Depression and what it's really like

Growing up with a clinically depressed mother with narcissistic personality disorder and a drinking problem p much clued me into just how much a parent's issues can fuck a kid up so I'm trying to get to a place where I can be comfortable with myself and my progress to think that I won't wind up like her.

"the fact remains, some people's lives just don't work out for them, and if that's so with your kids, it will have been largely because of you and whatever narcissistic personal growth project you had in spawning that they will have been stuck with those lives."

this seems pretty narcissistic in itself! while parents are (typically) the biggest influences in a kid's life, they spend a lot of time, maybe even more time, with other people, from pretty early on. it may be that you'll end up responsable for those other people being shitty (because of where you live, for instance). but that's only on you in a second-order way.

not really feeling that, direct parental influence and upbringing seems paramount to me

My mother has suffered with low-grade depression for years, but would probably deny it. Her own mother was violently mentally ill and was sent away as a result, so she's probably comparing her mum's mental health with her own and coming up with 'actually, I'm within the realms of normality'. Not for one second did she baulk at having her own kids, but because her mother wasn't in a position to pass down mum knowledge, she had other problems with Where The Boundaries Go and, perhaps, owning up to her own shortcomings as a parent.

i'm not talking about passing-on-depression, or influencing-via-one's-depression.

i'm just talking about the fact of causing the kid to exist in the first place. thereby sticking them with the hassle that is being happy or not, outside the range of what you can possibly help with as the parent.

this whole convo is really bumming me out tbrr

I think about that a lot, how weird it is that we have this power to bring people into existence and that, obvious cases aside, we assume we have an authority to do so. Even if the person one's bringing to existence has a good chance at a happy life, I find it a weird thing, as if we know best whether someone ought to be stuck with the mind-boggling complexities that come with a human life.

inherently selfish act that we justify, thanks biology

Xps what did you expect from a thread called "depression and what it's really like"??

Lol I know, I just feel low whenever ppl say that kids cured them of their depression.

I will say that being responsible for someone else's well-being does give some sort of primal urge to actually get up in the morning. I definitely wouldn't say it cures depression though.

No way it cures depression, which isn't so simply "cured," but it does distract you from broader global/internal issues to focus on minor, more or less solvable problems. What's for dinner, where are your mittens, let's go to school, want to see a movie, stop poking your sister ...

The Chris Rock (and maybe Chris Ware) quotes probably speak to the sensitivity of all artists or creative sorts, closely attuned to the world around them for inspiration but not always for the best. I have a couple of friends who I've never seen down, never seen brooding, always seem to be a beacon of positivity. I've never asked them if that is hard, or if it takes a lot of work, or if it just comes naturally. I have to work hard to stay out of funks, but by and large I am successful. At least until someone points out I am not being successful.

pplains 100% otm

it is hard for me to think about existential questions about having kids, because for me the decision to have kids was like the decision to eat in the morning: just the most natural thing in the world, not one for which I can say I reflected much; nor do I, on reflection, think I should have done otherwise. & one can also judge my eating in the morning to be a selfish decision. but that is not my frame for thinking about either of those matters. I'm not the mental healthiest person by any stretch but this particular concern escapes me.

Having children didn't cure my depression, but it definitely increases my baseline happiness and motivates me to take good care of my mental health.

But seriously advising people to have children to cure their depression is gross, and it also completely erases the very real problem of women developing post-partum depression.

Like, telling a woman who suffers from depression to have a kid to cure it is just... no.

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2013/03/surprising-rate-of-women-have-depression-after-childbirth.html

is it still pretty common for women to get advice that having a kid will solve their life problems?

i just deleted a big long winded post but basically, i am aware of all of this and wish it didn't make me feel like my value as a person in society weren't dramatically reduced as a woman who has chosen not to be a mother, but unfortch this seems to be true generally speaking
and i do not need to be consoled about this, as i enjoy my life for the most part
i just want my life to have value as a productive member of society (which i believe it does)
this is why it brings me down, apologies for not explaining this earlier

is it still pretty common for women to get advice that having a kid will solve their life problems?

― Nhex, Wednesday, December 3, 2014 5:13 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes.

obviously

That makes me sad that you feel that it lessens your value in society! :( I would never think that but I realize that might not the normal mindset, sadly. I don't understand what the connection is between your post and the topic or maybe that's the reason you've chosen not to and I missed that somewhere.

is it still pretty common for women to get advice that having a kid will solve their life problems?

― Nhex, Wednesday, December 3, 2014 5:13 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes.

― carl agatha, Wednesday, December 3, 2014 12:22 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thankfully I've never gotten this advice. In fact, anyone I've ever spoken to about having kids has been pretty straight up in admitting that children put a strain on most aspects of life and make things way more difficult.

after a brief mental survey, i can say that most people i know who have said "having kids gave me a reason to wake up in the morning" are men with the exception of one. all of the people who say "it's like having a cake in the oven literally all the time" are women. i don't have to go through it to see that the experience is vastly different for girls, and i am a woman.

i don't feel that it lessens my value in society, i believe that there are a lot of people who believe that based on the number of times i have been consoled about how it's ok to not have kids. it's just one of those topics, like being an only child.

