Thoughts on depression

When you’re depressed, there’s a certain way you start to think. You convince yourself that everything’s normal, that the way you perceive things is normal. It’s a double-edged sword as far as coping mechanisms go – on the one hand, you buffer your self-esteem, but on the other hand, seeing the situation clearly makes you likely not get or want help for your condition. 

Before I became depressed (and I believe, at the time, I suffered clinical depression (major depressive disorder)), I didn’t understand. In high school, someone I knew confided in me that they were depressed – the whole shebang, coping with meds and a weekly therapist. To this person, I’m sure confiding in me must have been a big step. After I went through my own depression, I understood this. But at the time, I didn’t and couldn’t understand the significance of the confession. “Oh, okay. Are you alright?” I said, or something to that effect. Not in the judging, curt way of signaling that it was socially unacceptable to have told me. But rather in the very ignorant, oblivious, and blasé way of someone who had never gone through it. Like, ‘oh, you’re depressed? I feel a bit bad for you. It’s not uncommon to go through depression – many people do. I hope you get better’. I clearly didn’t understand the way that it was so crippling. I assumed, well, as long as the person takes their meds, they’ll be fine. And functioning.

Before depression, I couldn’t understand why anyone who had a mental illness wouldn’t take their meds. I would wonder about it sometimes. Wouldn’t you rather be not crazy than crazy? I know there are some side effects, but the benefits outweigh the costs…right? 

It’s not so simple. Taking those pills (as I did, for a short time, about 3 to 6 months) isn’t just ‘take a pill, you’ll be fine.’ Those pills don’t automatically cure everything, especially for depression. They take awhile to work, you feel the same for a time, and it’s not like slowly you become happy. All it does is stabilize you. This is an enormous feat on the part of the pills. I’m not marginalizing that. But they don’t actually make you happy. In some cases you become stable but not happy – on that very strange margin between happiness and unhappiness. A kind of numbness at the experience may seep into you. It certainly felt like it for me, sometimes.

The second thing, perhaps the biggest reason people don’t take their meds, is psychological. I didn’t see this one coming, but I struggled with it a lot while taking the meds myself. Even if the meds didn’t cause a ton of side effects, there would still be quite a few people not taking their meds. 

Whenever you take those tiny pills, feeling the discomfort of the side effects along the way, you look at them and wonder about your own life. I must be worthless without these pills, you might think. Society, doctors, everyone keeps pushing these pills down your throat, literally and figuratively. And even without those pressures to take the pills, if someone tells you that you might be better with them than without, it does make you feel dependent. Like you’re no longer an autonomous being. That the only way to survive is with these pills, and you are weak for doing it. 

This logic, of course, can be applied to food and water. The only way to survive is to drink water and eat food. Without these things, you – your mind, your personality – are worthless. The biggest difference (and the reason this logic is not applied to food or water) is that literally all human beings need those things in order to survive. Only a few need pills to survive.

It’s no wonder mental health is stigmatized, considering people in general are extremely judgmental. Particularly in America, there’s this attitude of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” – that is, if you can’t deal with it, it’s a fatal flaw and weakness on your part. Why couldn’t you deal with your own problems? Why do you have to rely on some chemicals in order to feel good about yourself? Buck up! 

But just like food and water – and maybe if you don’t buy that argument, just like a warm hug from a loved one when you feel at rock bottom, or a kind word from someone when you’re down – some people (and quite frankly, that “some” is a lot of people) need pills to do the same. Maybe not forever (though, even if it is forever, that person shouldn’t have to feel ashamed about it), but at least for a time – they need it.

What’s worse is if you can’t admit it due to your own ego/coping mechanism or you buy into society’s platitude that things will get better if you just work a little harder or both. The longer you wait or don’t think the problem exists, the longer the problem persists and festers inside of you, until you start thinking that believing suicide is a good answer is a normal thought process and you don’t really need to tell anybody. Everything’s fine, really – just sometimes, when I’m a bit down, I’ll think of the easiest way to kill myself.

