The Sun Remains
For many years, someone close to me struggled with intermittent depression. The episodes arrived without clear external cause, as if rising from within rather than in response to events. A cold, dark tide rising independently of circumstance, leaving her adrift in a bleak and relentless turmoil. During these periods, time and memory warped. She felt as though the darkness had always been there and would never lift. The very possibility of life beyond it seemed, from inside it, inconceivable.
The depression presented as an all-encompassing heaviness that extinguished her vitality and coloured her entire perception. She would express a wish to disappear, to cease to exist — not, I came to understand, from active suicidal intent, but from an exhausted longing to be freed from the weight of suffering. And yet, remarkably, even in her darkest moments, she kept her commitments. Her radiant personality would vanish under the spell of the depression, but her conscientiousness and discipline remained: a quiet thread of resilience, holding even when everything else seemed to dissolve.
Over time I began noticing that the episodes were sometimes preceded by stressful or anxiety-inducing events, suggesting that a psychological dimension coexisted with what otherwise appeared somatic. Scrambling to try and help alleviate her pain, I tried multiple approaches in as gentle and supportive a fashion as I could muster.
The first was an image: the sun and clouds. The sun, I said, is always shining — even when hidden behind heavy clouds. When life feels grey and hopeless, it is not that the light has gone, it is only obscured. The task is not to dispel the clouds by pushing against them, but to stay put and trust in their eventual clearing. Trivial as this may be, it is, like many clichés, also true: this too shall pass. Frankl emphasised the importance of temporal perspective — the capacity to view suffering within the horizon of time, to remember that present pain is not infinite. Each episode, however crushing it felt, had always lifted. I emphasised this cyclical rhythm as a kind of lifeline: she was not trapped in a permanent abyss, but passing through a storm. When the clouds cleared, I would gently draw her attention to the return of light, so she would notice it and perhaps meet future episodes with firmer trust in her ability to weather them.
Another thing I tried arose from noticing the obliqueness of experience on either side of depression’s threshold. From the side of lightness and ease, one can hardly recall the crushing heaviness of melancholia. And from within the event horizon of the latter, nothing outside it is accessible. Happiness is notoriously difficult to retain in memory. In depressive states, the capacity to recall lightness vanishes — the mind simply cannot reach it.
This prompted me to try and bring evidence of the possibility for lightness and ease into her moments of darkness, as mementos for her to hold on to. So during moments of happiness, I would open the voice memos on my phone and record her saying “I’m so happy” when she genuinely felt it. Short, honest time capsules of joy in her own voice.
Later, when depression returned and she felt convinced — as the mind insists — that she had never been happy and never would be, I would open a memo and play it to her.
She would listen.
And sometimes she would say quietly: I don't recognise this person.
Her own voice. Her own words. Recorded days or weeks earlier. Unrecognisable to her now.
And yet, this encounter with herself from the other side would leave a mark and crack the shell of gloom. That confrontation between memory and perception — the living evidence that the darkness was neither all-encompassing nor eternal — served as something the depressed mind struggles to manufacture on its own: proof. Not intellectual discussion nor emotional reassurance, but proof, in her own voice, that another state was possible. That it had existed and that it could exist again.
Getting to know the full gamut of one’s internal states, and even more so, learning to navigate them well, is a strenuous and extensive process. It is neither linear nor ever truly complete. Despite making real progress in coping with her intermittent spells of sadness, over time it became increasingly clear that there might also be a physiological component. Depression can have biological dimensions that persist alongside, or despite, meaningful psychological progress. This, too, appeared to be part of the picture in her case. Following a consultation with a medical specialist, medication was prescribed at a low dose.
What followed, as both the physiological and psychological dimensions were addressed together, was a transformation I have found genuinely moving to witness. For years now, she has remained largely free of depressive episodes. When occasional heaviness arises, she meets it differently — with awareness, with perspective, with the capacity to step slightly outside its pull, rather than be consumed by it. What Frankl would call self-distancing: the movement beyond one's immediate condition toward meaning and possibility.
Looking back, what stands out is not any single approach, but the synergy of care that made the difference: the medical treatment that addressed the somatic root, the meaning-centred dialogue that addressed the existential one, and the relationship of trust that held both together long enough for either to work.
Frankl's psychiatric credo — the spirit is always intact — found its confirmation here. Even in her darkest episodes, something inside held. Her discipline, her commitments, her capacity to endure. The noetic dimension, burdened but unbroken, waiting for conditions in which it could breathe again.
She has found purpose through creative work, love, and connection. The person who once could not recognise her own joyful voice has become, steadily, someone who inhabits that voice most of the time.