There are a lot of options! Some of them are safe and work all right for most people and then you can get progressively more drastic. Some people get antidepressant effects from exercise or sunshine or doing weird stuff with their sleep schedule or hormone balance or eating chocolate or other stuff, and that's safe if trying it works for your lifestyle at all.

Melody gets the gist for most of this, but reading in Kayshu is still very slow and tiring compared to watching things, and she gives up after a few minutes and just scribbles down some questions to ask the visiting therapist once they arrive. 

At 12:15, Leareth is still asleep. 

Melody is...not sure whether to be worried? It's been, like, nearly twelve hours now since she gave him the sleeping drug, and he had already slept for a couple of hours before that, AND he took a nap during the day. 

She cautiously tiptoes upstairs and pokes her head into his room to check on him. 

Still apparently asleep, looking very comfortable and peaceful. He's at least changed position since the last time she checked. 

Melody makes a note to herself that drug #4 works possibly too well. And that if they're going to try it again, she should make sure he gets it at like 8 pm. And maybe half the dose. It's probably true that Leareth is chronically somewhat sleep-deprived, and it's been an especially intense few days, so maybe he genuinely needs fourteen hours of sleep, but it still seems kind of excessive. 

She's ready at 12:30 to let the visiting therapist in. 

Here is Dree escorting the visiting therapist! "Hi!" says the therapist. "My name is Kelta, you must be Melody."

:Hi! Yes, that's me. I'm very pleased to meet you - thank you for coming out here! Come on in - do you want tea, we have a lot of kinds -?: 

"Oh, no thanks, too hot for tea. Your social worker told me you wanted to talk about local psychological therapeutic practice and how you could do magic that complements it?"

Melody is understanding about two-thirds of the words Kelta is saying, and feels like she's getting close to the point where she won't have to mindread at all, but her word-finding is still very slow for keeping up in a conversation out loud. Of course, the only solution to that is going to be practice. 

"Yes please," she says, haltingly and with a very odd accent. :- Sorry, I'm trying to practice your language, but I'm not all the way there yet. Er, I've been watching a - movie? A show? I'm not clear on the difference - that Dree recommended for me, about therapy practices here, and I'm learning quite a lot from that but unsurprisingly it's confusing a lot of the time! I'm mostly curious what the existing areas of specialty are, because Dree made it sound like there are different areas people choose to focus on - also I'm very curious about all the things you have drugs to treat, we barely have that at all in either of the worlds I'm from...: 

"What's the show - usually television isn't exactly right, screenwriters don't like doing research and if they do they sometimes ignore it so they can make a better story -"

:I don't remember what it's called - here, I can just show you: Melody leads her to the kitchen table, finds the streaming service again, and points at the laptop screen. 

"Oh, that one. I didn't like it at all, but as far as I know it's not unusually bad on the accuracy front, just kind of cherrypicked and skipping the boring parts. Anyway, I'm not a drug specialist, is there reason to expect your magic would interact much with pharmaceuticals? I'm sure your social worker could find you a pharmacist."

:I don't actually know how it would or wouldn't interact! In my admittedly very limited past experience - there's exactly one herb we recently discovered that seems to help with depression - it didn't have a big effect on what I could or couldn't do in addition, it just helped with things that had been very hard for me to work on directly. ...Mindhealing doesn't do that well for directly affecting mood? I can do a lot with distorted thoughts and inappropriate guilt and stuff, and I can help people have healthier responses to negative moods and emotions, but if someone is just sad all the time for no real reason I can't really address that: 

"Huh. So better at - traumagenic conditions? Maybe abuse victims particularly? Or learned helplessness downstream of normal depression."

:That sounds right. I - a lot of what I've done with depression in the past involved basically helping them form habits around doing the things that tended to help with mood for them, like exercise or remembering to eat or going outside, because it turns out that inconveniently being depressed makes people much worse at consistently doing something until it's a habit and doesn't feel as hard:

Melody frowns. Considers. :Oh, and Mindhealing, especially with my particular Sight-metaphor, is pretty good at doing fine-grained interventions on things like intrusive thoughts? I don't know if people in your world ever get the problem where they're incredibly anxious that, I don't know, a bad thing will happen to their toddler, and so they're checking on them fifty times an hour and they're miserable and not able to get things done. Or we had one of the Healers who had that, but it was about whether she'd given the wrong drug or dose to a patient by accident, and she wouldn't be able to stop fretting about it even though she knew on a rational level that she hadn't made a mistake: 

"Sight-metaphor?"

:Oh, right, I haven't explained that, have I. So, hmm - Velgarth Gifts generally come with a receptive or sensory component, and an active component. For the telepathy, Mindspeech is the projective part and Thoughtsensing is the sensory one - for me it feels more like hearing than like seeing, but it's not exactly like either, also it varies between people. Same for mage-gift, or Healing, a Healer can directly see what's going on in a patient's body and learn to interpret what it means. Mindhealing is interesting because our sensory component is a sort of metaphorical representation of someone's mind-structure, and we all seem to end up with different primary metaphors. Mine is tapestries, and it means I'm relatively good at doing fiddly precise work with individual 'threads', which usually represent specific habitual thought-paths or thought-grooves, or associations to memories, although the metaphor is not perfect and I'm pretty sure not all 'threads' are the same kind of thing. We don't actually have much good scholarship around Mindhealing, not like Healing, because the Gift is so rare and there just aren't enough of us to form an academy. I wanted to change that but I kind of got interrupted by the whole war in Arda and I ended up there treating all the rescued prisoners of the evil god: 

"- you know, you might be more valuable in research than in clinical practice."

:Huh! I...confess I don't know anything about doing research. Especially not how it's done in your world, but it's hard in Velgarth - Healers can try things on mice before they try them on humans, I can't do that: 

"Not necessarily experimental research? Observational research, like, are the people who one thing works on systematically different in some way from the people who that thing doesn't work for."

:Ah. I...guess I can see that I might have an easier time observing what's going on with people than someone without magic! I'd never thought about it before. Honestly it seems really hard to do therapy when you can't see what's going on in someone's head!: 

"It's hard! You have to take a lot of data and do a lot of big studies and ask people for details on all their experiences and it's a slog."

:Neat! Do you do a lot of that in your world - really big studies where you collect information about a lot of people like that, I mean? I bet Leareth is going to be so curious about it. I wouldn't be surprised if he's tried to do similar things in Velgarth, actually, but I think it's a lot harder since we don't have computers: 

"I don't think computers are strictly necessary but they sure help. We do a lot of studies, yeah, not just psychology but in other things too."

:That's really neat. Hmm, I'm trying to think what sorts of things I'm good at seeing. The difficulty for a lot of things is that Sight only shows structure, not content of thoughts, and for anything subtle I have to spend a long time looking and also just get to know someone and what they're experiencing from the inside before I can interpret it well. ...It's very obvious at a glance if someone is having the sort of breakdown where they start hearing voices and believing absurd things. And I can often make a relatively quick guess that someone is chronically very depressed or very anxious: 

"Have you seen enough examples to know if there are different kinds you can distinguish?"