You are stating what worked for you and that is awesome. I am glad you found freedom from depression without medication and doctors. However I believe it is irresponsible to tell people that what you are doing is the only way to find relief.
Well, you can believe what you like. I don't take the World's thinking on mental health; I take God's. As far as I'm concerned, real, true, enduring relief can only be found in deep, rich fellowship with God. Only those without such fellowship, it seems to me, would think it irresponsible to point to it as the way to freedom from anxiety and depression.
How to you convince someone who believes God hates them to live in the way you describe? They will not even approach a church many times.
It's not my job to convince someone that God doesn't hate them. I can only tell them the truth about God, that He is love and offers an abundant life to them. Persuading and convicting a person that this is true is up to God Himself to do.
I personally was in a group with a woman who's mother was a Pastor, whe was in the choir and had completely given herself to her relationship with God but secretly cut herself when she was alone because she said it made her feel better.
Quite obviously she had not "completely given herself to her relationship with God." Her cutting of herself plainly contradicts your claim about her. Having a pastor-mother (which is entirely unbiblical, by the way) and singing in the church choir hardly constitutes a healthy, deep relationship with God - as her self-mutilation demonstrates. You seem to have a very superficial idea of what walking with God is like.
In my own situation, I am a believer who goes to Mass, I pray, and I thank God every day for who and what I have. I am not lacking in gratitude, I have been given every good thing one needs or could want in life. I have a family and friends who love me, a comfortable place to live, all the food I need, and I feel a Good relationship with God. I study the word, talk about it with others, pray for guidance and discernment and like I said give thanks. I talk with a spiritual advisor ad my Priest in order to stay in missions.
Being grateful to God and thankful for what you have is not fellowship with God. These things are good, but they are only a small part of knowing and walking with your Maker. Are you born-again? Do you have a second spiritual birth? Does the Spirit bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God? Does your life bear increasingly the fruit of the Spirit? Are you abiding in Christ who is your life? Are you surrendered moment-by-moment to the will and way of God's Spirit? If so, your life will be filled with joy and peace, love and contentment.
I could always be doing more but I try to live my faith and having said that, people exhaust me, I would prefer to stay in the house and do nothing that go out and be with people so I have to make a huge effort not to isolate.
Loving God inevitably means loving others. The apostle John wrote extensively about this. I'm a natural introvert. Being with people doesn't energize me like it does an extrovert. But as I step into the lives of others and love them as God has commanded me to, and I do so in His power, I don't find myself drained and wanting to isolate as I once did. "God's will done God's way will never lack God's supply." Loving others with God's love and in His power is a joy, not a drain.
I have come to see that my natural tendency to withdraw from others and isolate is just selfishness (when it is not done for the sake of getting alone with God). Whenever I am serving myself, it becomes much harder to serve others - and God. It isn't for no reason Jesus said,
Matthew 16:24-25
24 ..."If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
25 For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.
If I am truly to walk with God, to fellowship with Him, I must enter a life of self-denial, a life of death to myself. I cannot be of use to God when I am preoccupied with me, with my fears, and my heartaches, and my desires, and my pride, and all the host of other ways Self works to obscure God and magnify itself. The two things are anathema to each other, you see. Where Self is enlarged, God is necessarily diminished, and vice versa. When Self is magnified and indulged, fear, depression, anger, pride, self-pity, resentment and hatred always eventually result. And the more Self reigns, the more pathological its effects.
I am grateful for my life but God has not removed my depression. Perhaps itis a trial I am meant to go through but I don't think it is because I am lacking in my effort to seek a relationship with him and have this taken away.
God in His word tells us that joy and peace come by way of walking rightly with Him. When we are depressed, and anxious, and obsessive-compulsive, as so many are today, it is clear evidence that we are not walking rightly with God. This isn't necessarily evidence of sin, or of apathy toward God, but is often the result of simple ignorance, of not knowing how to properly walk with God.
The way you describe depression it is more of a character defect and it is not, it is a medical condition.
If there is one thing the Bible makes clear, it is that we are all of us highly defective. We are all of us wicked, rebellious creatures in desperate need of God's salvation and transforming power. Our wickedness manifests in all sorts of ways, including fearfulness and depression. These days, though, the World wants to pathologize our sinfulness, to make us victims of our own sin rather than the perpetrators of it. If we capitulate to this trend, if we deny our sinfulness and responsibility for our behaviour, we will never know the life of peace and joy and love God invites to have with Him.
1 John 1:6-9
6 If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.
7 But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.
8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.