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This is a good thing to know, but should also be noted that the same thing can happen with simply naturally recovering from a depressive episode.

The phenomenon should not be considered a reason to not medicate (which I don’t think you are implying, but some may take that as the conclusion). Instead it’s definitely something important to explicitly make people aware of.

Depression or the feeling so much mental agony that the idea of escaping with death becomes comforting, is a signal that something is wrong.

Realizing this has been important with weathering my own occasional dealings with severe[0]depression, once I realize “something is wrong”, I can start the annoyingly slow process of trial and error making changes to correct things. This turns depression from “how reality is” into “this is just feedback on my body’s state”. It turns things getting worse into either a “this is either a transient state or the wrong solution”.

[0] Which I define as the point where any passive ideation (fantasies of dying) starts to enter the gradient of becoming involuntary. As opposed to regular negative thoughts which can (and should) be brushed away as easily as a fly landing on me. Curiously, once I noticed it also affected my ability to experience color. While I could technically see colors, it was like have a mental partial greyscale filter because there was no beauty in it, color was just a meaningless detail.

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jdietrich|3 months ago

A sudden improvement in mood is one of the key warning signs for suicide. Often it's genuinely just a sudden improvement, but sometimes it is a byproduct of the relief people experience when they commit to ending their life. If you know someone who is severely depressed, you should watch them very carefully if they suddenly seem carefree.

>once I noticed it also affected my ability to experience color

A small amount of evidence does support the notion that depressed people literally see the world as being less vibrant.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34689697/

https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1503/jpn.200091