Conquering Mental Illness Depression

Depression is a serious issue that countless people struggle with; therefore the majority of physicians and doctors try to develop drugs, or new counselling techniques to help defeat this terrible foe, but perhaps neither of these solutions are the answer to defeating depression once and for all. Pam Houston suggests another solution in her short story “A Blizzard under Blue Sky”. Houston’s story begins with the narrator being diagnosed with clinical depression, yet she refuses to take medication offered by the doctor to help her overcome depression. Rather than taking medication, she decided to go winter camping, because she says she loves the natural world because “it gives you what's good for you even if you don’t know it at the time” (284). As the story continues, she describes the different activities that occurred on her winter camping trip, but her depression remained as she kept thinking of the things that held her down such as bills and deadlines. When night falls in Houston’s story, the narrator has a rough night in the sub-zero degree weather, but when morning comes she realises she hadn’t thought of all the things that are giving her stress over the entire night, and was happy to see the morning arrive. By the end of the story, the narrator feels happy and actually start enjoying the camping trip, therefore defeating her depression. “A Blizzard under Blue Sky” provides ample evidence that one can bring oneself out of depression without the use of medication or therapy by doing activities he or she loves to take his or her mind off of the things that are causing stress and depression.
One of the most common solutions to depression is to use antidepressant drugs, but are these drugs really doing as much help as they are...

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...etely outweigh the benefits. When it comes to therapy and counselling, it is hit and miss because it doesn’t always work with every type of depression. Since these other two solutions aren’t reliable, Houston’s solution of taking one’s mind off of the things he or she is depressed about by doing things he or she loves, is the most plausible solution to conquering depression. Even though Houston’s solution may be plausible, she admits, near the end of the story, that it may not work for everybody. Perhaps the best way to overcome depression permanently is to directly face your issues and try to eliminate the cause of the problem.

Works Cited
Houston, Pam. “A Blizzard under Blue Sky.” Reading Literature and Writing Argument. Custom Edition for Oklahoma City Community College. Eds. Missy James and Alan P. Merickel. New
Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2008. 283-287. Print.