has anyone ever been cured

I have good days, which is more than I hear from most people struggling with suicidal ideation. I’ll go further; the majority of the last three years have been good days; roughly 90%. One thing that changed it for me was when I started to think quantitatively and less qualitatively.

I’m at the midpoint right now. Not feeling great, but not wanting to end it. Four days ago I was in one of the worst pits I’ve been in feeling wise. Existentially; I have a job, a wife, a car, a house, and we’re going to start to try and have kids. I was kicked out at one point a few years ago; “You’ve got it great, no reason to complain.” The thing about chronic pain is that it doesn’t represent well in objective terms.

You can live. Cured is a pipe dream for most of us. I’m a social scientist, and I’ve heard about so called “cures”, and given the state of insurance if any of them were proven I’d know. There’s eye movement reprogramming, which some people claim works but the evidence is spotty. There’s electric wave therapy (often misrepresented as electroshock), and there’s magnetic field therapy (in very early days.) Not even getting into the BS people start up with meditation, mindfulness, and hallucinogenic drugs. The evidence is nil for those actually being effective.

SSRIs work, but not for everyone and you have to take them for the rest of your life, or at least as long as you want to function.
Same goes for most maintenance meds; they kinda work, for some people, and you have to keep taking them.

11 years of depression and anxiety, an anniversary I never wanted to celebrate. Yet, survival is the best I can do. Thriving by some definitions given my relative economic well being. I take every functional day as a gift, given that I never know when I will start falling apart again. Maybe it will never happen again; I kept a job through this last one, that never happened before. I was able to halt momentum and wait out the episode. Pretty good.