If you're honestly interested in mental health and you're suffering, you owe it to yourself to get settled first:
1. Eliminate processed food, extra sugar, excess nicotine/ caffiene, alcohol. Eat more real food: fruit and cream for your sweet tooth, your favorite veggies, cutting down on meat but enjoying your food. You can indulge on occasion, but you know that healthy diets can have a great effect on brain chemistry.
2. Exercise regularly and rigorously. Start by walking, dancing, a little tennis. Mix it up. Yoga, Zumba, whatever. Social activities are even better, but sometimes just out on your own, and being in nature is a proven mood lifter for many. Some regular exercise is better than none, but if you can bring yourself to greater than a half hour 4 or more times per week, the effects really start to make a difference.
3. Regular and healthy sleep. Eliminate electronics in the bedroom, keep a regular routine, make your bedroom a healthy sanctuary reserved for sleep. Reading, TV and internet in the other room.
4. Gardening, tending plants, being out there working with your hands. If that doesn't work with your housing situation, a neighborhood garden or even terrariums or a fish tank can provide one more thing to center your soul for just a minute.
5. Other handwork done deliberately and with a meditative spirit also has positive effects. Making music, listening to positive music (not necessarily high tempo or motivating, but any music that just makes you feel good is fine).
6. Socializing with people and keeping the conversation on topics of interest, ask about THEM, let them talk about themselves, care about them and listen like a friend. Share positive events. Talk about things you're doing to improve your mood. Do things that get you out of your normal zone, geographically and mentally. Go somewhere, see something, experience different things (movies, museums, concerts, parks, etc.)
6. a. Volunteering in a forum that allows you to directly help others. Being part of making the world a better place is often very affirming and brings deep, personal satisfaction. The collateral benefit is you're being a ray of light for someone so who cares how you feel anyway. The world and even your life is bigger than you. Get over it.
7. Meditation itself can be a powerful mental exercise for several reasons. First, it calms your mind during the act. Second, it increases your ability to bring your mind to a calm state when you get stressed, anxious, stressed.
7. b. Spiritual enrichment, whether in community or personal study or prayer, can connect you to ideas bigger than you and provide a bedrock of comfort that other things sometimes can't.
8. Professional therapy: The above may be enough collectively to turn things around. All of them take sustained practice and someone in a sever depressive state may be unable to motivate themselves enough to start or sustain any of them at all. But with the help of a professional depression therapist, your odds are much better as they learn the dynamics of your individual complexes contributing to your condition.
9. If you've done all the above, medication or other medical processes/ procedures (like electro/magnetic brain stimulation) may very well be your best course of action. There are some very promising treatments like low dose MDMA or LSD that my provide a much better prognosis and fewer side effects than the current norms of SSRIs.
Of course if that sounds like too much, do a few of them. You never know which one will help you past a tipping point. And of course, if you're already married to your identity as a depressed person, than you'll find an excuse to sabotage or avoid any real effort anyway. I hope you can last long enough to get over that particular hump.
