I have had issues with depression for most of my life. I was having them when I still bought into the religion and catholicism thing. If anything, the alienation I felt from the depression that religion did not help or bring comfort for may have contributed to my agnosticism, but atheism/agnosticism did not cause my depression. That has more to do with neurotransmitter imbalances than it does with religion or no religion.

I'd rather never see them again than believe that they were condemned to hell?

No, in many ways my atheism helps me deal with my depression. When I was a believer, the constant feeling that this was happening to me because I wasn't faithful enough or was somehow inherently deserving of suffering was kind of soul crushing. Once I realized that what it was crushing was just my sense of self worth and that there was no soul to worry about, I began to accept it as simply a physiological condition which required specific mechanisms and medications to control.

For me, death was always a part of life, I studied science early on, and understood the necessity of death in any rapidly propagating species. I feel grief over my loss, not over someone else's death.

My atheism and depression run concurrently. I don't think one caused the other, but I think it would be naive to assume that there isn't some kind of correlation.

nope. not a bit. i am clinically depressed and part of it it related to ptsd i acquired by waking up during eye surgery when i was three. my atheism is just a description of the fact that at the age of 15 i realized that there are no gods, and have had no reason since then to reverse that realization. by the way, depression is not the same thing as sadness, or grief. it is an illness. it has to do with neurotransmitters in the brain and those are not affected by atheism.

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