We Need to Talk About Depression and Everyone Needs to Listen

 

Originally published on Role/Reboot and cross-posted here with their permission.

When people publicly share their personal experiences of depression, I feel encouraged.

From this essay to this video to this comic/blog post, many who suffer from chronic, clinical depression are speaking out, trying to start a conversation, trying to lift the stigma that surrounds a misunderstood mental illness.

According to the World Health Organization, depression is common worldwide, with an estimated 350 million people of all ages affected.

Depression is twice as common in women than in men, and is the single most common women’s mental health problem.

That’s a lot of depression.

And people talking openly about their struggles is a fantastic start.

I see fellow sufferers rallying behind them and expressing gratitude that they no longer feel alone.

What I don’t see is a shift in perceptions of people personally unaffected by depression.

In fact, I often wonder if non-depressed people are even listening to this conversation.

In late June, Cate Dicharry wrote a heartfelt essay about the feeling of losing herself in her first year of motherhood.

While this piece resonated with many readers, a quick glance at the comments shows how quickly people jumped to the conclusion that Dicharry is mentally ill. That was disturbing, but one comment in particular stood out:

“Depression is massively narcissistic.”

Excuse me?

I was angry, but I disagreed politely and tried to let it go.

Still, I can’t stop thinking about the ignorance and wrongness of that statement.

Only someone who has never lived through real depression would say something so stupid and cruel, especially to the mother of a 10-month-old baby.

Even if Dicharry is depressed (and nothing in her essay suggests that), depression is a disease, not a symptom of narcissism.

I’m sure some narcissists suffer from depression, but not all depressed people are narcissists. I can’t believe that even needs to be said.

I’m going to explain what depression is like based on my experience.

This is not for the benefit of fellow depressives, but for people who have never been depressed, and especially for those who believe that depression is narcissistic, weak, or selfish. For people who believe depression is something one can simply “snap out of.”

If you’re one of those people, please stay with me. I’m going to put you in my (sometimes) sad shoes, walk you through it, and ask you to try – really, really try – to envision what the spiral feels like.

—

One day you start feeling a little sad, but don’t understand why.

Your life is great! You have all the stuff that’s supposed to make you happy, but you don’t feel happy.

You might feel a little guilty because of the starving children in Africa. Maybe you tell yourself that you’re coming down with something, that Mercury is in retrograde, that it’s just a phase.

But it isn’t a phase.

After a couple weeks, you don’t feel just a little sad anymore. You’re crying over your morning coffee or in a bathroom stall at work.

Now you feel sad, guilty, and embarrassed because you can’t hide your sadness anymore, and you don’t like crying in front of your coffee. You love your coffee. It makes you happy and you don’t want it to think less of you.

At this point, you can still pretend to be normal when you’re at work or out with friends or yelling at spending time with your kids.

These things probably even make you feel better for a while.

They’re exhausting and you might need to curl into the fetal position and nap more often than you care to admit, but you can still fake it when you have to. You can still function.

A couple weeks later, you stop going out with friends and yelling at your kids because you don’t have the energy to fake it.

Nothing brings you joy or makes you feel better for even a little while.

You still go to work, but you can’t focus and your boss is starting to look at you funny. Now you’re sad, guilty, embarrassed, and scared, because you don’t want to lose your friends or your kids or your job.

You finally tell your partner that you’re in a funk, that you might be depressed or something. Your partner nods and makes comforting noises and for a few minutes you think they get it.

Then they say, “Are you gonna go grocery shopping soon?”

You realize that they don’t get it. Now you feel sad, guilty, embarrassed, scared, and alone.

And that seems perfectly rational because you’re the one who can’t get your shit together. You are alone in your depression.

One morning you wake up and can’t get out of bed because you can’t imagine going through another day with all those feelings crashing around in your head.

You call your boss and say you don’t feel well. You tell your partner that, too.

And then you stay in bed and feel relieved that you don’t have to fake it. You tell yourself you just need sleep, lots of sleep, and then you’ll be okay again.

But you don’t magically become okay again.

The longer you stay in bed, the more you want to stay in bed.

Bed is a safe place because you’ve surrendered.

