system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: The human body is able to heal itself when it has a cold or a broken bone. Does that also work with mental illness like a depression?
gpt
The simple answer is, we don't know.

Something like depression (or any state of consciousness) can't really be explained. It's akin to asking what consciousness is in the first place and we don't know. We do know that consciousness has something to do with the chemicals called neurotransmitters that help pass signals around between brain cells.

You can think of human consciousness as "what it's 'like' to be a living brain." And if that's caused by the cells and neurotransmitters in our brain doing what they do when we call ourselves "alive," then we can say that depression is a certain state or pattern of these cells and chemicals. Specifically, we can say that depression is what it's "like" when these cells and chemicals fall into a certain pattern.

We don't understand these patterns in normally functioning brains, much less brains that are experiencing mental health issues. There is a lot of research that points to certain neurotransmitters and there being to much or too little of them. Antidepressants generally work to change the levels of neurotransmitters and have some success in treating depression, but the overall results aren't that great.

There is also the complication that research says chemicals and brain cells aren't all there is to it. There are personality, choice, circumstance, etc., variables that play roles we don't understand.

All that to say, we don't know if depression can heal itself because we don't know what it is. We don't know how much of it is physical and organic pathology, and how much of it is subjective "nature" influences.