StG, I know where you’ve been, and just so you know, you’ve done a fantastic job of handling it so far. By the time I got my last bout of depression under control, my inability to take care of financial matters pretty much trashed my credit record.
To answer your questions: as a well read layperson, it sounds to me like you have clinical depression - unipolar depression. From experience, I can tell you that depression sometimes does just “go away”. I had a bout in college that lasted a couple of months and then one day just disappeared.
However, after a year, I’d say that it’s relatively unlikely for it to just get better on its own. And since there’s no rhyme or reason for that happening anyways, don’t wait for it.
If you have a good doctor, go see him/her. My doctor was the first person I went to. She talked to me for the better part of an hour and then prescribed a low dosage of Prozac and recommended a counselor. The combination of therapies did the trick, and I began recovering within a month. The Prozac stablized my mood so that I could catch up with everything in my head. The counseling gave me a chance to take it out of my head and examine it a lot more objectively. In the space of a few months, I figured out more stuff than I had in the previous five years.
If you don’t have a doctor or can’t afford one, go to a counselor anyways. The Cognitive Therapy can go a long way towards helping just on its own.
Look at St. John’s Wort. It’s not a panacea, and you do have to do some research to find a good brand and dosage, but it can help as well.
Finally, here’s a link to a book that helped me a great deal. It’s posted in its entirety, so you can read the whole thing:
Peter McWilliams’ How to Heal Depression
You’ve held it together on your own StG and done a great job, but just because you haven’t beaten it on your own, don’t give up hope.