depression eventually gets you to the point that you can't work no matter how critical that employment is to your well being you just stop showing up or quit in a mental breakdown. sick leave is a nice alternative and i agree it must be nice to have that option but when you say "feeling depressed" vs being depressed i think you have the wrong idea about it.
What do you call it when your wife who you deeply love develops schizophrenia and bi-polar tendencies less than a year after you get married and then you sacrifice your 20's to take care of her only for her to end up killing herself, and then you feel sad and try to block the sad memories that make you feel depressed by working all the time and putting yourself to sleep every night for the next ten years by drinking alcohol?
I consider myself to be a high-functioning, depressed alcoholic. Most people who know me have no clue I'm depressed.
Keep in mind, I'm not suicidal. I just often find myself feeling sad and like life is ultimately pointless, and I try to find ways to self-medicate so I don't notice the sadness as much. I also feel severely burnt out, even though I enjoy my job which pays well (which is a very strange paradox that I can't explain even to myself).
depression is about what you can and can't do regardless the shit you've been through - I won't put a label on your life experience, but if you can function well and enjoy it you're probably not depressed
> if you can function well and enjoy it you're probably not depressed
“Depression affects all personalities and can look very different in various people,” says Jodi Aman, psychotherapist and author of “You 1, Anxiety 0: Win Your Life Back from Fear and Panic.”
“A highly functioning person can be suffering invisibly too,” she says.
I stick to my point and tbh you should talk to a doctor or get a diagnosis from someone deeply familiar with the dsm and not self diagnose and self treat. fwiw I can appreciate you're carrying emotional pain and suffering and it's common we throw around the word "depression" casually to describe this stuff but I don't think you're clinically depressed until it starts overriding your executive function .. it's all a scale of course and you could be heading in a direction so either way talking to a doctor would be good for you
I'm sure you didn't do it on purpose but the "because I was feeling depressed" part to me makes it sounds a little condescending. Depression for many isn't just something you "feel", it's what defines everything you can and can't do.
Depression is a major illness (ICD-10: https://icd.codes/icd10cm/F329), there is nothing slight about it. Getting treatment and going on leave if you have the option is definitely the right thing.
Long-term disability (LTD) insurers are generally reluctant to approve claims for benefits based on mental illnesses such as depression or bipolar disorder.
Huge difference between "feeling depressed" and "being unable to function on a daily basis due to a medical condition called depression".
Sick leave is appropriate if a person is sick. Depression can take over your life and make you unable to work. If sick leave does not exist for a depressed person they either become dependent on family or just get fired, risking homelessness, credit problems, increased chances of suicide etc.
In some countries and jobs ... well, that's what happens. But some places treat sick leave differently and if a doctor says you are sick you can get a lot of paid leave in order to recover.
If I could choose between a four-month vacation and not being depressed, I would take not being depressed. I wouldn't even have to think about it.
It's like looking at someone who's sick with a debilitating illness and saying "Wow, I sure wish I could just lie around in bed all day." No, t0mbstone, you don't. All the things you're imagining you'd do with that time—you can't really do them when you're feeling sick all day long.
This isn't just feeling blue. It's darkness, 24/7.
I think this is an uncharitable response. There is nothing in this comment that implies the person posting it is not depressed.
I think there is a very fair point being made about the privilege of having the possibility of a four month vacation to deal with mental health issues. For many people, a four month break from one's responsibilities has a strong likihood of resulting in homelessness and/or permanent harm to employability.
If I'd thought that's what they meant, I would have reacted differently. Perhaps I misinterpreted it—I'd agree 100% that most employers are not nearly as understanding or generous as they should be regarding disability leave.
But I was not the only one here who felt that the tone of the comment came a little too close to the "wow, I sure wish I could have a nice vacation if I was feeling sad" business that most of us are very used to hearing from people who have no experience with depression, and think that those who do are just babies who need to stop being sad and go outside.
> ...felt that the tone of the comment came a little too close to...
Making assumptions as to intent or meaning because of percieved tone isn't very charitable. You are correct in that you are far from the only one to do so. I do it sometimes too, but that doesn't make it productive.
I am not saying you shouldn't acknowledge how the tone came accross and explain how frequently that sentiment is faced. I am saying you should do that while assuming the best possible intrepretion of the comment you are responding to.
> ...think that those who do are just babies who need to stop being sad and go outside
While I don't hear that sentiment from other people very often, my own brain frequently says it to me; It isn't very helpful.
Depression and mental issues have a huge amount of stigma here in the USA. If I told my employer I wanted time off because I was depressed, there is an almost zero chance that I would get any meaningful support other than being allowed to use my limited PTO that I have accrued.
I do pay for both short and long term disability, but as far as I know, Long-term disability (LTD) insurers are generally reluctant to approve claims for benefits based on mental illnesses such as depression or bipolar disorder.
Additionally, I would have to deal with the newly acquired stigma of being "that depressed guy with mental issues".
Taking it even further, if someone admits that they have suicidal thoughts, this can easily result in having ALL of their rights completely stripped away. You can be forcibly hospitalized and medicated against your will, entirely on the word of someone else. You will also no longer ever be able to pass background checks, own a weapon, or be hired for many types of jobs.
I know all of this for a fact because it happened to my ex-wife, who developed schizophrenia in her early 20's (after we were already married) and became bi-polar and suicidal. After years of going in and out of the system and being put on countless medications, she ended up killing herself.
The USA really really really hates people who are mentally ill.
I will say that every time I have brought up depression in a professional context I have been surprised by how willing people are to find ways to make things work. It's not a guarantee OFC and you still might pick your allies, but you might be overestimating the stigma.
The "was" is inside of a "could" statement which usually means that it is a subjunctive tense and not a past perfect tense. This means that the tense is probably indicating that the intent is talking hypothetically. We don't do a good job of distinguishing these tenses on English but they do exist.
I wasn't trying to be snarky, even though I realize now it must have come off that way. I understand full well what depression is, as I have struggled with it for years. I genuinely wish I could take 4 months worth of paid sick leave like this article's author was able to. That's not exactly an option here in the USA though.
It's objectively a privileged position to be able to do that and not become homeless, but I wouldn't wish for it.
Have you ever had a day at work or during your schooling where, due to burnout, depression, anxiety, lack of direction, laziness, whatever... you just got nothing done? Maybe you wasted all your time reading/writing emails; browsing the web; etc?
I have had some days like that. And if I worked in a factory or a fast food restaurant, I would look at that experience and say, "gee, sure would be nice to be able to sit around doing nothing all day". But those days weren't like a vacation, they sucked. I didn't get any enjoyment or relaxation out of it. I felt crappy all day and even worse at the end of the day for having accomplished nothing. Even days where there's a production emergency and I have to fix bugs under pressure from clients feel better than that.
I've never taken 4 months off from work for mental health but I imagine it feels about like that...
I have been working my whole life. I have been working professionally as a web developer and software engineer since I was 13 years old. I am 37 years old with 24 years of professional experience.
During that entire time, there were only a couple of periods where I had more than a month off of work. Each of those times were when I was in between jobs and was trying to find new work, so I don't really count those periods as vacations.
I'm just so tired of the grind. I just want a long break to do nothing. I want to do nothing until I'm literally sick of doing nothing. I imagine that when/if that happened, I would be able to find my passion again. I'm not sure if it would look anything like the type of work I've been doing for years, but I agree with you. I realize that long term happiness is usually tied to creativity.
> Wow, I wish I could just go on sick leave for 4 months because I was feeling depressed...
Well... If you're indeed depressed, I wish for that too.
However, if you're actually healthy and just making a snarky comment, then I hope you never experience depression- it's hell. No amount of descriptive imagery or keen adjectives can ever convey what it actually feels like, so I understand how people who've never been in its jaws can be so dismissive. After all, just like it's hard to tell that stuffed inside a ballerina's blood-filled shoes are cramped, broken, _aching_ feet, it's hard to wrap your head around pain that isn't readily seen, much less try to empathize with the person feeling it.
The only way I can think of to describe depression is to describe suicidal ideation: when you have a moment, go to your garage, get a hammer, and smash your thumb with it. Not a pleasant thought, right? I'd be willing to bet that if you were to legitimately try, you'd find it almost impossible; the instinct for self preservation is one of the most basic, powerful instincts. Now, imagine a situation where you're in so much pain that this instinct is completely overwhelmed and you actively try to kill yourself to stop it, a situation where you cannot believe you'll ever be able to be happy again, a situation that feels truly hopeless.
That's depression. While suicidal ideation is one of the extremes, depression is something that drives a person to that point.
In all honesty, I sincerely hope neither you nor your loved ones ever have to face such despair. "That they experienced loss is not a gain, and that they experienced pain is not a victory."
I'm actually depressed, and have been for years. Working remotely in a room by myself for the last year hasn't helped.
I haven't had a real vacation (more than a week or so of time off) in years.
I have less than 2 weeks worth of PTO sick time accrued. I genuinely wish I had the option of taking 4 months of paid sick leave for mental health reasons. I'm pretty sure that would help me reset my mental state.
I wonder how much making being depressed part of your identity prevents you from getting better.
I'm not dismissing the reality of it, but reinforcing it to yourself and others around you on a constant basis probably isn't helpful? Constantly ruminating on your depressed state probably isn't good either.
Pretending everything is great probably isn't a good idea or likely even possible (or desirable?), but I'm not persuaded constantly talking about it is a healthy option either.
I know some people who can talk about their psychological struggles and remain likeable (it's some kind of charisma superpower), but other people where it's just a massive bummer (myself included). Step number one of getting along with people has been masking my internal state where possible. That lets me get by. The endless pit of despair and hopelessness that long-term depression can present, as with many chronic illnesses, it can just be a massive downer (especially when there's literally nothing the other person can do - why burden them with knowledge of my pain more than necessary?). And I can be likeable and fun to be around, and I appreciate it when I know other people who are struggling internally manage to play along also in their own way [ I know it takes them a lot of effort and I appreciate it deeply ]. This is how making it work works for me.
