Kung Fu, travelling to Melbourne for training and becoming deeply immersed in it. And I had a horse, which meant riding, feeding and all the looking after a horse needs.
I mention all of this because of what came next. I wasn’t withdrawn. I wasn’t sitting around with nothing to do. I had a full, physical, busy life.
Then depression arrived, and it seemed to come out of nowhere.
I knew immediately that something was very wrong. It came on so quickly. The closest I can get to describing it is that it was like black paint, or black tar, being thrown over me. Something fell over my entire body and, almost like a magnet, pulled everything positive out of me. I felt hollow and empty, and at the same time profoundly upset and sad.
There were a lot of tears. But tears don’t really describe it. The mood was so low that the darkness didn’t seem to be coming only from my eyes. My whole body felt as though it was weeping.
My whole body was leaking darkness.
That is still how I remember it.
Part of what made it so frightening was that I had no idea what was happening to me. Here I was, lifting weights, training in martial arts, riding my horse, and suddenly I didn’t feel like myself at all. I had no name for it and no explanation.
My horse helped, in its own way. It needed looking after whether I felt like it or not, and that responsibility kept me going to some degree. But depression also began quietly taking things away. Things that had given me real pleasure started losing their pull. I gradually lost interest in martial arts. To be fair, there were other reasons too, because I had overtrained and developed joint injuries. Still, I never really went back to it, and I associate at least part of that loss with depression.
That taught me something early. Sadness was only one part of depression. It was sucking the life out of me and beginning to interfere with the life I had been living.
“My whole body was leaking darkness.”
Then It Came Back
The first depression did eventually lift. I was relieved, and I assumed that was the end of it.
Only a few months later, it returned.
I remember my reaction clearly. Oh no. I thought this was gone. Now it’s back again. Don’t tell me this is going to be an ongoing thing.
The first episode had frightened me because I didn’t understand it. The relapse frightened me in a different way. Now I knew exactly what this feeling was, and I knew it could come back. That is its own kind of fear: the sense that even when you’re well again, you may only be well until next time.
I started asking questions I couldn’t answer. What’s going on here? Am I going to have to keep dealing with this?
Over the years that followed, it did keep coming back. Depression stole days, weeks and, over time, years from me. I have relapsed several times, and some of those relapses took me very low. I honestly can’t say one was worse than the others. At the worst points I lost hope completely, and my thinking almost shut down. I remember being on my bed, almost rocking, because that was all I could do. It felt as though my entire mental system had folded in on itself.
When you’re in the eye of that storm, you do think you’ll never get out of it. What kept me going, when I had nothing else, was holding on to the fact that I had pulled through before, so perhaps I could pull through again. The depression did go away. The problem was that it also kept coming back.
And somewhere in that cycle, the fear slowly began turning into something else.
I wanted to know why.
Looking for Someone Who Could Help
I once compared those collapses to the engine in a car breaking down. When an engine fails, you need somebody who understands how the whole system works. To me, psychiatrists were the mechanics of the mind. And as I used to put it, you’ve got to find the right mechanic.
So I went looking. I went from psychiatrist to psychiatrist, and from psychologist to psychologist.
I want to tell this part fairly, because it would be easy not to. I wasn’t rejecting conventional medicine. Quite the opposite. I was essentially looking for the magic pill, something that would make this terrible feeling disappear.
This was the 1990s, and I tried a number of different antidepressants. Some improved my mood to a degree, though not enough to really move the needle. Others caused adverse effects that became almost as memorable to me as the symptoms I was trying to treat.
What also stayed with me were the appointments themselves. Many of my psychiatric consultations felt very brief, perhaps around 15 minutes, and it often seemed to me that the main outcome was another prescription. When I reported adverse effects that were affecting my life quite significantly, I sometimes felt they weren’t explored in the depth I was hoping for.
That is my experience, from one patient’s chair. But I do remember leaving some of those appointments feeling that the questions I most needed answered hadn’t really been asked.
Psychology was different. There was time to talk, and sometimes I walked out feeling better simply because somebody had listened. Over the years I explored cognitive behavioural therapy and, at one stage, Thought Field Therapy. Those approaches helped me in real ways. For me, though, talking on its own wasn’t always enough to produce lasting change.
