Dealing With Depression

we can't govern
Jul 28, 2017 · 4 min read

I am young, white, and I write online a lot. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone that I have been treated for depression in the past. I make no attempt to hide this. I don’t think it provides me any special insight or adds a special sauce to my writing. It is not a curse, but neither is it a blessing. It is just a thing that is true about me, has always been true, and will continue to be true as long as I live.

Sometimes, when someone is feeling down, I would comment that “it sounds like you’re depressed.” My wife used to argue with me about this. She said that those people don’t suffer from clinical depression, and that I shouldn’t be making diagnoses. I wasn’t, though. It took a while to communicate that I saw depression as two separate things: a mood, which anyone can have, and a condition, which causes the mood to come on excessively and stay for an extended period.

I’ve been asked what I’m depressed about, what is bothering me. People see it as a cause-effect relationship, where <negative stimulus> produces <depression> as an outcome. I don’t think that’s right either. Depression is more of a filter. It’s a blanket that comes over you and impacts every aspect of your life. It can be subtle, at least at first. Depression does not create new problems for you, but it makes it impossible to address the problems that you have. Happiness and hope seem tiny and distant. It becomes impossible to remember a time when you felt happy or successful, but all to easy to remember every pain, shock and humiliation. Every sin is magnified. Every failure echoes in your ears.

This also projects forward. It’s hard to look forward to anything when you’re depressed. The things you dread loom large, and you can’t take your eyes off them. Depression will dismissively wave off the idea that anything good could be coming your way, and will dissuade you from even trying to make things better for yourself. Anxiety accompanies depression because every bad thing that might happen resolves itself into a surety, and you find yourself desperately plumbing the worst possibilities.

That’s what I mean when I say depression is a filter. It is not a thing you think about: it is a method of thinking that amplifies all of your doubts, fears and self-hatred. When people ask me what I’m depressed about, they’re putting the cart before the horse. Likewise, when people try to console me, they’re not addressing the core issue: my perception of events is fundamentally different from theirs, so naturally I will draw different conclusions.

I have been doing very well recently, depression-wise. I’m off medication for the first time in a long time, and I haven’t been relapsing. While depressed, I found that my medication helped, but what really saved me was the coping strategies I developed. I had to learn to see the filter. I was looking at the world through a distorted window, and I had to make myself consciously aware of the window and its distortion before I could escape its influence.

When you are depressed, one thing that can work is to consciously remind yourself that your thinking is disordered, and that the world you are seeing is not the real world. You’re in a funhouse, stagging from mirror to mirror, seeing your worst self reflected endlessly. Your self-esteem is warped and twisted into loathing and disgust. But none of it is real. It’s not an objective, rational reaction to a shared reality, something that anyone else in your position would feel. Beware that false rationality. It will convince you that your problems really are that bad, that there really isn’t any hope for you.

Other people can be a lifeline. They can keep you tethered, remind you that you live in a shared reality, and that in that reality, life is neither as hopeless nor as evil as it seems. And nothing I say here should be taken to be speaking against medication. Psychiatric medication saved my life. Going off medication should never be a “goal” you work towards for its own sake, but a choice you make if and only if you can safely do so. There is no shame in being medicated.

Just remember, you are not alone. You are not a villain. You are not doomed. Remember that the world you see around you is a counterfeit world, a small and twisted world designed by your brain to trap you and make you feel helpless. The real world still exists out there. You can live in it again.

If you have thoughts of hurting yourself, please take the time to call 1–800–273–8255. It’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

we can't govern

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