Depression & Low Mood Therapy Online

When the Colour Has Gone Out of Things

Depression rarely announces itself in the dramatic way it is sometimes described. For many people it arrives slowly, as a gradual flattening. Things you used to enjoy stop reaching you. Mornings become harder. The effort of ordinary life, replying to a message, cooking a meal, getting out of the shower, starts to feel disproportionate. You might not be in tears. You might not be unable to function. But something essential has gone quiet, and the quiet has lasted longer than it should.

It can also show up as irritability that seems to come from nowhere, a constant tiredness that rest does not fix, or a sense of being behind a pane of glass, watching your life rather than being inside it. Depression does not always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like absence.

How Therapy Can Help

I work with depression using an integrative approach. On one hand, there are practical tools from CBT for working with the thought patterns that depression reinforces: the automatic conclusions about yourself, the future and other people that can feel like facts when they are actually symptoms. On the other hand, depression is often carrying something, a grief that was never fully felt, anger that had no safe outlet, a self-image built in an environment that did not give you what you needed. Psychodynamic and relational work can help that layer come into view.

The pace matters. When you are depressed, the capacity for insight and action is reduced. Good depression work does not push. It meets you where you actually are, gives you what help is useful in the session, and slowly builds the conditions in which the heavier layer becomes workable.

Who This Work Is For

• Chronic low mood that has become the baseline of your life
• A recent depressive episode that has not lifted
• Recurrent depression that keeps returning in different forms
• High-functioning depression, where outwardly everything looks fine but inside things feel hollow
• Depression alongside other experiences, including trauma, grief, burnout or a significant life change
• People who have tried medication alone and want to understand what is going on underneath

What to Expect from Sessions

We start gently. Early sessions are about understanding your particular experience of depression, not treating depression in the abstract. From there, we work on whatever feels most useful: stabilising the day-to-day, making space for what has been buried, or both. I will not push you to feel better faster than you can. I will also not let us settle for a version of you that is merely functioning if there is more that wants to come back online.

Individual counselling sessions are 50 minutes and cost £70. Sessions take place online across the UK. If you are in crisis, please contact the Samaritans on 116 123 or call 999.

Further Reading

• Counselling for Men, for the flatness, irritability and quiet despair that often go unnamed.
• Therapy for Childhood Emotional Neglect, for the disconnection underneath low mood.
• Why Can't I Cry Even Though I Feel Sad? Understanding Emotional Numbness
• Why Do I Overreact to Small Things? The Hidden Signs of Unresolved Trauma
• Why Am I So Hard on Myself?
• What to Expect From Your First Counselling Session