1. My history of depression
I don’t know when I became depressed, but it likely had something to do with taking Ritalin to help with my ADHD. I also forget exactly when I began that, but it was at least before third grade. So I was very young. My parents had done a good job of educating me before I began school, so my early years in school were extremely boring. I already knew everything except cursive writing, except I was shy and afraid of looking like a nerd, so I didn’t speak up in class or show off how smart I was. Yet people still teased me, and over the course of few years their bullying paid off as I began to hate myself and blame myself for everything, rather than blaming others.
It peaked when I was ten years old, in fourth grade, after my parents decided I was mature enough to stay home by myself. One day, while home alone, I decided that I was tired of ruining everything, and I was going to make the world a better place by removing myself from it. I went downstairs and grabbed the biggest, sharpest, knife that we owned, and brought it upstairs to my bed. Psychologists will tell you a ten year old brain hasn’t developed enough to think in the way I did that day, but apparently there are exceptions. I stared at my reflection in the knife and thought about my life, all the people I knew, and all of the things that bothered me. I realized that most of what I blamed on myself had nothing to do with me, but most importantly, I realized that as miserable as I was, removing my pain and misery from the world would create even more pain and misery to take its place. The pain I would create in the people who cared about me by killing myself would be greater than what I was removing. This is almost universally true. You may or may not care about them, but there will always be people who are glad that you are alive. Remember that.
I decided I couldn’t kill myself until the day I was completely and totally alone, but I was still depressed. Nothing changed for about four years, until I met a girl who made me feel good for the first time in a long time. To make a long story short, I cared about her, and that was a new experience for me. We became close, eventually dated on and off for a little over two years, and along the way I became happy and realized I wasn’t as terrible as I always thought. It’s been a little over a year and a half since we broke up, but we’re still friends. She helped me overcome my depression, likely for good, and having done it myself I know it’s entirely possible.
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2. The purpose of this post
My goal here is to explain what it’s like to be depressed to people who haven’t been depressed, or who are so used to living with their depression that they’ve never recognized it for what it is. For those who are depressed, or who have been in the past, I also hope to offer some kind of solace.
Depression is a touchy issue, so I’m going to end up subdividing and classifying things all over the place, but I’m only trying to include everyone and alienate as few people as possible. I don’t want a poor choice of words or absent-minded exclusion to hurt anyone, or disregard their experiences. Depression is an extremely personal thing, and something many people keep to themselves and talk about only with their closest friends. I’ll never be able to cover every single possibility. There are things I simply have no experience with. If you understand what I’ve said, but it doesn’t apply to you or someone you know, then the best way to understand their situation is to ask them.
I also want to stress that this isn’t an instruction manual or a how-to guide for curing depression. I am not equipped to say “if you are depressed because of x, then do y”. Professional help is very easy to find, and if the situation calls for it, you would be foolish not to seek it out.
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3. What is depression, and why does it happen?
Some people think depression is simply a feeling, a way of feeling sad. That’s true, and most people get that from time to time, and it might last for a few days but eventually it goes away. That sucks, but it’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m more interested in the psychological disorder kind of depression, which sounds scary, but it’s an easy choice of words to distinguish between the two. This is the depression that stays for months, years, even decades. It’s a constant state of that depressed mood, and even when things are going well, it doesn’t magically disappear. You might cheer up for a week or two, but then it slams you back down. This kind of depression sticks around until your life improves drastically, to the point where you’ve solved the initial issue and many more. That’s important, because depression doesn’t just happen; something has to set it off.
Generally, everyone who becomes depressed has a problem in their life. These are extremely varied, but essentially, depression won’t go away unless that problem is solved. It doesn’t just disappear. If insecurities and poor self-esteem caused the depression, then fixing those will be the only way to get rid of the depression. If abuse or relationship troubles are the issue, then that needs to be taken care of. Basically, you can’t fix the effect while ignoring the cause.
There is the possibility that depression runs in the family, as it runs in mine through my maternal grandmother, but I don’t believe that means you’re doomed to be depressed forever. My mother told me that it’s just an imbalance of chemicals, and there’s nothing wrong with taking pills to correct that, and to a certain degree that is true. There’s nothing wrong with someone taking anti-depressants. There is everything wrong with the belief that pills and prescriptions will solve everyone’s problems. Again, the most important thing involved in overcoming depression is eliminating the catalyst. Anti-depressants will not help someone in an abusive relationship improve their life. Leaving the abuser and dealing with the emotional scars must have priority. I cannot make this any clearer.
The other key thing is that depression cannot be cured like a fever or a cold, and it can’t be removed with a good pep talk. You can’t force it out of someone simply by caring about them and supporting them. A personal impetus to be happy and have a better life is the only way to completely overcome it. Maybe that comes from an inspiring event in your life, maybe it comes from an inspiring person who comes along to save the day. I know that simply meeting a wonderful girl did not cure my depression, because I was still depressed for a time when we were together. It was through the gradual process of deciding I wanted to be happy and accept myself that I got through it, and I couldn’t have done it without her. I also know that it didn’t depend entirely on her, because it hasn’t come back now that things have changed between us. Of course, I get sad and “depressed” every once in a while, and that’s a legacy of my years of depression that will never stop completely. Now, however, I know how to cope, and I know that it will pass. For a day or two I might isolate myself and alienate a few friends, but inevitably I cheer myself up and life goes on.