Though I guess I can appreciate the principled approach of the person writing the article, that would be a disaster for me given how I am (and I don't think it reflects badly on my social circles). I have to struggle to not be a happiness vampire, and this would tip the scales.
>I’ve been in therapy on and off and I’m taking meds (and no, yoga, essential oils and exercise are not sufficient to treat mental illness)
I am in the difficult position where discusing my internal states too deeply is a significant trigger for downwards spirals. It doesn't mean I don't need have those conversations, but I do need to be careful about when and with whom I have those conversations.
You gotta find a balance but talking about it regularly, whenever you realize it affects your behavior is a good way to deal with depression. It also helps others to deal with it better.
There's a saying therapists use, "What we resist persists."
The research has shown that being open with others about your experience alleviates the symptoms of depression, including constant rumination. Putting on a happy face for the benefit of others, on the other hand, tends to make it much, much worse.
There are of course confounding factors like whether the person has a victimization complex or whatever, but those need to be handled on their own terms. I don't personally experience anything like that, so I don't know much about it, but my guess is that they would also generally be exacerbated by encouraging people not to talk about it.
Yeah I agree with you - I think what I'm trying to say is more nuanced and super easy to misinterpret (even in good-faith).
It's not about putting a happy face on, but about seeing yourself as a 'depressed person' or as having depression being a core part of your identity. I think that can be harmful - and lead to weird psychologies where being depressed is more comfortable in a way, more familiar.
Being open/honest is good, but making being depressed part of the way you see 'who you are' is likely bad (imo).
Hypervigilance [0] is also a thing - and it can make things worse.
Frankly, it is a core part of one's identity. It's not just feeling sad sometimes. It's a chronic condition that colors everything about how you see and experience the world. If you forget that or ignore it, it starts to take over, and your grip on reality is liable to start to erode.
Perhaps I misused the word chronic. It certainly doesn't always have to be lifelong.
But, even if it's not lifelong, it still is. One's identity is constantly changing. Suggesting that a part of a person's identity doesn't really count as much because that part of them might change a few years down the line is an act of erasure. It's a microaggresion directed at the person they are right here and right now. People who experience mood disorders are already swimming in a sea of social stigma; we could really use a little bit less rejection, well-intentioned or otherwise.
I think whether or not you make something part of your identity is a choice. This sounds like our core disagreement.
I think choosing to have something bad be part of the core of how you view yourself is harmful. There’s some evidence to back this up iirc (things like people involved in shootings being interviewed immediately after and then again months later - those that had issues recovering made it part of their identity, those that didn’t - didn’t).
If there are strategies to avoid harm I want to know what those are. If there are bad strategies I want to throw them away.
People can do what they want, but I wonder if defending and reinforcing someone’s identity as a victim does more harm than good.
In general I think people are way overconfident about what the “right” thing is here and what’s actually happening or what the best way to get out of it is.
Yet I see multiple comments warning about making depression part of your identity in response to a blog post that is pretty focused on why it is important to talk about experiencing depression.
I feel like the nuance is being lost in the opposite direction here.
>The research has shown that being open with others about your experience alleviates the symptoms of depression, including constant rumination.
Hello! Could you direct me to said research if you know where it is? I'm not aware of it, and haven't seen it recommended anywhere. I'd be genuinely interested to know if it checks out.
Similarily, I found that having mental health diagnoses have reframed my already negative tendencies to merely assign concrete reasons to my failings that sound more justifiable to me.
So many decisions and feelings in my life have become framed around statements like "that was because my attention was lost," or "my attention is probably not going to hold up for another hour if I try that," or "I just wasn't paying attention." Every accomplishment and every mistake is colored though a lens of attention, or my lack of it.
The fact that I procrastinate is no longer because "I'm lazy," but "I have a debilitating lack of executive function." It sounds reasonable, and it can be useful to understand the reasons to find better ways of dealing with them. But merely changing the reason from a less specific to more specific one doesn't ultimately solve the problem of procrastination.
It can be tempting to indicate the diagnosis as revealing the one major problem interfering with a normal life, but for me that isn't the case. It provides me with an easy distraction from the problems with how I carry myself and my usual thought patterns.
If I try learning to draw, and reach for learning materials focused on drawing skills, almost none of them will go out of the way to state: your attitude may prevent you from making progress on this lesson. Someone who's in pristine shape and someone who can barely find the motivation to get out of bed each day could read the same book with the intention of learning how to draw and have significantly different outcomes without any explicit indication as to why from just reading the book alone.
From my personal experience, depression is something that's there whether you think about it or not. Of course if you just think about it that'll just make things worse. But I don't think that's what this post is saying.
The conclusion is - "The majority of people are still uncomfortable when I casually mention my depression, but that doesn’t silence me. I do this not to elicit pity, or to be inspiration porn about overcoming obstacles, but to normalise this – people like me are here, everywhere, you could be me at any point in your life." and that sounds fine to me. If someone asks how you are, it is a positive thing to say you are dealing with depression to normalize it. I would probably not so it for everyone, but to friends and Co workers I think it is ultimately a good thing.
> I wonder how much making being depressed part of your identity prevents you from getting better.
I had the same thought recently when Bikepacking.com posted a short video documentary about two obese women doing long-distance cycling. The women claimed that their goal was to end fat-shaming. Yet maintaining such a heavy weight while engaging in such physically demanding activity is difficult indeed. I therefore got the impression that they had so made being overweight a part of their identities that it was no longer a condition they just happened to be stuck with, rather they were deliberately maintaining it at some half-conscious level.
I think that's probably the case in many scenarios. IMO people are often more resistant to change than they are drawn to improvement. That's why I think it's important to be careful what you base your identity on.
I agree. I wonder why it's so different for depression vs. other illness/challenges. When we see someone without legs, we accommodate them however possible and try to treat them equally, but we also celebrate those who manage to be competitive wheelchair racers or accomplished at calisthenics. Yet for depression, we almost try to convince people that it's simply not possible to be functional and you shouldn't even try. I sympathize with people who have depression but I feel like the current way people try to deal with it is similar to trying to encourage cathartic releases of anger, not knowing that it only makes anger worse.
If I had to guess - it's a mixture of the underlying mechanism still being very poorly understood which makes it very hard to treat.
Likely a lot of people experiencing what we classify as depression are actually experiencing similar symptoms of highly variable underlying causes.
Also, for a long time mental health was handled atrociously by society so people are (reasonably) sensitive to that and there's maybe a little bit of an overcorrection on this culturally where people are now afraid to suggest that there's any agency here at all.
Hopefully as we get some real empirical understanding of how our minds work we'll be able to relieve a lot of suffering. As it stands, psychology feels like medicine prior to germ theory (at least to me) - we have some treatments that seem to help, but barely know why.
I basically agree with your whole comment. I wish people on all sides were less forceful, whether critical or supportive of mental health issues, to account for the shortcomings we have with the field.
> we almost try to convince people that it's simply not possible to be functional and you shouldn't even try
That's not really the way it is, though I can see how you would get that impression. Coping strategies, trying to get the highest level of function out of myself on every given day, and learning how to set myself up for the highest level of function in the future are a big part of my approach to depression, complementary to the reflective, root cause-oriented approach that people associate with talk therapy. My depression varies in a range that includes "not depressed" (I mean, assuming I know what that is) and that is the state I "strive" to achieve as much as possible, using all the means at my disposal.
The thing is, everybody understands the concept of "just try not to be depressed," and they already overestimate its effectiveness, so we don't spend a lot of time talking about it. What people don't get is why it doesn't fix everything, so that's the part we try to explain. To begin with, the reason I put "strive" in quotes: it's not really the right word for trying not to be depressed, because "striving" is sometimes counterproductive and sometimes not even available as a tactic, so you have to try by not-trying, and if that sounds like a catch-22, well, it 90% is.
If you compared chronic depression to a chronic knee injury, you could compare "just try not to be depressed" to using the knee as normally as possible. It helps you get stuff done despite the injury, it's important for maintaining good movement patterns, it helps keep all the muscles around the knee strong so you don't injure yourself further, it's generally a positive thing for promoting whatever degree of long-term improvement is possible (which is near total for some people and not much for others, and you don't know how it will be for you,) but it doesn't cure the injury, and you learn from hard experience that arbitrarily pushing yourself can inflame the injury and set you back.
The problem is you don´t get to choose the content of your ruminations. When you are experiencing severe depression judgment is misguided and you don´t get to choose the contents of your mind the same way you don´t get to choose the contents of your mind in the middle of a maniac episode.
Well, I hope this person tries to do something about their depression besides just talking about it. For their sake as well as the sake of everyone around them who is probably tired of hearing about it.
I've seen very promising people lose their dreams to depression. Often times, I think back to one profoundly talented programmer who I met in Miami years ago, who is no longer with us. (When I met her and saw what she was working on, I was intimidated to see what a high schooler these days could do, and to be honest I breathed a sigh of relief when I found out she was an outlier.) What a tragedy, and what a loss that was for her community. In other cases, I've seen passionate, curious people fail out of school or work and never recover personally or professionally from it.
Chances are there was nothing wrong with her. When you have the ability to see from miles away the odds stacked against you, sticking around takes a bit of insanity.
There're a lot of people in the comments here who don't seem to know what depression is.
Depression isn't just “I'm sad all the time”. Functionally, depression is a reduction in the set of actions that one can take. For some, it can be bad enough that “fill out this form, make this phone call, write the reference number on the form then post it” is too much. No, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do that. That's why it's called a mental illness. Sure, they could “just try harder” except oops, that's not on the list either. (See http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html for a good analogy.)
Many depressed people come up with psychological tricks to move necessary tasks from the “unavailable actions” category to the “available actions” category. Possibly the best one I've heard is the “shower heist”: it's not “taking a shower”, it's grand theft of the clean.
