Depression and what it's really like

people are predictable based on their past behavior though

people are moderately predictable based on past behavior, but only in a limited way, in that new situations always differ to some degree from past ones and so may elicit a different behavior than you predicted.

I took out The Noonday Demon on recommendation from some here. Very interesting book - vivid - wonderful insight surrounded by some inconsistent ideas and writing. Couldn't get past about 50 pages though; I'm realizing now as I have to return it to the library that it's triggered a lot of anxiety in me as I tried to work through it. Strange feeling, I don't think I've really had that real feeling of "triggering" from reading an account until now. I might take it out again and try to finish it one day.

Just wrote and sent a long, probably at least somewhat unwelcome (at least in it's length) apologia for my silence to a friend who's been one of the bigger casualties of my depressive/low self-esteem based social anxiety. It's odd, I'm a little bit afraid of social stuff with strangers, but it's friends who I find, by far, most terrifying. It was catalyzed by him needing a (small) favor that didn't require any actual human interaction (dogsitting). Felt good to be able to help someone in my own stunted way, hoping I can build on that, at least a bit.

I've heard a lot about The Noonday Demon, though at this point in my life, with a car instead of train/bus commute and 16 hours a day in front of one glowing screen or another, sitting down and reading a book proper feels daunting. (Hasn't been that long, only a couple months, not a total Voluntary Illiterate.)

Was it just too real/relatable, or was it that panic feeling a lot of self-destructive minds get when confronted with stuff that might actually help? (This is an honest question, not meant to be leading or accusatory.)

Definitely the first, mixed in with a lot of questionable greater analysis

I read that book this Summer; I found it very relatable and validating. Like it's ok to need to take pills and exercise and get hugs from your dad and steel yourself that a cloud may again pass over you someday. Also I learned that an ancient Greek doctor thought cauliflower could cure depression. I am a sucker for facts like that.

I also thought it was just a great read; both of Andrew Solomon's books I've read have been full of wonderful prose and great stories of humanity.

He's really impressive. I'm looking forward to the next book, but it takes him about ten years on each so I will have to be patient.

andrew solomon is great.

when i talk to people about having depression (rarely) i get a really strong sense that they don't believe me. i have always made a point of not being outwardly moody around people, so when i am in the throes of it i just stick to myself, so my friends have only seen me when i have enough energy to seem happy. this wouldn't be a problem except i'd like at least one friend to talk to about this stuff. the only person who really knows me at my worst is my ex-girlfriend, but i can't talk to her without feeling sad about the fact that she broke up with me and that i am not a part of her life anymore, which is a highly unproductive thing to feel a year and half after the relationship ended. so.... yeah. i don't know what the point of sharing this is. just that chronic, (relatively) manageable depression can be lonely.

i seem to have two sorts of friends in my circle of highly educated academics and activist/humanities/computer types, people who have never really been depressed and seem not to have ever understood why i don't just shake it off, and people who have been or are depressed. even the latter it seems i have only been able to commiserate or sympathize with occasionally, because we don't talk too much about depression, or are too withdrawn from the world in the worst of it. but the former irk me more and more, particularly in the last several years. i've been depressed so long that i've gotten to see the ways it has changed depending on circumstances, and recently i've had several very abrupt changes in clearly contrasted circumstances, in terms of living arrangements, work life, social life, financial situation. i have seen how i have a better time of it when things, in some respect, turn decisively in my favor. but overall things haven't, for a while; from my perspective it keeps seeming like i'm stuck, made to start over again and again, from nothing. when i look at those undepressed, successful friends, i see people whose lives keep rising, cruising along, developing, but also people who can't appreciate what a grounding, a boost, they get from that continuity of circumstance. it's like they have 'affective privilege'. i have generally felt like they don't believe me, don't believe my depression is real (i'm so capable, so high-functioning, i guess). it's hard to feel you share much, or can, with people like that.

they will never understand

i'll tell you what depression's really like: it really sucks. that's about it. thanks.

seem not to have ever understood why i don't just shake it off

good lord, there's far too much ignorance about depression out there that you shouldn't have to deal with. it sure doesn't help that the word often gets used to describe the temporary moods of sadness or hopelessness that everyone feels on occasion.

true, but it doesn't help that in a world with more information and discussion of mental health as an illness than ever before, some people still opt to be wilfully ignorant shitheads either

"as an" = "and"

people also don't understand the varying degrees of depression, either. like j. points out - if you're high-functioning, ppl don't believe you're depressed bc their idea of depression is lying in bed crying all day. which, yes, is the case for a certain type of severe depression. but robin williams is the perfect example of high-functioning depression - and it was still so bad, he killed himself.

yes. and i'm talking about educated, sophisticated people surrounded by depressives. i assume many such people have had their moments. it's hard not to when you're in these walks of life. so often i'm inclined to think this is more an aversiveness than ignorance or a failure of sympathy or imagination. anyone who's touched on the depressive frame of mind, of life, is loath to make contact with it again. it's just so inert. it saps your spirit when you have to face it, deal with not being able to change it, even in others.

yup

- spend $50 on a concert ticket
- don't go

^been there

sorry mookie :(

i'm not a big advance ticket buyer for precisely that reason but "spend a month thinking almost non-stop about how awesome a show is going to be and how exciting it is that the band is coming to my small uncool city; don't go" <- certainly been there approx a billion times

my worst moments of Other People Trying To Relate To Depression are when they say "oh yes, x had that. They're fine now though!" (subtext: why are you not fine now, why are you not being easygoing and fun and successful like this other friend or relative is. worst when they let you know that it only took their friend a few months and man you've been a drag for yeeeaaaars)

on the other hand I think I've been more dysthymic (no longer a recognised medical term: perhaps downgraded to "a bit of a sadsack") than full-on depressed for most of the past decade, so I feel like a fraud with the major-depresso crowd too. it's nice that this thread works for both categories cz sometimes other depression boards seem to be such a oneupmanship err onedownmanship contest. thanks guys! <3

People can change their understanding of depression, but until they do it's frustrating. I've known friends and family who said stuff like "in my family we didn't have time to be depressed" or called anti-depressants "happy pills" but came to a better understanding, mostly through living with a person with depression.