The reason I’m addressing the idea of treating depression like a normal is twofold: first, if you are depressed, you must know how to deal with it. It’s hard, and I would honestly put anyone who overcomes their depression far above the average in terms of emotional strength, but you will have to want it and work for it to get there. Second, if you know someone who is depressed, you have to choose between helping them cope and helping them get better. I’ve learned first hand that you can’t compliment someone so much that they gain self-esteem, nor can you cheer them up to the point where their depression goes away. A depressed person in a good mood is still depressed, and they will be depressed when you aren’t there to cheer them up. You have to support anything they do to contribute towards getting better and give them as much solid advice as you can to solve the problems in their life. It comes to a point where you must accept that no amount of love and care will lead someone to change their life, and if you can’t convince them by yourself, you have to find some other strategy to work with. I can’t tell you what you will have to do, but it falls to your best judgment to decide how to proceed.
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4. Why is depression such a problem?
The main problem with recognizing depression is that it’s not like “woe is me, I am so depressed and miserable and sad!” It’s not as direct as that, and you don’t really tell yourself that you’re depressed. If it’s something that comes and goes, maybe you recognize it, but if it’s something you’ve had persistently, it’s not often that our brains identify it for what it is. You just don’t feel things properly, but if you’re used to it, you’ll never know the difference. Your joy is muted, your excitement for things you would otherwise care about disappears, and life becomes a chore as all pleasure seems to disappear. It becomes hard to care about anything positive, and very easy to care too much about everything negative. The worst part is that you don’t care that things aren’t right in your life, and it’s extremely hard to want to change and to work steadily towards helping yourself. With most types of depression, people feel as though THEY are the problem in their life, so it makes it even harder to care about helping themselves.
To be clear, this is not fun. There’s no pleasure involved in being depressed. It doesn’t make you feel any better that people who want to help you are frustrated by the fact that you won’t help yourself. I don’t really need to list the symptoms of depression, but they all work together to create a constant mental, physical, and emotional fatigue. Overcoming all of that is one of the most emotionally strenuous tasks many people will ever undertake.
The difficulties people face such as the loss of family and loved ones, dealing with illness, and other emotionally painful things, require a different kind of strength to surpass. Other people can help you deal with grief, but no one can give you the strength to feel genuine happiness again. After you’ve survived depression, there’s not much that can bring you down as low as you once were. After you learn to cope with minor setbacks, and figure out the things that help you preemptively stop bouts of depression - sleeping well, exercising, listening to upbeat music, writing, whatever works for you really - you’re basically set. Even when things go bad, it’s business as usual rather than the end of the world.
Not only do people who are already depressed have a hard time wanting to work towards helping themselves, but they don’t usually feel like doing a whole lot of other things either. By procrastinating and spending time thinking about everything that’s wrong with your life, things inevitably pile up or don’t get done and make everything worse. It’s a bad cycle to get caught in. Just like overcoming depression, overcoming this cycle means not only taking care of all the work you didn’t do, but going ahead and doing the work you’re supposed to be doing right now so you don’t get stuck in it again. It’s a big productivity waster, and with extreme depression it’s a struggle to get anything done at all. You simply don’t care.
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5. What’s it like to be depressed?
You may know the symptoms in theory, but that really doesn’t tell you anything about what it’s like to be depressed. You’ll hardly ever feel happy and you won’t enjoy much, you’ll sleep too little (or too much), you won’t eat enough (or you’ll each too much), you might have inexplicable headaches and you’ll spend most of your time tired. Sure, none of those things sound pleasant, but the broad symptoms like that are the least of your worries. Most of those symptoms are physical, and the only emotional ones (no joy or pleasure) doesn’t sound very intimidating. Basically, reading that doesn’t give you any idea of the mental and emotional effect it has when it becomes a “normal” part of your life.
When I was in junior high, one of the ways I visualized my depression was a filter separating me from everything and everyone else. When life was going well, it was a light grey filter. When the depression got worse, it was a darker grey. The filter coloured my perception of everything in life, from my interactions with others to my thoughts and emotions. A dark grey filter led to pessimism and paranoia, and I would assume the worst of everyone. I felt emotionless, like a robot or a psychopath. Things I used to love became soulless routines, and things I should have enjoyed meant nothing to me.
Being depressed was the emotional equivalent of needing glasses to see or a hearing aid to hear. Things that should be there are nowhere to be found, and it’s very difficult to function normally with the kind of dampening you get from not seeing, hearing, or feeling everything you should. If you continue the charade and act like nothing is wrong, you’ll only aggravate the symptoms and make the problem worse. Lying and acting adds further stress to your life as you try to convince others that nothing is wrong.
Imagine, then, looking out at a beautiful sunset. It’s amazing, it’s beautiful, and to simply experience it once would be to live a better life. Except when you look out, the sun is colourless and drained of any potential beauty. Birds are chirping and the radio in your car is playing your favourite song, but these sounds are far away and distorted as if your head were submerged in a foot of water. That’s a bleak version of an incredibly beautiful moment, which is sad on its own, but it doesn’t stop there. Apply that same dampening effect to daily tasks, which are far less beautiful than a gorgeous sunset, and imagine living with that every single day. Nobody really enjoys those things, so imagine being depressed and having to force yourself through them. Sounds… depressing, doesn’t it?