If you think depression is “just laziness”, why would someone go to all the effort of reframing basic actions in this way? So please, none of that.
>No, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do that. That's why it's called a mental illness.
That's not the reason it's called a mental illness. It's called an illness because it's a source of suffering. Also, of course there's a reason - otherwise it wouldn't happen.
I think the larger sentiment (and you're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong) is that dealing with depressed people is tiring. I have a few friends who deal with chronic depression, and getting their input on things or checking up on them is always a production. I still greatly appreciate their position in my life, but my sanity (and patience) is finite. More often than not, I'm equally (if not more) helpless, which makes it extremely difficult to disengage or move the discussion forwards.
I welcome an honest dialogue around mental health, but a dialogue requires two people to be dynamic. If the two become mutually incompatible, then there's effectively no way for me to contribute.
"Depression" is more the term our medical community has today to describe low mood, lack of energy, loss of interest et al.
It's important to understand that there exists no weird illness that is causing these symptoms. Instead, the symptoms can have all sorts of roots, but depression is just what we call them.
I suffered from bad depression in my youth. Couldn't get a haircut or buy new shoes, things like that. I think the worst moment came when I was so depressed I just stood there in my room. I couldn't even lie down. No way to explain that to a normal person.
One day my mom said, "I know you're not faking this because no one would deliberately be this miserable."
It was more comforting than you might imagine.
- - - -
(I debated adding this because I don't want to get drawn into an argument about my own personal history, but FWIW I was cured completely in a single session of hypnotherapy that lasted less than ten minutes. The therapist was Dr. Richard Bandler, co-inventor of Neurolinguistic Programming. (Yes, the NLP that is decried as "pseudoscience".))
Unless you're dealing with con artists, the “pseudo” in “psuedoscience” is usually the explanation. I don't doubt Freud was able to help a lot of people, but I do doubt his explanations of what it was exactly that helped, and why.
The issues is that we are missing the "why" of how most antidepressants work... so do they also qualify as pseudoscience?
In my mind, psuedoscience isn't just missing the "why/how it works" but also the "who/when it helps" and as a result don't have clear statistical backing.
We know the why is “because the antidepressants were taken”. But antidepressants only work sometimes – different antidepressants work for different people! We don't know the true, fundamental reason, but at least we've pinned it down a bit.
I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed; if they were doing science instead of just theorising, they would've noticed.
> We know the why is “because the antidepressants were taken”.
We don't know that. The best we know is that people who take antidepressants on average experience more improvement than a placebo. We actually don't know who got better from taking antidepressants due to the placebo effect.
> I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed;
This is a good point and I would agree that pseudosciences are generally bad at uncovering bad explanations. I will point out that the "chemical imbalance" theory is still widely believed even though it has been pretty thoroughly debunked.
I think the dichotomy science/pseudoscience if often applied to whole fields when there is often a mix of both within any given field. The prevelence can certainly be highly variable from field to field but it isn't as black and white as we like to suggest.
> the “pseudo” in “psuedoscience” is usually the explanation
Explanation of what?
I would say that NLP is non-scientific or pre-scientific, yet you can find practitioners and promoters who claim it is scientific, so to that extent NLP is pseudoscience. The trouble is that detractors use the label "pseudoscience" to cast shade on the whole thing, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The techniques developed under the rubric of NLP are rigorous and repeatable. E.g. the phobia cure or the "Visual Kinesthetic Squash" are like algorithms, in the sense that they are concrete patterns that work to create specific changes. They have been tested and refined and the essential elements boiled down to render specific steps without extraneous elements. A person can learn a pattern like the phobia cure and apply it to cure phobias. So there is a kind of rigor and repeatability that distinguishes NLP from the vast majority of schools of psychology.
> I do doubt his explanations of what it was exactly that helped, and why.
One of the most interesting (IMO) aspects of NLP is that Bandler and Grinder were very careful not to speculate as to how or why these patterns work, they refused to develop theories. The patterns were developed operationally without trying to find explanations or stories for what was going on in the brain that made them work. So no one knows why the "VK Squash" works. No one knows why the phobia cure works. But they do work. And sometimes they don't, so you try something else. It's not scientific, it's operational: do what works.
> There're a lot of people in the comments here who don't seem to know what depression is.
> Depression isn't just “I'm sad all the time”.
I always see these comments in threads about depression but I almost never see people actually making the comments in question. Can you point to an example in this thread?
I am also in academia (a PhD student), and this resonates with me a lot. I got into major depressive episode by the end of last year (having had a few before that) , and was pretty unproductive until the end of March, which is then I took a month long vacation and moved back in with my parents to get back on my feet. Which I was able to do because I spoke openly about my mental health with my advisor and collaborators. And like this person, I shared my experience in a public blog post (https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/life/covid_depression...). I tend to agree that normalising being honest and open about depression is good - even just saying you were less productive and went on vacation due to it is good, because then others might see that as the healthy thing to do instead of as something that they can't consider. Granted, 'never not talk about depression' seems like it's overstating things, but on balance I think this blog post makes a good point.
I used to have depression from early to mid adulthood that I could not shake off. Many times, it felt like it would never go away, almost like it was an integral part of me. When I was deep in my hole, I thought thoughts like "don't kid yourself, you're always depressed, this is how it is", and I certainly did not have any reason hoping I would some day suddenly not be depressed. But while it was not sudden at all, I am happy to say that I am now, by all means of assessment, not a person suffering of depression anymore.
I think in my case I was "lucky" that I did not want to take medication against it, any at all, and that my causes of depression did not require it. With a very big warning: It was lucky for my situation, and my apparent causes of depression. I do not want to assert that medication cannot help. My reasons for not taking medication were partly misguided, partly right (again, for my specific case). For example, I had the fear that medication would change my "personality" beyond removing depression, and I did not want to change my personality, because I liked the "good" part of my life, in the intervals where I was not suffering from depression too much (I say "too much" because I'm not sure I was ever really happy during that time). I don't think that's how the medication works, though.
So that left talk therapy, a lot of it. Years of it, sometimes interesting, often difficult. And through all of that, I discovered that I had reasons to be depressed, but I was very far away from seeing and understanding those reasons just on my own. They manifested as "generic" depression instead. Getting to those reasons and talking about them straight cured me. Part of it might have just been understanding my emotions at all. I am probably very lucky in that regard, going from "almost always depressed, sometimes too much to properly function" to "basically cured" by finding out what actually bothered me.
Not everything is rosy now, life does not work that way. Sometimes life situations make me sad, overwhelmed, even desperate, and may still send me into a depressive hole for some time. But when that happens nowadays, I can always attribute a specific reasons to it. I am then depressed because depressing things are happening, and it is an "appropriate" reaction. To go back to the beginning, understanding the obvious reason why you are currently depressed entirely removes the "this is a part of me" aspect. Nobody thinks a person mourning for a loved one suffers from "depression" as a condition, for example. I think I learned a new skill.
Second disclaimer: I can only speak for what I went through, and I am not a professional. It is entirely possible that your depression has other causes, and cannot be fixed by talk therapy. For some, knowing that it worked for me might instill hope, though.
I've noticed it's very common to swap 'sadness' and 'depression' in american english. In brazilian portuguese we have an abreviation for "depressão" which is "deprê". Depression is the illness and "deprê" is slang for "sad" and they do not mix. It seems to me by equating both the american english is making it harder for people to realize the difference (which is tremendous).
I wonder if the pt-br words being so similar makes the difference more explicit, that perhaps the english words being so obviously different, makes it easier to forget?
if the topic would ever come up seriously, most everyone would agree that depression is different than regular sadness- but in casual conversation it sometimes seems to warp into depression being a kind of adult form of sadness, almost as if sadness is just for children...
I've quit a job because I was going through bad depression before and I didn't think I could do a good job. I even asked for part time work, so I understand where she's coming from, but..
In my opinion, this attitude she's portraying is a dangerous attitude to have. This victimhood seems core to her identity. I'm not trying to shame the condition, I'm trying to say that the condition shouldn't become some core part of your identity. Real phenomenon: Have you ever heard of cancer patients becoming depressed after they've gone into remission, because being a "cancer patient" essentially became a core of their identity, and once they no longer had it they became lost? You don't want your identity to be "depressed person", because the last thing you want is to start feeling like a fraud when the fog starts to lift.
Also, I'm just going to say, it's ok to want your employer to have empathy for you, but you also have to have empathy for them. If you're consistently telling them "well, so, I'm a good employee, but I might drop off the face of the earth for 4 months at a time".. what are they supposed to do?
You see this a lot nowadays. A lot of social media sites are biased towards positivity and reaffirmation, but what happens is that people get lots of positive feedback for identities and mentalities that are counter productive to a good life.
I agree wholeheartedly while being empathetic with what she's going through.
The identification is, as you say, dangerous. Most people have depressive episodes at least once in their lifetime, and it can leave just as suddenly as it comes.
It makes me wonder if this intense identification slows her recovery or even worse blinds her from seeing its cause; if in this case it has to do with how she is living her life in terms of family, work and social life.
I didn't see anything in the article about seeing herself as a victim or it being ”core to her identity." I think you might be projecting here.
In fact, I see her desire and efforts to normalize depression as an attempt to move away from victimhood.
> You don't want your identity to be "depressed person", because the last thing you want is to start feeling like a fraud when the fog starts to lift.
You also don't want to assume because the fog lifted, you should completely disassemble the support mechanisms you have built. Like with cancer remission, there is a signifant chance of relapse that can be somewhat mitigated by good monitoring amd timely interventions.
She's a woman in a man's world. It's much more socially acceptable to say "I'm depressed" than to say "Doors don't open for me even though I am doing all the things I get told I should do to make them open and I'm doing my best and nothing really works anyway. It's demoralizing."
