> trying to be the slightest bit aware of what the sewage of thoughts in your head consists of.
That's a pretty useful thing for a "normal" person as a preventative measure to reduce the probability of depression (although there's tons of biological causes including things about gut biome, overstressed immune system, etc., and it's not clear if this 'awareness' would help in those cases).
But to a person in the middle of depression, that's like asking them to fire up a debugger and inspect the issue, when their very problem is that their OS barely boots up and refuses to run any program whatsoever.
The first paragraph about the 'preventative' aspect might be what you had in mind, with the second para's content implicit in it, but I feel it's important to make it explicit given how widely misunderstood an illness depression is.
