Healing Depression with Belonging, Mattering, Creating, and Soaring: Dr. Ardeshir Mehran on Claiming and Reclaiming Your Own Individual Emotional Rights

In this episode, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. Ardeshir Mehran, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, transformation leader, and leadership coach who has the mission of bringing a cure to depression and whose book “You are not depressed. You are un-finished” works as a guide, a resource, and an inspiration to ease the emotional and physical pain and suffering of people worldwide.

It comes down to respecting, honoring, and fulfilling your seven emotional needs, which are in fact rights and not privileges and that many of us either neglect, do not know about, or are not familiar with. It ranges from the need to belong and to matter up to the need to soar and go beyond self-actualization. This bill of emotional rights also includes the need to create.

We also talk about how men and women often try to compensate for this lack and how even executives and senior managers experience not only stress but depression and are simply not aware of it. Their emotional lack is often manifested in symptoms of the body ranging from headaches, neck, and back strain to gastrointestinal issues to cardiovascular ailments and conditions. While we tend to run to medication for relief, they do not treat the root causes and cannot possibly heal us. Since depression is a consequence and not the cause, medication can merely make us functional at best.

Depression may be classified as a mood disorder, but it is rather a signal, a symptom, and a warning sign with much deeper root causes in effect and at work. It often points towards missing or neglected emotional needs and experiences in our lives and is a reminder that "mental health" affects the whole and entire body and not just the head. In fact, the opposite of depression is not happiness but personal fulfillment, which can be attained by focusing on your body and mind with their unexpressed and unfulfilled emotional needs and rights.