Women have long been given prescriptions for antidepressants in cases where "divorce" might have been a better prescription and so on.
And you eventually get beat down by it. Even if it remains clear in your mind that your gender is a factor in things not working even though you work hard and do what you get told is the right thing to do and yadda, you eventually learn that saying it out loud not only will not get you any remedy, it will get you nothing but open hostility from other people.
I don't know if that's supposed to be sympathetic or dismissive or what, but especially in combo with the downvotes, it's hard to not see it as dismissive.
A woman says "It's not socially acceptable to talk about your gender being a factor in having trouble making your career work", gets downvoted to hell. People fail to see the irony.
I've been on HN nearly twelve years as part of an overall good faith effort to sort my problems and make my life work and I am quite open about being dirt poor to the point of going hungry and being willing to work and wanting to improve my income and it failing to open doors for me. When I talk about "Most men don't really want to talk to me privately unless they are hitting on me" I get snide comments about how HN has no messaging system, as if people haven't heard of email.
I'm telling you from firsthand experience this is amazingly demoralizing and crazy making and it isn't socially acceptable to talk about it no matter how much you can point to evidence that "My gender seems to be a factor in my intractable poverty" and no matter how carefully you word it to not be blamey or suggest people are doing you dirty with malice aforethought.
Definition of idealogical: based on or relating to a system of ideas and ideals, especially concerning economic or political theory and policy.
I'm not talking about ideology or political theory. I'm talking about "If a specific person's life is in the toilet due to social crap they have no power to fix, it gets pretty fucking depressing. And often it's vastly more socially acceptable to say I'm depressed than to say I'm oppressed and being denied opportunity for BS reasons"
If you aren't the mod, quoting guidelines at me like I'm behaving badly when I'm not is a PC form of ad hominem. Ad hominems are also against the guidelines, FYI.
I know the guidelines. I've been a member for more than a decade.
I work with female senior software engineers and project managers, and have personally hired quite a few. They seem to be doing great, are well respected, and doesn’t seem to have the problems you are advocating. So obviously what you consider to be universally true isn’t. My guess is that you have been unlucky and worked for companies with bad cultures? I have personally worked in a company that was toxic to everybody (male/female/…) and the only solution is to jump ship until you find a good one. They are out there.
No, she wouldn't. If the world has broken her of talking about it, obviously, she wouldn't.
I'm giving you my take as a woman. But go ahead and do the PC dismissal as more concrete evidence that what I'm saying is both true and utterly socially unacceptable.
If you're already convinced the world is as you see it, there's no point having a discussion. The reality is that the world is a _really_ complex place, and one narrative simply doesn't cover everything, we're not all the same, not all companies are the same, not all societies/groups/cities/nations are the same.
I'm aware that women are disadvantaged in some cases, maybe even in companies that put a lot of effort into promoting them. But there are places where the opposite is happening. I used to work in a big tech corporation that was pushing this quite a lot - if they got two applicants, one was male one was female and they were roughly equally qualified, managers were expected to choose the female. This did make the gender diversity quite incredible, even in software engineering teams - I was in a team that was 50-50 male-female (this wasn't a 4 person team either). Have a look at [1], [2], [3], as well.
At the same time I don't want to discount your experience - there are plenty of awful people out there of all genders and races, and there's no excuse for stuff like that. We need to try and rat out discrimination, whichever way it points.
The OP said: In my opinion, this attitude she's portraying is a dangerous attitude to have. This victimhood seems core to her identity. I'm not trying to shame the condition, I'm trying to say that the condition shouldn't become some core part of your identity.
So if you are a woman, it's not okay to say "My gender is an obstacle to my career success and it's literally crazy making." And if you do the more socially acceptable thing of chalking it up to a personal problem like depression, then some internet stranger is free to malign you and your presumed victim mentality.
If another woman tries to say "Hey, maybe she has a legitimate reason for feeling victimized and it isn't just some kind of neurotic BS" on a male dominated forum where the comment occured, she gets a pile on of downvotes and various replies that more or less boil down to "How dare you make such an observation!"
I wasn't looking for a fight. I made a comment as someone with firsthand experience of how frustrating it can be to try to pursue a career as a woman in a man's world. A zillion people are vilifying me for it.
Why do so many people feel some need to try to shut me down and act like it's a bad faith comment in violation of the guidelines?
The reactions to my observation are over the top. The observation itself is incredibly mild.
I think I'm done here. It is probably a waste of my time to keep responding to comments where there is some kind of presumed guilt on my part. It's all too easy for other people to decide that's evidence of how fighty and irrational and bad I am when none of that is true.
What's true here is that it's an overwhelmingly male forum and it's socially acceptable for millions of people to watch me starve and shrug and say "Not my problem" and it's not socially acceptable for me to say "I would like to stop starving and wish someone would help me figure out the super secret handshake to being allowed to earn a goddamned living. Please and thank you."
I have seen a lot of your comments and articles over the past few months. I don't presume to put myself in your shoes, but my wife works in software engineering, and I work with several other women or wives of friends in the field. They have all had normal experiences, much like mine, with very few instances of anything being different for them because they are women.
I'm providing these anecdotes because you are providing your anecdotes and I figured it might make a discussion. As I said before, I have read your medium posts and your posts to this forum, and it seems that you are always fighting a battle that doesn't always exist (see your comment above that was flagged), but I feel like you are using the 'dismissal' of people viewing your arguments as irrelevant to the conversation as proof that the battle is happening and you're losing.
I don't understand why you might be starving or not making a living unless you are unemployable or have some type of issue that prevents you from performing at a normal level, as I have not known anyone in tech who could not earn a living unless they were struggling with something that prevented them from being able to work properly.
These are my anecdotes and they aren't facts or truths, I am just showing that the experience I have seen of women in tech does not intersect with your experiences, in a way that makes your points very foreign to me and I'm sure to others who don't share those experiences. Perhaps you are also in an 'experience bubble', and the world as you see it does not always conform to the pattern.
I have personally hired a number of woman for senior developer jobs and they have all done well. Better than some of the guys I have hired. If it truly is impossible for woman to do well in a male dominated industry, how do you explain that?
The world is not a uniform place. Not everything is Netherlands, not everything is the US. Some of my best colleagues in software have been women (older ones, too), I have hired women and never ever preferred anyone because of their gender. I have trouble even understanding the concept because of my autism spectrum disorder.
All of this can be an indication of all being fine where I live. Or it can be an indication of my biases being well hidden. And both can be different where you are. “Women don’t know the secret handshake” could be a thing wherever you are based in and it could be that there is some underlying issue you are not aware of. Or it can be both or neither. This is why people flag the comment: our experiences differ wildly and generalizations thus tend to rub a lot of people the wrong way.
Also, as a male, I’ve always had the feeling of “not knowing the secret handshake”. I don’t fit in, I don’t usually get a call when somebody starts something new. I don’t get invited to a night out. Has nothing to do with the gender, I’m just not a pleasant person to be around. I know this and am working on accepting this after years of trying to change it. Might not be applicable in your case, but one can experience very similar treatment that women apparently do in some places for very different reasons.
What you have is a theory for why she's depressed. You may be correct or incorrect. Unless you secretly know her neither of us knows if that is true. For me, my depression had nothing to do with the outer world. There isn't always a reason, sometimes it's just biology.
It has nothing to do with what I was trying to say though.
My point is not that her depression is valid or invalid, it's that forming a sense of victimhood into your core identity is dangerous. I would give the same advice to men or women.
I'm not religious but consider this widely known prayer: "grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference". Victim mindset is the opposite, it's focusing on things you can't control. I personally think it's more useful to do the best with what is in your power.
I couldn't agree more. It was also a red flag when she said that she wanted to normalize her depression. Depression, like any other mental illness, should be destigmatized but not normalized.
Through out the entire post she outlined exactly why it should not be normalized. It's a debilitating disorder that should not be left untreated. I think to try and normalize it would leave the impression that severe depression is analogous to having a hard day. This is because to most people that is the closest thing they have experienced to severe depression, but in reality it's very different.
I think by doing this she is actually working against her own interests.
I agree with you about "normalization" vs "de-stigmatization", but I can't imagine she meant "normalization" like this?
> people like me are here, everywhere, you could be me at any point in your life
That's a very important point, and I believe that's what she meant by "normalise". "Normalise" in the "people with depression are normal people with an illness, not 'ill people', anyone can be affected because it's a normal illness like an infection" kind of way, which more or less equals de-stigmatization, right?
But English is not my first language, it's totally possible I'm reading this the wrong way, feel free to correct me if that's not a possible way to read this article. :-)
I can't really imagine that anyone with depression would really want to "normalise" it in the dictionary way, by suggesting that it should be untreated and a "normal way of life". On the contrary, nobody should have to suffer from this. :-/
The word "normalize" carries a lot of cultural baggage / implication since its adoption by the woke twitter crowd. Often, "normalize X" means "I want X to be common, I encourage doing X".
On the topic of destigmatization, I recommend this Robert Sapolsky lecture (on the neurobiology of depression) to everyone to understand just how physical and systemic depression is: https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc.
For understanding how lifestyle changes can help treat depression, I recommend this: https://youtu.be/drv3BP0Fdi8. He contradicts the author on the point of exercise—it is one of the most potent medicines (though hard to administer to yourself when you’re depressed).
Reflecting on my own (extensive) experiences with depression and its co-conspirators, I think there are two deep fears that inhibit seeking or sticking with treatment:
1. What happens if I don’t get better? Then I’m hopeless.
2. What happens if I do get better (and it’s not enough, or I ruin my progress with a relapse)?
I don’t have a definitive answer to either, but reasonable responses include: trying and failing feels better than languishing/surrendering (not trying is the only thing that’s likely hopeless), it is (or should be) OK to make nonlinear progress in managing chronic illness (depression or otherwise), and the universe/existence is at once magnificent and meaningless so just try to relax and enjoy the ride with your fellow creatures.