My brother was the "happy pills" guy w/r/t his wife's depression but he really changed his attitude when I told him my experience and about our dad's and other family members' depression. He just thought our father was a miserable old grump. (Our father always rejected anti-depressants as "suicide pills" but he benefited somewhat from therapy.)

heh, onedownsmanship

almost at the point where i have to make lists (ugh) of things about myself that i have positively changed or improved, because it feels like i have the same pathetic feelings and failings since I was a teenager, (social insecurity, romantic inadequacy, anger and resentment that leads to burning bridges and overall misery etc.) and as much as i try to convince myself that i am "making progress," i struggle to believe it.

:(

am in those boats a li'l bit myself. but like uh um uhhh uh well my writing is what gets me through. your music is gr8 and i hope you still believe in it heaps. also you rule <3

also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder

it's a thing

sarahell, someone at school is travelling to SF soon and it reminded me of our excellent bourbon fap. If you're social inadequate, I'll be socially inadequate with you any day.

I realize that internal feelings of social inadequacy are not the same thing as how you deal with someone on the outside, though! But still.

Spent my whole life feeling like the greatest thing I could ever do for the world is to not be alive. Fuck this feeling.

I feel guilty, I feel awful, I really do wish I were dead.

those feelings aren't at all the whole of who you are. hope you can keep telling yourself that. everybody here will tell you the same.

crabbits, there is a giant green parisian buttplug that proves that there will always be herefotore unrealized and delightful ways of conferring benefits upon the world

Un plug anal géant de 24 m de haut vient d'être installé place Vendôme ! Place #Vendome défigurée ! Paris humilié !

Sent u a msg crabbye

crabbits yr fb reel is a constant delight out of any and all ilxors I'm p certain yr vvvv high in the 'daily good done in the world' category and I hope v much that there's clear times when you feel it as confidently

srsly crabbits you're the best

^^^fact

crabbits there should be a bitchin comic book series about u & yr world

i hope that you don't leave this world but i deeply understand that feeling

I'm just exhausted from this constant inner warfare today. I don't know what's triggered it, but the last couple of weeks life has been tasting like bile, and I'm so so tired of it. I can still function in the world, but I just want to go somewhere and hide .... not so much from everyone else but from myself. I'm so tired of being inside of myself, my habitual thought loops so tedious and painful.

I'm an atheist, pretty much always have been, but I flirt with the notion of becoming a believer in God of some sort. It's from a wretched, needy state, a state where I simply crave some Being to love me and carry my pain somehow. A Being that helps me go beyond the prison of the self so I can enjoy the beauty in the world again. This suburb I live in is a parched desert. There are trees everywhere, but everywhere I see only Death. Everything is already dead. I see things, but they are not real. I can't taste or smell life anymore. It's bleached, ravaged of meaning or joy.

I am very very sad.

Why do I even post these things? It's not going to help anyone.

Sometimes you have to let the pus out, man.

I sort of started privately talking to God, whether or not he/she/it is real, just to ask for forgiveness when my brain is kicking its own ass and making me feel like horrible, guilty shithead who should be dead and not alive. 'I am really beating myself up over this thing, dear God please forgive me,' I think. It helps. It helps me feel better! I don't go to church or anything, and sometimes I like to imagine the god as a tiny dancing popsicle like at the end of Borgel by Daniel Pinkwater.

lol love that, crabbits

feeling somewhat less stuck today. it's been achieved mainly by simply not brooding so much on myself. trying to really focus on other people, genuinely so. truth is, i could spend several lifetimes bemoaning my problems and shortcomings. no lack of grist for the mill. but that way madness lies.

distraction is the way

I dont know if I am depressed or not. I have always felt powerless but accepted it and internalized it. Now im doing something different, a career change, a new start. But what should be empowering I'm finding very challenging and I feel quite despondent a lot of the time which I never did before because I lived in a bubble of pretending the real world didnt exist.

I'm engaged, im not procrastinating, I'm throwing everything at it because I feel if i stop, it will be over. All of it, not just this but everything and yet I welcome that feeling. Ive had enough! Ive been living away for a short time and can go days without speaking to people and...Ive realized how much I love it! Silence! But im in a bubble, I'm living off savings and eventually I will have to return to the real world and I'm not sure that I want to, especially with an uncertain future that I'm not sure I'm going to be able to manage. Can i really be bothered? Wouldnt it be easier just to disappear?

disappearing is a warm fantasy

seems very strange to me that some people don't get depressed

makes me wonder a lot about what makes someone susceptible really

Genetics, for one thing. Possibly for a lot of things.

~genetics~ is a kind of a hand wave

even when those mechanisms are better understood I still suspect that the sort of explanations offered will be incommensurable with any sort of first person experiential or psychological account

depression feels like such a thoroughly integrated part of people's personality that you need to account for it on the same terms you do with other facets

I'm sure completed neuroscience will make it all perfectly clear