“I'm Determined to Crack the Code”
In 1997 I was studying a Diploma of Kinesiology in Melbourne, and part of the course was anatomy and physiology. We each had to complete an assignment.
I chose the brain.
I still remember photocopying a picture of a brain and putting it on the front cover.
It’s hard to explain now how different research was then. The internet was only just becoming available in Australia. There was no typing a question into Google and having thousands of papers in front of you a second later. So I did it the old way.
I passed whole days in libraries, finding books and whatever research material I could get my hands on. I photocopied things, took them home and kept reading.
And I became almost obsessed with it.
I was reading about the different structures of the brain, what they did, how everything was interconnected, and emerging research at the time exploring how depression might affect the brain. Every answer seemed to open up several more questions.
My assignments have a habit of becoming enormous when something captures my interest, because I immerse myself in it. This one became so substantial that the lecturer wanted a copy.
But the size of it isn’t really what I remember. What I remember is that somewhere during that assignment, something in me changed.
Until then, depression had been something that happened to me. Now I wanted to understand it.
I was beginning to see that it had many different layers, and that there might be far more going on than I’d ever been told.
That was when I made a decision I’ve never really let go of.
“I’m determined to crack the code.”
I didn’t know what cracking the code actually meant back then. I only knew that I wanted to find out how this worked.
“I’m determined to crack the code.”
The Search Became Part of My Life
That same pattern followed me when I began studying naturopathy. My assignments kept getting bigger, because I wanted to absorb as much as I possibly could. And none of it was purely academic. In the back of my mind I was always asking the same thing: could this help explain what has been happening to me?
As my studies went on, I learned chemistry, nutritional chemistry, organic chemistry and eventually biochemistry. That gave me a framework I simply hadn’t had before. Gradually I began to understand that nutrients, enzymes, biochemical pathways and other physiological processes could be relevant to mental health.
There was no single dramatic moment. It built up over years, one piece at a time.
There were long stretches when much of my spare time went into reading peer-reviewed research, ordering books and making pages of notes. When I came across a nutritional, naturopathic or emerging approach that seemed relevant, I usually wanted to understand it through personal experience as well as on paper.
So over many years I explored different nutritional approaches, supplements and herbal medicines, followed new theories as they emerged, and paid close attention to what changed and what didn’t. I also took part in clinical research, including a ketamine clinical trial here in Australia, because I wanted to understand newer approaches as more than words in a journal.
I have never thought of any of that as chasing the latest thing. Each time, it was the same question I’d carried since that brain assignment, asked again from another angle.
That search was a big part of why naturopathy became more and more interesting to me, and eventually why it became my profession.
Over time, mental health became the centre of my professional work.
Perhaps more than any other area of my work, my heart and soul rest in mental health.
There Wasn't One Breakthrough
When I was younger, I think I imagined that cracking the code would look like a single discovery. One day I would find the protocol, the combination, the thing that worked, and that would be that.
That isn’t how it went.
Around 2009, during a period when I was trying several things, including psychological approaches, I went onto an antidepressant called fluvoxamine.
And it helped.
From my recollection, it helped more at that particular time than anything else I was doing.
That’s important to my story, because the truth isn’t that medication failed me and natural medicine saved me. It didn’t happen that neatly.
Fluvoxamine reinforced something I had already begun to suspect, that biology and brain chemistry were part of my picture. It doesn’t mean that medication would help someone else in the same way. What it showed me was that different approaches were contributing different things at different times.
Psychology had given me something. The right medication, at the right time, had given me something. Nutritional and naturopathic approaches gave me other things. And later, functional and integrative frameworks gave me more ways of thinking about all of it.
Much later, further mental-health training helped organise ideas that had been sitting in my head as scattered pieces.
I trained in the Walsh approach through the Walsh Research Institute, where Dr William Walsh was one of my lecturers. I was drawn to its attempt to look for biochemical patterns across large numbers of people with mental-health conditions.
I also completed the Psychiatry Redefined Functional & Integrative Psychiatry Fellowship, associated with psychiatrist Dr James Greenblatt, which brought nutritional, metabolic and integrative ideas into a psychiatric framework. Much of the broad philosophy was familiar to me as a naturopath, but some of the clinical material added pieces I felt had long been missing.
