Oh the “treatment-resistant” thing is absolutely garbage. Especially I imagine if you’re in the UK and you’ve been shoehorned into CBT as your only option. But even if it feels impossible to achieve, I bet there is some set of realistic life conditions (individually and on a societal level) that you would absolutely want to live for if you felt you could plausibly see them achieved?

I don’t know if you’ll be able to relate, but the conclusion I came to based on my experience and research for my own situation is that the perceived enormity of the gap between how things are in the moment and where we’d like them to be is the thing that’s so crushingly painful to experience. The real things we need to bridge this are probably ways to be empowered both to manage trauma and to feel that it IS okay to have dreams and it ISN’T pointless to work towards them. But each person probably benefits from different approaches to achieving both of these things, and the best approach for a person’s needs can even change over time. (If we all had strong social networks, it wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but having a hierarchical social order weakens that possibility for most people.)

Often, the message sent by typical approaches to treatment is to tell people: “Your entire view of life is wrong because you’re depressed, so we must reprogram your brain until you concede we’re right AND can function just barely well enough to contribute to GDP.” The dehumanizing nature of many aspects of the systems we live under are definitely promoting depression. Especially for those of us who can’t help noticing how those systems work.

I hope you can find a therapist or other party willing to listen, be real with you, and ask you the right follow-up questions based on your specific needs.