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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".))
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.
>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.
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.
> 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?
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 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. ^^
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, that's just plain rude.
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 physical disability they are pressured at least to not be an asshole and pressured via ADA to help people out. The reality is that this does get a lot trickier and people who are really just surface level pressured by society and legal issues to help someone out in the workplace, well, you're going to run into a wall at some point with a physical disability too.
By talking about your disability it's a litmus test to gauge what people are "safe" for you. It will help you get further in your personal and professional life if you have a feeling for who will be helping you because they either have a better understanding (usually people personally impacted by going through it themselves or having a loved one) or someone who has an open enough mind to want to learn about it. The reality is that a lot of people don't fit into those categories. And in many many personal relationships and environments you will fail if you try to get people to understand who don't.
I'm guessing some of the people who are having a reaction to this article are people who just are in the camp of not being "safe" people and need to think about it more or spend time with a loved one who is affected by these things to understand this stuff further. Use the physical disability analogy I used to challenge your views on this subject.
People who don't understand this often think I'm passing value judgements on "perfectly nice" people. I'm not. I just need to cultivate the people around me in the same way that I need to cultivate a space that's physically accessible to me if I had a physical disability. The people you surround yourself can effect your emotions and depression is an emotional disability. If my health suffers when I'm around someone it's not going to do us any good for me to force it for their benefit or for appearances, especially when the risk for me is that I could end up hospitalized. You need to keep very strict boundaries as someone with a disability like this and since people don't contextualize it in the same way that they do a physical disability people are often berated and misunderstood for it, a bit like I see in the comments here. She needs to keep herself safe. It can be that you get wrapped up into the identity thing and I can't speak for her but being able bodied/disabled is just as relevant to your outward way of interacting to the world as is your gender expression or so on and you can't leave it off the table, nor should you really if you want to be healthy.
