A better fix for depression might be found in physical labor, hands-on creative endeavors. It's why exercise works. The psychological mechanism is what Randolph-Macon College Ph.D Kelly Lambert calls "effort driven rewards." You do stuff and feel better. As we have become more sedentary, and have become consumers of information, rather than producers of meaningful, useful and beautiful things, we have thrown our natural human balance out the window... and pay the price in how we feel about ourselves and each other. A steady diet of creative, expressive, artistic behavior is a requirement for human psychological health and well-being.
Why Anti-depressants Don't Work by Mark Hyman, M.D. doesn't go into why the hands and creative work does work, but it does illustrate the huge waste of our current methodology. I should point out that all those happy pills are going into our waste stream, having an unspecified effect on our freshwater ecology, something our environmental scientists are beginning to have grave concerns about.
I would scarcely make light of the serious implications of depression. Its effects can be devastating. I can offer this simple advice based on my own experience. Make stuff, feel better.
Interestingly, early psychologists had observed some interesting things on this particular subject which might offer insight. As Henry Maudsley, MD had noted in his 1883 book, Body and Mind, the following:
"Fix the countenance in the patten of a particular emotion--in a look of anger, of wonder, or of scorn--and the emotion whose appearance is thus imitated will not fail to be aroused. And if we try, while the features are fixed in the expression of one passion, to call up in the mind a quite different one, we shall find it impossible to do so.... We perceive, then that the muscles are not alone the machinery by which the mind acts upon the world, but that their actions are essential elements in our mental operations."Can it be that the act of doing, of making, of creating, may have impact on the emotions? Get busy in the wood shop, or the kitchen or the garden and you may discover a few things for yourself.