Depression

Depression is treated in The Secret not simply as a clinical condition but as one of the book’s defining examples of a bad feeling: an emotional state that signals disempowering thought and can, within the book’s system, be altered by deliberately changing attention, expectation, and belief. Its decisive significance lies in the way it converts suffering into both warning and possibility. Depression appears among the painful conditions that readers report overcoming through The Secret, while the book’s teachers place it within a larger contrast between negative emotional momentum and the joy, health, and abundance supposedly available through constructive thought.

Definition and Emotional Function

Depression is grouped with anger, resentment, and guilt as a feeling that does not empower the person experiencing it. Lisa Nichols distinguishes between good feelings and bad feelings by their immediate emotional effect: one makes a person feel good, while the other makes the person feel bad. Depression therefore functions as an internal signal rather than as a neutral description of circumstance. The text insists that the individual is the only person who can know how they feel at a given moment and recommends repeatedly asking, “How am I feeling?” This practice is meant to increase awareness of emotional changes during the day and make the connection between feeling and thought visible.

Within that framework, depression cannot coexist with good thoughts. The book states that thoughts cause feelings, so a depressed emotional state is interpreted as evidence that the person is entertaining thoughts that produce pain. This places emotional monitoring at the center of the proposed method: recognizing depression is the first step, and identifying the thought behind it creates an opportunity to redirect the mind toward a more empowering subject.

Depression and the Law of Attraction

The book connects depression to its larger account of the law of attraction, which it describes as an impartial and exact law of nature, comparable to gravity. Joe Vitale argues that everything surrounding a person, including the circumstances they complain about, has been attracted by that person. Applied to debt, difficult clients, accidents, or other unwanted conditions, this claim makes persistent thought the central causal explanation for experience.

The same reasoning is extended to collective disasters. The text says that people caught in events involving mass loss must have been on a frequency matching the event, even if they did not consciously imagine that exact occurrence. Persistent fear, separation, and powerlessness are presented as thoughts capable of attracting experiences framed as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Depression consequently belongs to a worldview that offers an intense sense of personal control, but does so by assigning heavy responsibility to the sufferer’s own mental frequency and by giving little attention to social, medical, or accidental causes.

The reader is placed before a stark choice between seeing life as governed by luck and external circumstances or believing that life experience is in their own hands. Whatever the person chooses to think, the book says, will become their life experience. Depression is thus made part of a moral and practical decision: continue identifying with disempowering thought, or begin cultivating thoughts associated with control, hope, and positive expectation.

Healing, Attention, and the Body

The Secret includes depression among the conditions people reportedly healed from as the film spread around the world. These accounts are presented alongside stories of recovery from chronic pain and disease, walking after an accident, and surviving a deathbed condition. The stories function as testimonial evidence within the book’s argument, showing readers that mental and emotional change can allegedly produce dramatic transformations in health.

The health chapters explain this process through attention and belief. The placebo effect is described as an instance in which a patient who truly believes a tablet is a cure receives the expected result, sometimes with an effect equal to or greater than that of the medication designed for the condition. The human mind is therefore presented as a major factor in healing. At the same time, John Demartini cautions that medicine should not be rejected in an acute situation that could cause death; medication may relieve pain while a person explores the mind and focuses on health. The book consequently presents mental healing as capable of working harmoniously with medicine, even while it gives thought a primary explanatory role.

Demartini also states that physiology creates disease as feedback about an imbalanced perspective or a failure to be loving and grateful. In this account, bodily signs and symptoms are not merely terrible intrusions but messages about inner imbalance. Love and gratitude are then given an expansive healing power, said to dissolve negativity in whatever form it has taken. Depression is not discussed only as an isolated mood; it is folded into a total theory in which emotional negativity, bodily illness, and scarcity arise from the same failure to sustain harmonious thought.

Positive Thought, Laughter, and Testimony

The book’s strongest emotional counterweight to depression is not merely rational optimism but a practiced movement toward gratitude, faith, laughter, and joy. Cathy Goodman’s personal story is offered as a model. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she repeatedly expressed gratitude for her healing and imagined herself as though cancer had never been in her body. She and those around her also watched very funny movies and laughed continuously, because they believed stress would be damaging during the healing process.

Goodman’s use of laughter is explicitly linked to Norman Cousins, who had been diagnosed with an “incurable” disease and told that he had only a few months to live. Cousins decided to heal himself and spent three months watching funny movies and laughing. His story becomes part of the book’s chain of testimony: depression and other negative states are opposed not by passive waiting but by deliberately generating emotional experiences that feel joyful and life-affirming.

The book summarizes this pattern as three powers working together: gratitude to heal, faith to receive, and laughter and joy to dissolve disease. This is a narrative of emotional reversal. The painful state is not explored through relapse, social isolation, treatment history, or uncertainty; instead, it is placed within a rapid movement from negative feeling to chosen positive feeling, from sickness to belief in healing, and from fear to laughter.

Perfection, Responsibility, and Significance

The Secret’s ideal response to depression is to think thoughts of perfection and to focus on the healthy, harmonious condition one wants rather than on the condition one fears. The book declares that imperfect thoughts cause humanity’s ills, including disease, poverty, and unhappiness, and urges the reader to affirm perfect thinking and perception. Bob Proctor similarly advises a person with disease to see themselves living in a perfectly healthy body and to let the doctor attend to the disease, warning that constant discussion of illness gives it further mental attention.

This principle extends beyond personal symptoms. Jack Canfield argues that noticing what is unwanted can provide contrast and clarify desire, but continually talking about, reading about, and emphasizing what is unwanted creates more of it. Focusing on negative events in the world is said to add to those events and attract further negativity into one’s own life. The recommended alternative is to redirect attention toward joy, abundant food, love, and well-being, even when troubling images have already appeared.

Depression therefore occupies an unstable position in the book. On one hand, it is acknowledged as real suffering and included among the conditions people claim to have overcome. On the other, the doctrine’s internal logic makes negative feeling evidence of incorrect thought and implies that the sufferer can change the condition by changing mental focus. The result is empowering in its promise of agency, but it also risks turning depression into a personal failure of thought and obscuring the complexity of medical, psychological, and structural causes. In the book’s rhetoric, however, depression is chiefly a threshold: the felt proof that one’s thoughts are disempowering and the starting point for a deliberate return to gratitude, expectation, love, and joy.