You’ve stopped faking it and you no longer have to deal with anyone.

Between dozing and staring at your arm hair (because you’re too fucked up to watch TV or read a book), all that sadness, guilt, embarrassment, fear, and aloneness start to seem less defined.

Those feelings don’t go away, though.

Instead, they morph into one big feeling: despair

You realize that something is really, really wrong with you. You wonder if you’ll ever be okay again. You wonder if you even want to be okay again.

Life seems like so much work, more work than you can imagine doing, ever.

Finally, after a time, even the despair goes away and you feel nothing.

You look back with morbid nostalgia on the sadness, guilt, embarrassment, fear, aloneness, and despair. You crave sleep because in dreams you feel something.

This is the heart of depression: a shitload of nothingness.

You can’t sleep, so you root around in the medicine cabinet and find some old Ambien. You take one and you finally sleep, for a while.

When you wake up you take another, and later, another.

You start counting the pills left in the bottle and wondering if you should just take them all and sleep forever.

You tell yourself that your partner, your kids, your friends, and your coworkers would be better off without you.

If you’re lucky, you see the insanity in this line of thinking.

You pick one thing in your life that makes you feel like an asshole for even considering suicide. Maybe it’s your family, or your work, or your cat. But it’s something.

You ask for help, which feels like the hardest thing you’ve ever done.

Talking to your partner, finding a doctor, even picking up the phone and dialing a number, seem impossible.

Everything seems impossible.

But you do it anyway because the alternatives are either more nothingness, or real and permanent nothingness, and you’ve decided you don’t want that.

If you’re lucky, you get the help you need: a good doctor, a proper diagnosis, a plan of action that works for you. Maybe medication, talk therapy, or a combination of the two.

You begin doing all the work, the hard-as-fuck work, that will let you feel something, anything, that makes you want to live.

If your doctor prescribes medication, it takes weeks to kick in. Talking to a therapist brings back all the sadness, guilt, embarrassment, fear, aloneness, and despair, and that feels counterproductive.

You have some good days, but mostly bad.

If you keep working, the good days come more frequently.

Your meds start working. Therapy becomes easier. You keep doing the work no matter how hard it is. You learn a bunch of stuff about depression that you never wanted to know.

Eventually, you feel like yourself again, or close enough. If you’re smart, you keep working because you don’t want to end up back in bed.

And then you know what happens? You live the rest of your life knowing that depression is a disease, and while you might be in remission, it could sneak up on you again. Or not.

You never know if the nothingness will take over again.

—

I was lucky, but not very smart.

When I felt like myself for a year or so after my first depressive episode, I stopped taking my meds without telling anyone. I felt fine! I was doing everything right: eating healthy, exercising like crazy, exploring Buddhism, practicing mindfulness.

For a while, I was okay.

Then I spiraled again, but I didn’t recognize the signs.

Finally, when I wanted nothing more than to stay in bed forever, I went to my therapist, sat in his office, and cried. I started the work all over again: medication, talk therapy, waiting for the good days to outnumber the bad.

That’s what depression looks like for many people.

We are not depressed because we are selfish, lazy, or weak, and we know we are difficult – even infuriating – to live with.

So we often cling to denial as tightly as people who don’t understand that depression is a life-threatening disease, people who believe depression is a narcissistic behavior. But it’s not a behavior at all.

You cannot choose how to behave when you feel nothing inside.

For me, the cycle repeats itself even though I’ve never again gone off my medication. Every three or four years, my antidepressant/anti-anxiety cocktail loses its punch. I catch it as quickly as possible and I start a new medication.

I am grateful every day that the people closest to me are understanding and empathetic instead of ignorant and judgmental, because this is me for the rest of my life.

But not all people who suffer from depression are as lucky as I am.

Please remember this: While empathy from those who’ve been there is invaluable, sympathy from those who haven’t is an act of selflessness and compassion.

 

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Role/Reboot contributor Laurel Hermanson is a freelance writer and editor in Portland, OR. Her first novel, Soft Landing, was published in 2009. She is currently working on her second novel, Mommune. She blogs about almost everything at Grace Under Pressure. Find her on Twitter @laurelhermanson.