The irony of it all is that the author did just that, talk about her depression.
Many people are habitual malcontents (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcontent). My parents were like that their entire life, and I picked it up and don’t know how to kick it (mostly try by shutting up). It’s awful way to be, but once it’s in you, good god it’s impossible to feel happy.
It’s not clinical depression, it’s just a miserable disposition that can often be dressed in the guise of woe-is-me, the forever teenage goth kid.
> although the Covid-19 pandemic definitely hasn’t helped
If anything, people who have experienced depression before would be more capable and resilient when dealing with the pandemic restrictions. Because they're used to dealing with negativity. I know at least that was the case with me and some friends of mine who are also affected.
Also, there can be some peace in knowing the whole world is shit down, and everyone is sitting at home surfing the web, for those who struggle with lonelyness.
For a while, yeah. After a few months of seclusion, I felt completely trapped with no way out. Knowing you're not alone in your situation doesn't make being alone in your life feel any better.
I had started working on my social skills at the end of 2019. I began going out again in January or February of this year and I still haven't made back the progress I lost during the lockdown.
When I had depression I found it very therapeutic to talk about it, to put it out in the open, but I also ran into a lot of people who couldn’t stop talking about their depression. at some point talking about your depression is just as depressing to others as the depression itself
For me, when I'm capable of doing so, being around others in person is one of the best ways to cope with my depression. The pandemic has been massively destructive for my mental health because of this.
From what I gather, there are some studies that show that dietary intervention helps and that piece of it seems to boil down to "some foods promote brain inflammation and this makes depression worse."
My personal opinion is that a lot of what gets currently classified as mental illness would be best seen as a somatopsychic side effects of actual physical illness.
I have a really serious and incurable medical condition. Somatopsychic side effects are a big part of my life. In many cases, I have figured out "This specific mental or emotional thing indicates this specific nutrient deficiency." And the treatment ends up being "Eat foods high in that nutrient."
Having said that, I think a large part of mental illness is really "you are a product of your social environment and the world can sometimes be amazingly talented at driving you crazy."
But to whatever degree mental illness has roots in actual biology, I really think it should be viewed as illness not mental illness.
> I talk about my mental health to anyone who will listen, and also try to those who won’t. I don’t launch into the story of my life and whole disease history but I need everyone to understand that depression is something that affects every aspect of my life.
I can't relate to this at all. Maybe it's a big difference in personality, culture or place in life, but the last thing I want to do is to openly share things that are very personal with people that I barely know.
I can kinda relate to it, but I also understand you. I don't know what the author experienced before being so outgoing with it, but I assume there was a phase of "putting up a happy facade and just carry on". And thats really bad, probably worse than "over-correcting" and being very open about it, atleast for yourself, IMO. :-/
I would never open myself to co-workers like this. I can't even tell most of my friends, because I don't want to burden them with it. But a part of me would still like to, just wants to shout it out and let them know (but can't). Because having nobody to support you with this but yourself and some medication is... not ideal. A "facade" like this, where you don't let people know that you're not fine, is pretty exhausting in the long run. It's like you're a robot, mechanically trying to keep everybody from worrying.
I don't know if the other extreme is any better, but if it works for her and her environment, good for her. ^^
I can relate to this. She is bravely talking about a condition that is still somewhat taboo (mental health) in order to 1) help others understand her problem and 2) make it less taboo. This potentially helps her and others in a similar position. I do the same thing when talking about my son who is struggling with addiction, though I am very selective about who I discuss it with. It's surprising how many people have someone they know in the same position or are in a similar position themselves. But you have to talk about it before you find this out. Talking about it helps you (assuming the person you are talking to has some empathy) and gradually makes it more acceptable for the issue to be discussed in public. Good for her.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure 15 to 30% of the population experience depression. Severity varies, but it's difficult for psychiatry to draw a line between melancholy and depression.
I'm pretty certain there are depressed people who are somehow functional and have unhealthy ways to cope and are able to go through it.
But it doesn't mean that people who are functional can give lessons to those who are not.
Talking about depression is okay, and medicating is good, but in my view there are way more people with depression than we like to admit. So talking about it it'sy okay, but it's more about being able to admit weakness.
We don't like to show vulnerability and weakness, but we should.
That's pretty much me. I have a few friends that have severe depression, some with suicide attempts, some that ruminate a lot at night and have their minds go to scary places. For me I just keep putting on pounds and sometimes I don't sleep at all for a night, but I can usually function "normally". I've had a few bad experiences with psychologist when I was younger which makes me a bit sceptict of them and I don't like opening up to other people. I should probably try some medication but I don't know if I have it in me.
Ok, there's a lot to unpack here. The thing that people are saying about clinging to an identity has truth to it and it can hold you back.
However this is the way I look at it and interpret it. Depression is often an invisible illness. There are physical invisible illness too. Depression is a disability just like any other. It is very possible to a form of chronic treatment resistant depression that lasts your whole life. There is nothing dangerous about "normalizing" the fact that you can have a mental illness that will never go away. My 20s were awful because people who didn't know me were constantly trying to tell me this was a phase or I would "get over it". I didn't. Once I learned to embrace that and not listen to those people I started recovering further. However it still never went away, but I never expect it to go away. It is what it is, it's a pain sometimes, just like having a physical disability is, there are more steps to take, and more things you have to watch for but if you have some support and educate yourself you find ways to navigate it just the way someone with a physical disability does. As you get older you find more areas in life that are not for you, or you need more help in, and so on, and it gets better with age to some extent because of having more of these experiences to draw from and being secure about what your needs are and sticking up for them. It can be lonely as a lot of people try to tell you something else but if you know certain environments lead to hospitalization for you, you shut that out and stop engaging with that crap anymore.
So as someone with chronic TRD I look at what she's saying like this. When you're in "recovery" (I kind of hate that term with mental illness but it is what it is) your environment is very, very important to you. Let's forget the psych part of it now. Is someone with a physical mobility disability going to thrive if they're in a 6th floor apartment with no elevator that's not ADA compliant? No. No question. The disability is relevant to that situation because it's not a good fit for them and will contribute to worsening symptoms. If someone is physically in a wheelchair or physically has a cane or whatever someone may step in and be like, hey, yeah this apartment isn't ADA compliant, let's find you something else, whatever. But with invisible disabilities you don't have anything to go off of.
Now let's go back to that same analogy with someone with depression. People you surround yourself with, again, your environment, can heavily influence how this disorder plays out. Just because someone is "nice" and well meaning, it doesn't mean they are safe. Let me say that again. Someone can be the nicest person in the world, but not safe for you and your symptoms. This is not a value judgement, just like the apartment example is not a value judgement. It's not a good fit and it's better for everyone as someone with a disability that you have a good fit and environment for your disability as things are hard enough already.
But depression is an invisible disability. And depression is stigmatized. And now we can throw gender or other things into the mix. Maybe we don't want to tell someone about this, or people at our job, or whatever. There are different reasons for this. But at the end of the day you will run into disability related issues and people won't be able to contextualize them as disability related issues, and they will snowball, and you most likely will suffer as a result.
By being upfront and honest about your disability it's the same thing as having a wheelchair or a cane, although it's more stigmatized and less well understood in this case. In society we are at the point where we look down on people making fun of those that are physically disabled or not assisting them but it still happens to a crazy extent. A lot of the work is already done in that case. Even if people don't understand physic...
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadI consider myself to be a high-functioning, depressed alcoholic. Most people who know me have no clue I'm depressed.
Keep in mind, I'm not suicidal. I just often find myself feeling sad and like life is ultimately pointless, and I try to find ways to self-medicate so I don't notice the sadness as much. I also feel severely burnt out, even though I enjoy my job which pays well (which is a very strange paradox that I can't explain even to myself).
“Depression affects all personalities and can look very different in various people,” says Jodi Aman, psychotherapist and author of “You 1, Anxiety 0: Win Your Life Back from Fear and Panic.”
“A highly functioning person can be suffering invisibly too,” she says.
https://www.healthline.com/health/depression/this-is-what-hi...
Sick leave is appropriate if a person is sick. Depression can take over your life and make you unable to work. If sick leave does not exist for a depressed person they either become dependent on family or just get fired, risking homelessness, credit problems, increased chances of suicide etc.
In some countries and jobs ... well, that's what happens. But some places treat sick leave differently and if a doctor says you are sick you can get a lot of paid leave in order to recover.
If I could choose between a four-month vacation and not being depressed, I would take not being depressed. I wouldn't even have to think about it.
It's like looking at someone who's sick with a debilitating illness and saying "Wow, I sure wish I could just lie around in bed all day." No, t0mbstone, you don't. All the things you're imagining you'd do with that time—you can't really do them when you're feeling sick all day long.
This isn't just feeling blue. It's darkness, 24/7.
I think there is a very fair point being made about the privilege of having the possibility of a four month vacation to deal with mental health issues. For many people, a four month break from one's responsibilities has a strong likihood of resulting in homelessness and/or permanent harm to employability.
But I was not the only one here who felt that the tone of the comment came a little too close to the "wow, I sure wish I could have a nice vacation if I was feeling sad" business that most of us are very used to hearing from people who have no experience with depression, and think that those who do are just babies who need to stop being sad and go outside.
Making assumptions as to intent or meaning because of percieved tone isn't very charitable. You are correct in that you are far from the only one to do so. I do it sometimes too, but that doesn't make it productive.
I am not saying you shouldn't acknowledge how the tone came accross and explain how frequently that sentiment is faced. I am saying you should do that while assuming the best possible intrepretion of the comment you are responding to.
> ...think that those who do are just babies who need to stop being sad and go outside
While I don't hear that sentiment from other people very often, my own brain frequently says it to me; It isn't very helpful.
