How can I heal my bettas depression?

I love animals as much as the next introverted nerd, but don’t make the mistake of anthropomorphizing your pets. I know it seems counterintuitive, but thinking that your animals feel and think the same way that we do does them much more harm than good.

Lets use your fish as an example. You think your betta is depressed, so you start doing things to cheer it up, changing its tank, adding new animals, new food, new decorations, moving its tank to a cheerier location, all in the interest of providing it variety and companionship. From the fish’s point of view, however, its environment is in a constant state of flux, it’s feeling constant stress, it never knows what is safe to eat because you keep changing its food, the tank-location changes are causing the temperature to fluctuate constantly, and every effort you are making to help it is only serving to terrify an animal that didn’t have the ability to feel depression in the first place.

Anthropomorphizing animals leads to a lot of really dumb pet mistakes, like sweaters on dogs, vegetarian diets for cats, and punishments for bird behavior that having nothing to do with how birds actually think. I’m sure your fish is a lovely creature, but happiness and depression are concepts that are completely beyond its ability to realize.