How to Understand Depression and Be More Empathetic

“More Than a Feeling”

When it comes to depression, 70’s rockers Boston pretty much nailed it with that one.

I’ve never had depression. Like every human being on Earth, I’ve been sad, upset, down, and blue. Like many people, I’m sure that in the past I have described such emotions as “feeling depressed”.

“I’m feeling pretty depressed at the moment.” I wonder how many of us have said that, or something similar, before.

But I am incredibly fortunate. I have never suffered from depression, which, as Matt Haig teaches us, is not an emotion at all. Depression is a horrendous, isolating, debilitating mental illness.

We’ve all felt sad. We’ve all felt down. But having depression is a different realm entirely.

Depression sneaks up behind Feeling Down, grabs it by the nuts, force feeds it a bunch of psychopharmaceuticals, waterboards it, and then shoves it into solitary confinement.

Depression is hell, but learning about it can be enjoyable

In this eloquent, unvarnished and often hilarious book, Matt Haig chronicles his downfall into depression in his early twenties. The picture he paints is so vivid that at times you’ll feel like you’re right there with him and his girlfriend, Andrea, witnessing his engulfment into the abyss.

And it really is an abyss. Because depression, remember, is not just sadness. Sadness is a feeling, an emotion. One we all experience. Depression is a mental illness. And it’s accompanied by a whole host of symptoms. Haig lists some of them:

These were some of the other things I also felt:

Like my reflection showed another person.

A kind of near-aching tingling sensation in my arms, hands, chest, throat and at the back of my head.

An inability to even contemplate the future.

Scared of going mad…

Hypochondria.

Separation anxiety.

Agoraphobia.

A continual sense of heavy dread.

Mental exhaustion.

Physical exhaustion.

Like I was useless.

Chest tightness and occasional pain.

Like I was falling even while I was standing still.

And the list goes on. For pages.

Anxiety and depression: a deadly cocktail

Adding anxiety to depression is a bit like adding cocaine to alcohol.

As if the list of symptoms above doesn’t make depression sound bad enough already, just wait for Haig to tell you what it’s like to feel like that and then have a panic attack.

Like feeling sad, anxiety on its own is not depression. Many of us have felt anxious. And some of us, including me, will have had a full blown panic attack and will know just how terrifying that can be.

I was utterly convinced I was having a stroke or dying the first time I had a panic attack. I’ll never forget that feeling of instant hopelessness and the simultaneous sensation of reality being syringed out of my head and replaced with floaty fog. Oh, and the ridiculous heart-beating-like-a-sledgehammer palpitations, of course, which further add to the “I’m definitely, one hundred percent going to die” thoughts. It’s pretty much the worst feeling ever.

But wait. No it isn’t. Having one when you’ve got depression must be.

When an otherwise healthy person has a panic attack, at least their mind has the ability to think rationally, especially if it’s not your first one. You can calm yourself down. You can tell yourself that it’s just a panic attack and that it will pass. You can control it. You can learn to overcome it.

When you’ve got depression your mind is ill. Rational thought is something you can only dream of. Except you can’t dream because you’ve got insomnia. And when you do sleep you have nightmares. And then you wake up from the nightmares having a panic attack. And so it is that the whole shitty experience just becomes a vicious cycle of complete mental and physical chaos.

Matt Haig uses many great analogies in the book, but my favourite one that speaks to the above has to be this:

If you have a bad back you can say ‘my back is killing me’, and there will be a kind of separation between the pain and the self. The pain is something other. It attacks and annoys and even eats away at the self but it is still not the self.

But with depression and anxiety, the pain isn’t something you think about because it is thought. You are not your back but you are your thoughts.

Imagine the utter torment that this causes. There’s a good reason suicide rates among those suffering from depression are so high.

According to figures from the World Health Organisation, (suicide) kills more people than stomach cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, colon cancer, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s. As people who kill themselves are, more often than not, depressives, depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet.

Depression is a disease.

Matt had a support network — his girlfriend and his parents — around him and he went through hell. So imagine the situation for those who have no such network to rely on, who live a life of isolation. Too scared to leave their beds, let alone their houses. Too afraid to talk. Too frightened to live.

And although the physical symptoms are there, depression is, essentially, invisible. And for those sufferers that are able to be in the company of others, their depression, if noticed at all, will nine-times-out-of-ten be shrugged off as merely ‘mood related’. You know, something like “Matt seems a bit down in the dumps at the moment doesn’t he?”

It’s the stigma that kills

The year is 2016.

We have smart phones. We can buy anything you can think of without ever leaving the house. We get robots to do jobs for us. We even send robots to Mars.

But we’re still crap at talking openly about mental health problems such as depression.

Mental health is… weird. Mental health is… such an awkward thing to talk about. It’s… embarrassing. People with mental health problems are… weak.

As a majority, that’s pretty much where we’re still at. It’s 2016, but there’s a stigma surrounding mental health problems, and sufferers are discriminated against. People with mental health problems still aren’t seen as equal and active citizens.

That’s a fact that acts like the icing on the cake for sufferers who were already highly unlikely to talk to anyone about their problem. Knowing that a stigma exists means that any minuscule chance of seeking help that might have existed leaves them to suffer in agonising silence.

And this is why Reasons to Stay Alive is just so darn good. It has contributed to and opened up the conversation — something that’s so vital to help set people on the path to wellness.

“Brilliant…should be on prescription”

That’s what former Communards musician and everyone’s favourite radio Reverend, Richard Coles, says of the book. I’d love to come up with something original, but honestly, why bother? The Rev is spot on.

Like I said at the start of this post — I’ve never had depression. And I found this book so accessible, engaging, and inspiring, that I can only imagine what a beacon of bright hope it must be for actual sufferers. I mean, seriously. Listen up, health services. Put it on prescription!

And when I say “accessible”, I really mean it. The book, admittedly, isn’t very long, but I devoured it in one sitting. And yet, when I’d finished, I felt like I’d been on a much longer journey with Matt than the book would suggest. It’s a hell of a ride, I promise. And we’re just the lucky readers.

Anyone will benefit from reading this book.

I’m sure of it.

You only need to see some of the Tweets of people with depression to know that this book has helped them to conquer it. That’s a fact, of which I hope Matt Haig is incredibly proud.

But if the rest of us, the non-sufferers, read it too, then surely we can help immeasurably. We can learn to recognise the signs. Reach out. Listen. Talk. Just be there. You know, the basic things that we’re able to do as humans. And we can learn not to say things like “Cheer up!” or “Come on, it’s not the end of the world!” when we know that someone is in a dark place.

Reasons to Stay Alive isn’t just one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s one of the best books I’ve read. Ever.

Please read it. It can’t fail to help our common well-being as a society in which mental illness is on the rise. It will also make you laugh.

And that’s a great start for anyone.

Remember that the key thing about life on Earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts.

Be brave. Be strong. Breathe, and keep going.
You will thank yourself later.