I do pay for both short and long term disability, but as far as I know, Long-term disability (LTD) insurers are generally reluctant to approve claims for benefits based on mental illnesses such as depression or bipolar disorder.
Additionally, I would have to deal with the newly acquired stigma of being "that depressed guy with mental issues".
Taking it even further, if someone admits that they have suicidal thoughts, this can easily result in having ALL of their rights completely stripped away. You can be forcibly hospitalized and medicated against your will, entirely on the word of someone else. You will also no longer ever be able to pass background checks, own a weapon, or be hired for many types of jobs.
I know all of this for a fact because it happened to my ex-wife, who developed schizophrenia in her early 20's (after we were already married) and became bi-polar and suicidal. After years of going in and out of the system and being put on countless medications, she ended up killing herself.
The USA really really really hates people who are mentally ill.
Well there is, the wording itself: ".. I was depressed".
I was.
Have you ever had a day at work or during your schooling where, due to burnout, depression, anxiety, lack of direction, laziness, whatever... you just got nothing done? Maybe you wasted all your time reading/writing emails; browsing the web; etc?
I have had some days like that. And if I worked in a factory or a fast food restaurant, I would look at that experience and say, "gee, sure would be nice to be able to sit around doing nothing all day". But those days weren't like a vacation, they sucked. I didn't get any enjoyment or relaxation out of it. I felt crappy all day and even worse at the end of the day for having accomplished nothing. Even days where there's a production emergency and I have to fix bugs under pressure from clients feel better than that.
I've never taken 4 months off from work for mental health but I imagine it feels about like that...
During that entire time, there were only a couple of periods where I had more than a month off of work. Each of those times were when I was in between jobs and was trying to find new work, so I don't really count those periods as vacations.
I'm just so tired of the grind. I just want a long break to do nothing. I want to do nothing until I'm literally sick of doing nothing. I imagine that when/if that happened, I would be able to find my passion again. I'm not sure if it would look anything like the type of work I've been doing for years, but I agree with you. I realize that long term happiness is usually tied to creativity.
Well... If you're indeed depressed, I wish for that too.
However, if you're actually healthy and just making a snarky comment, then I hope you never experience depression- it's hell. No amount of descriptive imagery or keen adjectives can ever convey what it actually feels like, so I understand how people who've never been in its jaws can be so dismissive. After all, just like it's hard to tell that stuffed inside a ballerina's blood-filled shoes are cramped, broken, _aching_ feet, it's hard to wrap your head around pain that isn't readily seen, much less try to empathize with the person feeling it.
The only way I can think of to describe depression is to describe suicidal ideation: when you have a moment, go to your garage, get a hammer, and smash your thumb with it. Not a pleasant thought, right? I'd be willing to bet that if you were to legitimately try, you'd find it almost impossible; the instinct for self preservation is one of the most basic, powerful instincts. Now, imagine a situation where you're in so much pain that this instinct is completely overwhelmed and you actively try to kill yourself to stop it, a situation where you cannot believe you'll ever be able to be happy again, a situation that feels truly hopeless.
That's depression. While suicidal ideation is one of the extremes, depression is something that drives a person to that point.
In all honesty, I sincerely hope neither you nor your loved ones ever have to face such despair. "That they experienced loss is not a gain, and that they experienced pain is not a victory."
But hey, I'm just some guy on the internet- YMMV.
I haven't had a real vacation (more than a week or so of time off) in years.
I have less than 2 weeks worth of PTO sick time accrued. I genuinely wish I had the option of taking 4 months of paid sick leave for mental health reasons. I'm pretty sure that would help me reset my mental state.
I'm not dismissing the reality of it, but reinforcing it to yourself and others around you on a constant basis probably isn't helpful? Constantly ruminating on your depressed state probably isn't good either.
Pretending everything is great probably isn't a good idea or likely even possible (or desirable?), but I'm not persuaded constantly talking about it is a healthy option either.
Though I guess I can appreciate the principled approach of the person writing the article, that would be a disaster for me given how I am (and I don't think it reflects badly on my social circles). I have to struggle to not be a happiness vampire, and this would tip the scales.
>I’ve been in therapy on and off and I’m taking meds (and no, yoga, essential oils and exercise are not sufficient to treat mental illness)
Often neither is medication.
I'd argue this is the basis for all good standup comedy.
"How are you doing?"
The research has shown that being open with others about your experience alleviates the symptoms of depression, including constant rumination. Putting on a happy face for the benefit of others, on the other hand, tends to make it much, much worse.
There are of course confounding factors like whether the person has a victimization complex or whatever, but those need to be handled on their own terms. I don't personally experience anything like that, so I don't know much about it, but my guess is that they would also generally be exacerbated by encouraging people not to talk about it.
It's not about putting a happy face on, but about seeing yourself as a 'depressed person' or as having depression being a core part of your identity. I think that can be harmful - and lead to weird psychologies where being depressed is more comfortable in a way, more familiar.
Being open/honest is good, but making being depressed part of the way you see 'who you are' is likely bad (imo).
Hypervigilance [0] is also a thing - and it can make things worse.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervigilance
It may have been episodal which happens to most people at some point in their.
I can understand the approach ( and not necessarily agree) if it were a chronic life long condition.
But, even if it's not lifelong, it still is. One's identity is constantly changing. Suggesting that a part of a person's identity doesn't really count as much because that part of them might change a few years down the line is an act of erasure. It's a microaggresion directed at the person they are right here and right now. People who experience mood disorders are already swimming in a sea of social stigma; we could really use a little bit less rejection, well-intentioned or otherwise.
I think choosing to have something bad be part of the core of how you view yourself is harmful. There’s some evidence to back this up iirc (things like people involved in shootings being interviewed immediately after and then again months later - those that had issues recovering made it part of their identity, those that didn’t - didn’t).
If there are strategies to avoid harm I want to know what those are. If there are bad strategies I want to throw them away.
People can do what they want, but I wonder if defending and reinforcing someone’s identity as a victim does more harm than good.
In general I think people are way overconfident about what the “right” thing is here and what’s actually happening or what the best way to get out of it is.
I feel like the nuance is being lost in the opposite direction here.
Hello! Could you direct me to said research if you know where it is? I'm not aware of it, and haven't seen it recommended anywhere. I'd be genuinely interested to know if it checks out.
So many decisions and feelings in my life have become framed around statements like "that was because my attention was lost," or "my attention is probably not going to hold up for another hour if I try that," or "I just wasn't paying attention." Every accomplishment and every mistake is colored though a lens of attention, or my lack of it.
The fact that I procrastinate is no longer because "I'm lazy," but "I have a debilitating lack of executive function." It sounds reasonable, and it can be useful to understand the reasons to find better ways of dealing with them. But merely changing the reason from a less specific to more specific one doesn't ultimately solve the problem of procrastination.
It can be tempting to indicate the diagnosis as revealing the one major problem interfering with a normal life, but for me that isn't the case. It provides me with an easy distraction from the problems with how I carry myself and my usual thought patterns.
If I try learning to draw, and reach for learning materials focused on drawing skills, almost none of them will go out of the way to state: your attitude may prevent you from making progress on this lesson. Someone who's in pristine shape and someone who can barely find the motivation to get out of bed each day could read the same book with the intention of learning how to draw and have significantly different outcomes without any explicit indication as to why from just reading the book alone.
The conclusion is - "The majority of people are still uncomfortable when I casually mention my depression, but that doesn’t silence me. I do this not to elicit pity, or to be inspiration porn about overcoming obstacles, but to normalise this – people like me are here, everywhere, you could be me at any point in your life." and that sounds fine to me. If someone asks how you are, it is a positive thing to say you are dealing with depression to normalize it. I would probably not so it for everyone, but to friends and Co workers I think it is ultimately a good thing.
I had the same thought recently when Bikepacking.com posted a short video documentary about two obese women doing long-distance cycling. The women claimed that their goal was to end fat-shaming. Yet maintaining such a heavy weight while engaging in such physically demanding activity is difficult indeed. I therefore got the impression that they had so made being overweight a part of their identities that it was no longer a condition they just happened to be stuck with, rather they were deliberately maintaining it at some half-conscious level.
Also, for a long time mental health was handled atrociously by society so people are (reasonably) sensitive to that and there's maybe a little bit of an overcorrection on this culturally where people are now afraid to suggest that there's any agency here at all.
Hopefully as we get some real empirical understanding of how our minds work we'll be able to relieve a lot of suffering. As it stands, psychology feels like medicine prior to germ theory (at least to me) - we have some treatments that seem to help, but barely know why.
That's not really the way it is, though I can see how you would get that impression. Coping strategies, trying to get the highest level of function out of myself on every given day, and learning how to set myself up for the highest level of function in the future are a big part of my approach to depression, complementary to the reflective, root cause-oriented approach that people associate with talk therapy. My depression varies in a range that includes "not depressed" (I mean, assuming I know what that is) and that is the state I "strive" to achieve as much as possible, using all the means at my disposal.
The thing is, everybody understands the concept of "just try not to be depressed," and they already overestimate its effectiveness, so we don't spend a lot of time talking about it. What people don't get is why it doesn't fix everything, so that's the part we try to explain. To begin with, the reason I put "strive" in quotes: it's not really the right word for trying not to be depressed, because "striving" is sometimes counterproductive and sometimes not even available as a tactic, so you have to try by not-trying, and if that sounds like a catch-22, well, it 90% is.
If you compared chronic depression to a chronic knee injury, you could compare "just try not to be depressed" to using the knee as normally as possible. It helps you get stuff done despite the injury, it's important for maintaining good movement patterns, it helps keep all the muscles around the knee strong so you don't injure yourself further, it's generally a positive thing for promoting whatever degree of long-term improvement is possible (which is near total for some people and not much for others, and you don't know how it will be for you,) but it doesn't cure the injury, and you learn from hard experience that arbitrarily pushing yourself can inflame the injury and set you back.