I guess maybe I've never experienced that because I've never said to anyone that I don't want or am not ever having kids but having been the recipient of the only child bs I can see how awful that must be.

exactly
this is why i said "oh i dunno" for a really long time

now i'm bummed out

I have heard from a great many people who feel that their problem, whether it's depression or even an unhappy marriage is going to be resolved by having a kid. I get the reasoning, to an extent -- the things that are most likely to improve your mental health are staying busy and having an ongoing project that keeps you moving. If it brings you joy, that's a bonus. Basically a kid is, for some people, a really fulfilling project.

There's nothing wrong with that, but the flip side of that, that people feel guilt because it's seen as an essential part of the adult experience (it's not) or people that do have a kid but continue to be depressed (or, as in the other case I mentioned, still have a mediocre-to-bad marriage) is a lot more potentially negative.

It took me a long time to realize that some things that help other people stay mentally sound aren't for me, and I should feel no guilt about that.

so: find what you love, keep on movin', and when you can't love anything, look for help

"whether it's depression or even an unhappy marriage is going to be resolved by having a kid"

But a kid isn't a fucking project! I get it too but I thought that by now most even slightly intelligent people would realize that having a band-aid baby is the worst idea ever.

Conclusion: people are still dumb. Especially the kind that would think and/or voice this kind of opinion.

I think people forget that a kid is both a human being that they have to provide (an environment) for, with no idea of how that human will grow and mature, _and_ a project.

euler, i appreciate that some people may not be personally moved by these concerns. i'm just suggesting that they're wrong not to be, and proposing that if they're not, it may be because they're fundamentally thinking more of their own lives than of those of their potential children. (what seems natural is not much of a guide, either, i think - how much of what people think about sex and gender 'seems natural' to them but seems wrong upon consideration??) if for example a person thinks, well, life is pretty alright, all things considered, and so my kid's life would probably be, too (and of course i'll do everything i can to make it that way for them, etc)—then they stand a chance of minimizing, let's say, a residual possibility dependent on the difference between lives, between their life and the kid's life, that the kid's life will just turn out NOT to be pretty alright, in a way the kid can't change, or escape, or accommodate herself to, or come to terms with, etc. it's a matter of the jemeinigkeit/mineness of one's existence, so it (were this possibility to come to be) is not something the parent can do anything about, either - they can't anticipate it, prepare the kid for it, etc. put in pascallian terms, having a kid is like putting the kid's happiness in life at stake (to uncertain risk, in a gamble) as well as your own.

this has nothing to do with whether you see your kid-having as a project or not etc too, that just brings out the core possibility that i think would be there in any case, and would not necessarily be mitigated by being a loving well-providing parent raising an independently existing being.

so: find what you love, keep on movin', and when you can't love anything, look for help

― valleys of your mind (mh), Wednesday, December 3, 2014 12:04 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark
amen

sorry crüt
on the upside, i was thinking about you today!

xps

I think there's just a bit of slipshod semantics at work here. A kid is not a project, but raising a kid is a project. It is possible to devolve the project of raising a child almost entirely to chance, to whomever happens to be available, and a deeply depressed parent may not be available to participate in raising their own child. Nothing is automatic as ENBB points out.

exactly

Raising myself is a project. I'd hate to think that would still be the case on the offchance that I had children (which looks like a ship that has sailed at this point).

My whole kids not being a "project" was that they're so much more and the responsibility of having them is pretty much the most serious and heavy thing. Just to clarify. These fucked up people thinking that having a child will fix things in any way whatsoever seem to be missing the weight of that decision somehow.

yeah, by "project" I mean "this will be a time and emotional investment, every day, probably for the rest of your life" style of thing. something that you are investing yourself in.

not quite like knitting a hat

No I realize that - I just wanted to clarify even tho it probably wasn't necessary.

:)

As a product of my mother's attempt to keep hold of a failing relationship, I feel pretty qualified in saying that it doesn't work and either one or both parents end up resenting the kid.

j I get your line but another way to see it, in jamesian terms, is that the possible good of the kid's life can't be realized unless you give her that chance.

it's true that we would be makint this decision, rather than the kid, but that's also the case on your line! I don't see how to adjudicate this without a leap of faith, either way

well, not having the kid seems importantly different from having it (in either the case of its life being good or the case of its being bad).

there's no kid without a kid being born - there's no person who wouldn't have suffered being dragged into suffering - there's just a human life, whatever the hell that is. and a human life is made up of a billion facets, some of which might be considered wonderful and some of which might be considered horrible, but to judge the creation of human life wholly on the possibilities of experiencing the horrible feels like a very one-sided way of judging?

and other people's judgements are gonna vary wildly on whether life is worth having, of course, especially on this thread, and so they should. but anybody who co-creates another human being cannot be making a clear-sighted decision to add to the sum of misery or happiness in the world because the outcomes are more or less unknowable

depressives are p. good at that xp

god yeah absolutely. i just think that broadly speaking the having of children is not a decision grounded in consequentialism

there are always too many children as it is