I have also studied genetics and related biochemical pathways through MTHFR Support Australia.
I also learned about the range of investigations that can sometimes be considered when looking at a person’s broader health, things I didn’t know existed when I was 21.
Sometimes the right investigation can be like turning on a torch in a dark room. Suddenly you can see things that weren’t obvious before.
Other times it shows very little.
A test is never the whole answer. It is one source of information, sitting alongside a person’s symptoms, history, medical assessment, psychological picture and everything else going on in their life.
I still don’t describe myself as “cured”. Depression has been recurrent in my life.
Over time, as I learned more and found approaches that suited me, I became much better at understanding and managing my own depression. But it was a long process. It took years, and it came through many discoveries and experiences rather than one miracle breakthrough.
What If We're Asking the Wrong Question?
For a long time, the question in my head was simple.
What treats depression?
Or, more honestly, in those early years:
Which pill is going to make this go away?
It took me years to see that the question itself might be part of the problem.
Depression can be multifactorial. Two people can walk out of a doctor’s office with the same diagnosis and have quite different factors contributing to their depression. Medical history, medications, psychological factors, stress, sleep, nutrition, lifestyle, relevant pathology, biochemical factors, genetics and individual life circumstances can all play a part, in different combinations for different people.
So the question I find more useful now is this:
What is contributing to depression in this particular person?
That doesn’t mean every person with depression has a hidden biochemical abnormality waiting to be found. It doesn’t mean functional testing explains every case. And it certainly doesn’t mean psychiatric or psychological care is unimportant.
I’ve benefited from both.
That is why I don’t see psychiatry, psychology and naturopathy as opposing camps. Depression can have several layers, and different people may need very different combinations of support.
My role at BalanSoul is to look carefully at parts of the picture that may not yet have been explored, while working alongside appropriate medical and psychological care.
When I first decided to crack the code, I thought it meant finding the treatment that worked.
Over many years it came to mean something else.
It came to mean learning how to investigate the individual person, and asking better questions about them.
That is the heart of the personalised, integrative approach I use with depression today.
I’m not looking for one universal explanation, because I spent too long hoping for one myself.
“What is contributing to depression in this particular person?”
What I Want Someone Struggling with Depression to Know Today
Sometimes a person sits opposite me and says something like this:
I’ve tried several things. Some helped a little. Some made me worse. I don’t think anybody is really listening, and I’m starting to wonder whether anyone understands what’s going on.
That affects me, because I recognise parts of it.
I’ve sat in consulting rooms wanting answers. I’ve tried different medications and lived with their adverse effects. I’ve had treatments help only partly. I’ve relapsed after believing the depression had finally gone.
And I’ve spent years trying to understand why.
I won’t tell you I know exactly how you feel.
I don’t.
Nobody knows precisely what another person’s depression is like from the inside. What my own history has given me is a reason to take your experience seriously, and a reluctance to assume that your depression is the same as mine, or the same as anyone else’s with the same diagnosis.
When I think back to myself at 21, what I wish I had known wasn’t the name of one treatment or one test.
It was that not having an explanation yet didn’t mean there was nothing more to understand.
I spent years hoping I would eventually find the answer to depression.
What I found instead was that the better answers often came from asking better questions.
That is why I never stopped looking.
And it is why, when someone comes to me with depression today, I don’t begin by assuming I already know their story.
“What my own history has given me is a reason to take your experience seriously.”
If You'd Like to Work With Me
BalanSoul is based in Shepparton, Victoria, and I also consult by telehealth across Australia.
I can’t promise you a single answer. What I can do is take your story seriously, listen carefully, and look at what may be contributing to your depression.
My approach is personalised and integrative, and it works alongside appropriate medical, psychiatric and psychological care rather than replacing it.
If you have felt embarrassed or ashamed about needing help with your mental health, please know you will be met with understanding here.
George Parker, BHSc(Nat)
Important Safety Information
If you are currently taking medication for depression, please don’t stop or change it without first speaking with your prescribing doctor. If you are in crisis or feeling unsafe, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or call 000 in an emergency.
Contact us for any advice
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0409 502 632