Depression isn't just “I'm sad all the time”. Functionally, depression is a reduction in the set of actions that one can take. For some, it can be bad enough that “fill out this form, make this phone call, write the reference number on the form then post it” is too much. No, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do that. That's why it's called a mental illness. Sure, they could “just try harder” except oops, that's not on the list either. (See http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html for a good analogy.)
Many depressed people come up with psychological tricks to move necessary tasks from the “unavailable actions” category to the “available actions” category. Possibly the best one I've heard is the “shower heist”: it's not “taking a shower”, it's grand theft of the clean.
If you think depression is “just laziness”, why would someone go to all the effort of reframing basic actions in this way? So please, none of that.
>No, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do that. That's why it's called a mental illness.
That's not the reason it's called a mental illness. It's called an illness because it's a source of suffering. Also, of course there's a reason - otherwise it wouldn't happen.
I welcome an honest dialogue around mental health, but a dialogue requires two people to be dynamic. If the two become mutually incompatible, then there's effectively no way for me to contribute.
There is a lot of people who don't seem to know what depression is because no one really knows what is depression.
It is complex, it is multi-faceted, it can be subtle, it can be overt. It varies from person to person. It varies in causes.
It's important to understand that there exists no weird illness that is causing these symptoms. Instead, the symptoms can have all sorts of roots, but depression is just what we call them.
One day my mom said, "I know you're not faking this because no one would deliberately be this miserable."
It was more comforting than you might imagine.
- - - -
(I debated adding this because I don't want to get drawn into an argument about my own personal history, but FWIW I was cured completely in a single session of hypnotherapy that lasted less than ten minutes. The therapist was Dr. Richard Bandler, co-inventor of Neurolinguistic Programming. (Yes, the NLP that is decried as "pseudoscience".))
In my mind, psuedoscience isn't just missing the "why/how it works" but also the "who/when it helps" and as a result don't have clear statistical backing.
I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed; if they were doing science instead of just theorising, they would've noticed.
(We agree, but we're using different words.)
We don't know that. The best we know is that people who take antidepressants on average experience more improvement than a placebo. We actually don't know who got better from taking antidepressants due to the placebo effect.
> I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed;
This is a good point and I would agree that pseudosciences are generally bad at uncovering bad explanations. I will point out that the "chemical imbalance" theory is still widely believed even though it has been pretty thoroughly debunked.
I think the dichotomy science/pseudoscience if often applied to whole fields when there is often a mix of both within any given field. The prevelence can certainly be highly variable from field to field but it isn't as black and white as we like to suggest.
Explanation of what?
I would say that NLP is non-scientific or pre-scientific, yet you can find practitioners and promoters who claim it is scientific, so to that extent NLP is pseudoscience. The trouble is that detractors use the label "pseudoscience" to cast shade on the whole thing, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The techniques developed under the rubric of NLP are rigorous and repeatable. E.g. the phobia cure or the "Visual Kinesthetic Squash" are like algorithms, in the sense that they are concrete patterns that work to create specific changes. They have been tested and refined and the essential elements boiled down to render specific steps without extraneous elements. A person can learn a pattern like the phobia cure and apply it to cure phobias. So there is a kind of rigor and repeatability that distinguishes NLP from the vast majority of schools of psychology.
> I do doubt his explanations of what it was exactly that helped, and why.
One of the most interesting (IMO) aspects of NLP is that Bandler and Grinder were very careful not to speculate as to how or why these patterns work, they refused to develop theories. The patterns were developed operationally without trying to find explanations or stories for what was going on in the brain that made them work. So no one knows why the "VK Squash" works. No one knows why the phobia cure works. But they do work. And sometimes they don't, so you try something else. It's not scientific, it's operational: do what works.
> Depression isn't just “I'm sad all the time”.
I always see these comments in threads about depression but I almost never see people actually making the comments in question. Can you point to an example in this thread?
I think in my case I was "lucky" that I did not want to take medication against it, any at all, and that my causes of depression did not require it. With a very big warning: It was lucky for my situation, and my apparent causes of depression. I do not want to assert that medication cannot help. My reasons for not taking medication were partly misguided, partly right (again, for my specific case). For example, I had the fear that medication would change my "personality" beyond removing depression, and I did not want to change my personality, because I liked the "good" part of my life, in the intervals where I was not suffering from depression too much (I say "too much" because I'm not sure I was ever really happy during that time). I don't think that's how the medication works, though.
So that left talk therapy, a lot of it. Years of it, sometimes interesting, often difficult. And through all of that, I discovered that I had reasons to be depressed, but I was very far away from seeing and understanding those reasons just on my own. They manifested as "generic" depression instead. Getting to those reasons and talking about them straight cured me. Part of it might have just been understanding my emotions at all. I am probably very lucky in that regard, going from "almost always depressed, sometimes too much to properly function" to "basically cured" by finding out what actually bothered me.
Not everything is rosy now, life does not work that way. Sometimes life situations make me sad, overwhelmed, even desperate, and may still send me into a depressive hole for some time. But when that happens nowadays, I can always attribute a specific reasons to it. I am then depressed because depressing things are happening, and it is an "appropriate" reaction. To go back to the beginning, understanding the obvious reason why you are currently depressed entirely removes the "this is a part of me" aspect. Nobody thinks a person mourning for a loved one suffers from "depression" as a condition, for example. I think I learned a new skill.
Second disclaimer: I can only speak for what I went through, and I am not a professional. It is entirely possible that your depression has other causes, and cannot be fixed by talk therapy. For some, knowing that it worked for me might instill hope, though.
if the topic would ever come up seriously, most everyone would agree that depression is different than regular sadness- but in casual conversation it sometimes seems to warp into depression being a kind of adult form of sadness, almost as if sadness is just for children...
In my opinion, this attitude she's portraying is a dangerous attitude to have. This victimhood seems core to her identity. I'm not trying to shame the condition, I'm trying to say that the condition shouldn't become some core part of your identity. Real phenomenon: Have you ever heard of cancer patients becoming depressed after they've gone into remission, because being a "cancer patient" essentially became a core of their identity, and once they no longer had it they became lost? You don't want your identity to be "depressed person", because the last thing you want is to start feeling like a fraud when the fog starts to lift.
Also, I'm just going to say, it's ok to want your employer to have empathy for you, but you also have to have empathy for them. If you're consistently telling them "well, so, I'm a good employee, but I might drop off the face of the earth for 4 months at a time".. what are they supposed to do?
The identification is, as you say, dangerous. Most people have depressive episodes at least once in their lifetime, and it can leave just as suddenly as it comes.
It makes me wonder if this intense identification slows her recovery or even worse blinds her from seeing its cause; if in this case it has to do with how she is living her life in terms of family, work and social life.
I hope she gets better.
In fact, I see her desire and efforts to normalize depression as an attempt to move away from victimhood.
> You don't want your identity to be "depressed person", because the last thing you want is to start feeling like a fraud when the fog starts to lift.
You also don't want to assume because the fog lifted, you should completely disassemble the support mechanisms you have built. Like with cancer remission, there is a signifant chance of relapse that can be somewhat mitigated by good monitoring amd timely interventions.
Women have long been given prescriptions for antidepressants in cases where "divorce" might have been a better prescription and so on.
And you eventually get beat down by it. Even if it remains clear in your mind that your gender is a factor in things not working even though you work hard and do what you get told is the right thing to do and yadda, you eventually learn that saying it out loud not only will not get you any remedy, it will get you nothing but open hostility from other people.
This is probably something that most of us can relate to at some point in our lives.
A woman says "It's not socially acceptable to talk about your gender being a factor in having trouble making your career work", gets downvoted to hell. People fail to see the irony.
I've been on HN nearly twelve years as part of an overall good faith effort to sort my problems and make my life work and I am quite open about being dirt poor to the point of going hungry and being willing to work and wanting to improve my income and it failing to open doors for me. When I talk about "Most men don't really want to talk to me privately unless they are hitting on me" I get snide comments about how HN has no messaging system, as if people haven't heard of email.
I'm telling you from firsthand experience this is amazingly demoralizing and crazy making and it isn't socially acceptable to talk about it no matter how much you can point to evidence that "My gender seems to be a factor in my intractable poverty" and no matter how carefully you word it to not be blamey or suggest people are doing you dirty with malice aforethought.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I never claimed to be a mod.
I'm not talking about ideology or political theory. I'm talking about "If a specific person's life is in the toilet due to social crap they have no power to fix, it gets pretty fucking depressing. And often it's vastly more socially acceptable to say I'm depressed than to say I'm oppressed and being denied opportunity for BS reasons"
If you aren't the mod, quoting guidelines at me like I'm behaving badly when I'm not is a PC form of ad hominem. Ad hominems are also against the guidelines, FYI.
I know the guidelines. I've been a member for more than a decade.
I'm giving you my take as a woman. But go ahead and do the PC dismissal as more concrete evidence that what I'm saying is both true and utterly socially unacceptable.
I'm aware that women are disadvantaged in some cases, maybe even in companies that put a lot of effort into promoting them. But there are places where the opposite is happening. I used to work in a big tech corporation that was pushing this quite a lot - if they got two applicants, one was male one was female and they were roughly equally qualified, managers were expected to choose the female. This did make the gender diversity quite incredible, even in software engineering teams - I was in a team that was 50-50 male-female (this wasn't a 4 person team either). Have a look at [1], [2], [3], as well.
At the same time I don't want to discount your experience - there are plenty of awful people out there of all genders and races, and there's no excuse for stuff like that. We need to try and rat out discrimination, whichever way it points.
[1] National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track - https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112
[2] Gender discrimination in hiring: An experimental reexamination of the Swedish case - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[3] Man Up and Take It: Gender Bias in Moral Typecasting - https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2019.15459abs...
So if you are a woman, it's not okay to say "My gender is an obstacle to my career success and it's literally crazy making." And if you do the more socially acceptable thing of chalking it up to a personal problem like depression, then some internet stranger is free to malign you and your presumed victim mentality.