From what you probably can imagine, this did indeed happen to me. I’m talking particularly about the last bit in the paragraph above. Because of my own personality – the fact that I’m a bit lazy, an avoider of pain, a coward, and someone who thinks too hard and then is turned off of any real action based on the complications of the plan in mind – I never actually went as far as trying to actually commit suicide. I did spend a fair amount of time looking at the easiest ways to kill myself – rat poison (but it would hurt, and what if I didn’t take enough, I’d just end up in the hospital with internal bleeding), carbon monoxide (a quick and painless death, but what if I didn’t die? I’d incur severe damage to my brain, to the point where I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself/think the way I used to, and I’d be more trapped than ever), alcohol poisoning (but again, what if I didn’t die? I hadn’t and have never (upon writing this) consumed alcohol even once in my life. How was I supposed to how much I was supposed to drink? Plus, I’d heard alcohol poisoning was pretty rare), cyanide (but how tf was I supposed to get it?), and a host of other ways.

You could see I’d thought a lot about all the ways I could kill myself just to get out of the pain and humiliation of a situation that I’d never chosen for myself and succumbed to in ways that I had never imagined I would. Don’t worry – as of writing this, I’m still fked but I don’t look at suicide sites anymore. Nor do I have suicidal ideation. Sometimes I think it’d be easier for myself if I died, but there’s a clinical nature to the thought that wasn’t there when I had depression. And any nihilistic philosopher-type will have contemplated the question at some point, so there’s no need to worry. 

If you (and I’ll assume the you that’s reading this is not the future me. My memories are strongest when tied to emotion, and believe me, depression was a series of switching from numbness to despair back to numbness. It wasn’t pretty.) are reading this, hopefully if someone tells you that they have depression, or if you yourself are having these thoughts and trying to convince yourself that it’s no big deal, take it seriously. Ask for help, if you can. Anybody at all who you know will take you seriously and just listen. It’s not fun to be in the bottom of a hole and not know your way out. Or, more than likely, believe there is a way out. 

Your feelings are legitimate. There’s usually a source behind depression – some unconscious nihilism about a society mired in superficiality, or perhaps a dissatisfaction with what life has to offer. Or perhaps loneliness, or being bullied, or not fitting in – things in your life that signal to emotions that it’s better to stop living than to be in this type of pain and stress – to shuffle off this mortal coil. I know that depression sometimes hits people out of nowhere, even if their lives are “great” in all that society expects it to be – having wealth and professional success and friends. I’m not completely dismissing the possibility that depression can come out of literally nowhere, but I doubt it. There’s usually a reason behind everything – the logic of our survival is pretty…well, logical. Your brain wouldn’t usually want to shut down forever for no reason, which leads me to conclude that “nowhere” is actually an unconscious factor (that most people, not being particularly perceptive) due to some circumstance that manifests itself into depression.

With depression, I urge you to think about it. But not it, as in the sadness it will cause your family. Don’t try to guilt or shame yourself (or let others’ guilt or shame get you) into not committing suicide. I think it’s a bad strategy, and unfortunately one that a lot of sites employ to stop you from committing suicide. Don’t try to weigh the worth of your life – that will also get you nowhere and probably make you feel more depressed (since you feel negatively, you will not say that your life is worth very much, and then feel more depressed for thinking about it. And on goes the cycle).

When I say think about ‘it’, I mean think about any reason, at all (go through anything and everything, big and small), as to why you would feel this way. What factor in your life, or what circumstance, made you feel this disconnected? Or maybe it’s more indirect. Did something in your life (for instance) cause you to feel small, which made you, in your entire life, try so hard people ended up hating you for it? If you can’t think in those terms, ask someone who’s perceptive/a good listener/a philosopher-type in your life (you probably have one) to figure it out (once you tell them the details of your life). Or ask a professional therapist if you have the funds. Ask someone who you feel you can trust, and can sift through the memories of your life to find something.

And if you do find someone like that, and they lay out a working theory for you, then you (with, hopefully, the help of your solid support system) should try to rectify the damage that the past has done either by mending the source or changing your behavior/environment so as not to fall into the behavior that was causing you (directly or indirectly) to be depressed in the first place.

I wrote the above a long time ago, but here is an update for my thoughts, and a solution that may help those who have depression. My advice would be to find the thing (activity or person or group) that makes you feel most connected to the world. I don’t mean to sound hippie dippy with that last part, but I believe when you feel disconnected from the world, that no one can truly understand you, that you feel alone, is the reason behind depression. It doesn’t matter if you have all the resources in the world; the perception of disconnectedness is what matters with regards to depression. If you can find someone or something that truly allows you to connect with the world in an emotionally unfiltered way, I think you are building the first set of steps out of depression.

Hopefully, you’ll be all right. But I’m not sure. I wish you the best.