Paul: Stimulants
Stimulants are typically only prescribed for depression as a last-ditch effort, and that's not even why I take stimulants (sigh), but for me their greatest boon is unambiguously the way they part the veil of my depression.
Speed, infamously, makes you feel more confident. When I think about what "confidence" means, another way to put this is that—for me, anyway—it makes good things feel more possible.
My depression manifests, cognitively, as a stymying of possibility. The only thing that's clear to me in a depressed state is that I am useless, that everything I might try to become unuseless is itself useless, and that the only saving grace of my uselessness is that the world is so vast and my own self so impotently specklike that it finally does not even matter that I am useless, except to me and the people unfortunate enough to rely on me for anything.
I go down cognitive garden paths of the source of my uselessness, retracing that day's poor decisions, the prior failings that led to those decisions, and so on, all the way back to childhood—and as I cannot convince myself that I ever could have acted differently in any of the crucial junctures, the only conclusion is that I am useless by nature, that my failures were always the only possible outcome, and that it is only reasonable to expect more of the same.
Would you believe that having broken those trails so thoroughly, I can now traverse them with impressive alacrity? What I mean is, on a bad day, I can get real sad, real fast.
On me, sadness looks like anger. Which, god, is the most embarrassing thing. There is maybe nothing more unsympathetic and contemptible than an impotently angry man.
This, more than anything else, is why stimulants were life-changing for me, and why I resent them for it. To have the gates of possibility unlocked by a molecule my body does not make on its own is a precarious and unblessed way to live a life. But—I must admit that so far, it beats the alternative.