If another woman tries to say "Hey, maybe she has a legitimate reason for feeling victimized and it isn't just some kind of neurotic BS" on a male dominated forum where the comment occured, she gets a pile on of downvotes and various replies that more or less boil down to "How dare you make such an observation!"
I wasn't looking for a fight. I made a comment as someone with firsthand experience of how frustrating it can be to try to pursue a career as a woman in a man's world. A zillion people are vilifying me for it.
Why do so many people feel some need to try to shut me down and act like it's a bad faith comment in violation of the guidelines?
The reactions to my observation are over the top. The observation itself is incredibly mild.
I think I'm done here. It is probably a waste of my time to keep responding to comments where there is some kind of presumed guilt on my part. It's all too easy for other people to decide that's evidence of how fighty and irrational and bad I am when none of that is true.
What's true here is that it's an overwhelmingly male forum and it's socially acceptable for millions of people to watch me starve and shrug and say "Not my problem" and it's not socially acceptable for me to say "I would like to stop starving and wish someone would help me figure out the super secret handshake to being allowed to earn a goddamned living. Please and thank you."
I'm done with this ridiculous nonsense for today.
I'm providing these anecdotes because you are providing your anecdotes and I figured it might make a discussion. As I said before, I have read your medium posts and your posts to this forum, and it seems that you are always fighting a battle that doesn't always exist (see your comment above that was flagged), but I feel like you are using the 'dismissal' of people viewing your arguments as irrelevant to the conversation as proof that the battle is happening and you're losing.
I don't understand why you might be starving or not making a living unless you are unemployable or have some type of issue that prevents you from performing at a normal level, as I have not known anyone in tech who could not earn a living unless they were struggling with something that prevented them from being able to work properly.
These are my anecdotes and they aren't facts or truths, I am just showing that the experience I have seen of women in tech does not intersect with your experiences, in a way that makes your points very foreign to me and I'm sure to others who don't share those experiences. Perhaps you are also in an 'experience bubble', and the world as you see it does not always conform to the pattern.
All of this can be an indication of all being fine where I live. Or it can be an indication of my biases being well hidden. And both can be different where you are. “Women don’t know the secret handshake” could be a thing wherever you are based in and it could be that there is some underlying issue you are not aware of. Or it can be both or neither. This is why people flag the comment: our experiences differ wildly and generalizations thus tend to rub a lot of people the wrong way.
Also, as a male, I’ve always had the feeling of “not knowing the secret handshake”. I don’t fit in, I don’t usually get a call when somebody starts something new. I don’t get invited to a night out. Has nothing to do with the gender, I’m just not a pleasant person to be around. I know this and am working on accepting this after years of trying to change it. Might not be applicable in your case, but one can experience very similar treatment that women apparently do in some places for very different reasons.
It has nothing to do with what I was trying to say though.
My point is not that her depression is valid or invalid, it's that forming a sense of victimhood into your core identity is dangerous. I would give the same advice to men or women.
I'm not religious but consider this widely known prayer: "grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference". Victim mindset is the opposite, it's focusing on things you can't control. I personally think it's more useful to do the best with what is in your power.
Through out the entire post she outlined exactly why it should not be normalized. It's a debilitating disorder that should not be left untreated. I think to try and normalize it would leave the impression that severe depression is analogous to having a hard day. This is because to most people that is the closest thing they have experienced to severe depression, but in reality it's very different.
I think by doing this she is actually working against her own interests.
> people like me are here, everywhere, you could be me at any point in your life
That's a very important point, and I believe that's what she meant by "normalise". "Normalise" in the "people with depression are normal people with an illness, not 'ill people', anyone can be affected because it's a normal illness like an infection" kind of way, which more or less equals de-stigmatization, right?
But English is not my first language, it's totally possible I'm reading this the wrong way, feel free to correct me if that's not a possible way to read this article. :-)
I can't really imagine that anyone with depression would really want to "normalise" it in the dictionary way, by suggesting that it should be untreated and a "normal way of life". On the contrary, nobody should have to suffer from this. :-/
For understanding how lifestyle changes can help treat depression, I recommend this: https://youtu.be/drv3BP0Fdi8. He contradicts the author on the point of exercise—it is one of the most potent medicines (though hard to administer to yourself when you’re depressed).
Reflecting on my own (extensive) experiences with depression and its co-conspirators, I think there are two deep fears that inhibit seeking or sticking with treatment:
1. What happens if I don’t get better? Then I’m hopeless.
2. What happens if I do get better (and it’s not enough, or I ruin my progress with a relapse)?
I don’t have a definitive answer to either, but reasonable responses include: trying and failing feels better than languishing/surrendering (not trying is the only thing that’s likely hopeless), it is (or should be) OK to make nonlinear progress in managing chronic illness (depression or otherwise), and the universe/existence is at once magnificent and meaningless so just try to relax and enjoy the ride with your fellow creatures.
Many people are habitual malcontents (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcontent). My parents were like that their entire life, and I picked it up and don’t know how to kick it (mostly try by shutting up). It’s awful way to be, but once it’s in you, good god it’s impossible to feel happy.
It’s not clinical depression, it’s just a miserable disposition that can often be dressed in the guise of woe-is-me, the forever teenage goth kid.
You see, I just did it again.
If anything, people who have experienced depression before would be more capable and resilient when dealing with the pandemic restrictions. Because they're used to dealing with negativity. I know at least that was the case with me and some friends of mine who are also affected.
I had started working on my social skills at the end of 2019. I began going out again in January or February of this year and I still haven't made back the progress I lost during the lockdown.
My personal opinion is that a lot of what gets currently classified as mental illness would be best seen as a somatopsychic side effects of actual physical illness.
I have a really serious and incurable medical condition. Somatopsychic side effects are a big part of my life. In many cases, I have figured out "This specific mental or emotional thing indicates this specific nutrient deficiency." And the treatment ends up being "Eat foods high in that nutrient."
Having said that, I think a large part of mental illness is really "you are a product of your social environment and the world can sometimes be amazingly talented at driving you crazy."
But to whatever degree mental illness has roots in actual biology, I really think it should be viewed as illness not mental illness.
I can't relate to this at all. Maybe it's a big difference in personality, culture or place in life, but the last thing I want to do is to openly share things that are very personal with people that I barely know.
I would never open myself to co-workers like this. I can't even tell most of my friends, because I don't want to burden them with it. But a part of me would still like to, just wants to shout it out and let them know (but can't). Because having nobody to support you with this but yourself and some medication is... not ideal. A "facade" like this, where you don't let people know that you're not fine, is pretty exhausting in the long run. It's like you're a robot, mechanically trying to keep everybody from worrying.
I don't know if the other extreme is any better, but if it works for her and her environment, good for her. ^^
I'm pretty certain there are depressed people who are somehow functional and have unhealthy ways to cope and are able to go through it.
But it doesn't mean that people who are functional can give lessons to those who are not.
Talking about depression is okay, and medicating is good, but in my view there are way more people with depression than we like to admit. So talking about it it'sy okay, but it's more about being able to admit weakness.
We don't like to show vulnerability and weakness, but we should.
However this is the way I look at it and interpret it. Depression is often an invisible illness. There are physical invisible illness too. Depression is a disability just like any other. It is very possible to a form of chronic treatment resistant depression that lasts your whole life. There is nothing dangerous about "normalizing" the fact that you can have a mental illness that will never go away. My 20s were awful because people who didn't know me were constantly trying to tell me this was a phase or I would "get over it". I didn't. Once I learned to embrace that and not listen to those people I started recovering further. However it still never went away, but I never expect it to go away. It is what it is, it's a pain sometimes, just like having a physical disability is, there are more steps to take, and more things you have to watch for but if you have some support and educate yourself you find ways to navigate it just the way someone with a physical disability does. As you get older you find more areas in life that are not for you, or you need more help in, and so on, and it gets better with age to some extent because of having more of these experiences to draw from and being secure about what your needs are and sticking up for them. It can be lonely as a lot of people try to tell you something else but if you know certain environments lead to hospitalization for you, you shut that out and stop engaging with that crap anymore.
So as someone with chronic TRD I look at what she's saying like this. When you're in "recovery" (I kind of hate that term with mental illness but it is what it is) your environment is very, very important to you. Let's forget the psych part of it now. Is someone with a physical mobility disability going to thrive if they're in a 6th floor apartment with no elevator that's not ADA compliant? No. No question. The disability is relevant to that situation because it's not a good fit for them and will contribute to worsening symptoms. If someone is physically in a wheelchair or physically has a cane or whatever someone may step in and be like, hey, yeah this apartment isn't ADA compliant, let's find you something else, whatever. But with invisible disabilities you don't have anything to go off of.
Now let's go back to that same analogy with someone with depression. People you surround yourself with, again, your environment, can heavily influence how this disorder plays out. Just because someone is "nice" and well meaning, it doesn't mean they are safe. Let me say that again. Someone can be the nicest person in the world, but not safe for you and your symptoms. This is not a value judgement, just like the apartment example is not a value judgement. It's not a good fit and it's better for everyone as someone with a disability that you have a good fit and environment for your disability as things are hard enough already.
But depression is an invisible disability. And depression is stigmatized. And now we can throw gender or other things into the mix. Maybe we don't want to tell someone about this, or people at our job, or whatever. There are different reasons for this. But at the end of the day you will run into disability related issues and people won't be able to contextualize them as disability related issues, and they will snowball, and you most likely will suffer as a result.
By being upfront and honest about your disability it's the same thing as having a wheelchair or a cane, although it's more stigmatized and less well understood in this case. In society we are at the point where we look down on people making fun of those that are physically disabled or not assisting them but it still happens to a crazy extent. A lot of the work is already done in that case. Even if people don't understand physic...
Sorry, that's just plain rude.