I suffered from several bouts of depression from the age of 7 to the age of 30. I read Your Sacred Self by Wayne Dyer and he recommended meditation. I bought the book Meditation for Dummies by Stephan Bodian and learned mantra meditation close to the age of 30. I would spend 45 minutes, 5 days a week for 18 months doing mantra meditation (mantra meditation is where you focus on repeating a mantra in your mind and anytime your mind wanders you bring back your focus to the mantra while meditating) i would write out my negative thoughts and come up with a positive mantra that contradicted my negative thoughts and change my mantra every week. After doing this for a few weeks my thoughts became calmer and after 18 months my thoughts were a lot more positive. I am now 52 and from the age of 30 to 52 I have rarely suffered from depression and when I do it is not as severe as it was when I was younger. Can't recommend mantra meditation enough. One thing I learned is that mantra meditation needs to be done for a minimum of 20 minutes and almost every day to get the most benefits from it. It is okay to start at meditating 5 minutes a day and over a few days increase it to 20 minutes a day. Some people like meditation so much they meditate more than 20 minutes a day.