Depression

Amber Rhea, Penny Red and Caroline "Uncool" have all written exceptional posts about depression and what it's like, and some of the issues that the rest of the world has with it. In addition, there are some excellent comments by people such as Jane Brazen at Amber's post, or Natalia Antonova and Aspasia on Caroline's post. (It's probably worth avoiding the arseholes who commented on Penny's post, some of whom were - to say the least - very unsupportive!)

I'm currently reading through How to Get it Done When You're Depressed, by Julie A. Fast and John D. Preston, Psy.D., ABPP . The subtitle is "50 Strategies for Keeping Your Life on Track", and it's written from Ms Fast's personal experiences suffering from depression. I posted about it in December when my mother sent me a clipping from a magazine about it. I haven't got very far with it yet but already a lot of the problems that depression causes, that Ms Fast writes about are deeply familiar to me, and some of the suggestions for techniques to handle them are familiar as things that I have learned through experience to employ.

Depression has been a part of my life at least since I was a teenager, although I didn't know it at the time. I mean - feeling miserable, writing lots of angsty poems, listening to gloomy music, etc - that's just what teen angst is all about, isn't it? It's just what teenagers do, right? And of course, if you've been there, then there's always a subtext from adults around you of, "Just wait until you're older, and you have real problems to deal with, kiddo!" (Or, as Simpsons bluesman "Bleeding Gums" Murphy put it, "You play pretty good for someone with no real problems!")

In many ways, for at least 10 years that was my relationship with depression. It was always just a lot of pretentious angst, like a stupid fucking teenager. There was always a narrative whereby I had no right to feel down about anything, and if I did then I was just being a self-indulgent prat. That was what society seemed to be telling me, it was what seemed to be the subtext for other people's reactons to me (when in fact, as Julie Fast points out, depression is a very selfish illness - they were reacting to the selfishness that it induces). Because I thought everything was normal, and that everyone else was obviously able to cope, and I wasn't, I felt like just a huge failure. So the end result of all that was that not only did I feel down, but I blamed myself for feeling down. Natalia mentions people snapping their fingers and saying 'snap out of it". Hell, I was doing that to myself!

And of course, what people miss - what I was missing - is that when you have depression, there is no "out of it" to snap to. One of the reviewers on the Amazon page for Get It Done When You're Depressed wrote that, "The author herself states in the introduction that she continues to suffer from chronic depression, and I can't help wondering if it's the very strategies in this book that are keeping her from recovery." The thing is, there is no recovery from depression in many cases: it's a chronic illness and you're stuck with it for life. That reviewer talks about having had stress-related depression, which is at once the same and not the same as chronic depression. We generally don't talk about recovering from bipolar disorder, because the "up" phase is generally recognised as a part of the illness cycle; unipolar depression is much the same, except that the stable periods don't look like part of a cycle. So there is no "out of it", there is only "get through it, and cope with it".

Another reason there is no "out of it" to snap to, is that depression isn't just a mood illness. It's a system-wide malfunction of the mental states, that results in extreme tiredness, general lethargy, self-hatred, indecision, loss of focus and many more really groovy things that just generally fuck you over. I sometimes talk about depression feeling like being in the wrong gear on a mountain bike: sometimes it's like the pedals are whirring round, and the bike hardly moves; other times, it's just so difficult to make the pedals turn that you can't get any sort of momentum into the drive wheel anyway. The "snap out of it" meme assumes that there is in fact a "right gear" to be in, and it's just a question of finding that gear through mental willpower. But depression is a broken mountain bike: they forgot to put in all the in-between gears where the right gear would be found.

When I finally got the diagnosis, as I mentioned on Amber Rhea's, I believed at that time that anti-depressants were mood-altering and personality-altering drugs and I didn't want any of it. But just the diagnosis itself helped. I mentioned earlier that I'd felt like everyone else was able to cope, and I couldn't, and somehow that it was my fault and I was a failure, or else, I was just imagining it all. Well, here finally was proof that it was real, I wasn't imaginng it, and there was a reason why I couldn't cope the way everyone else could. It wasn't just me being pathetic. If I was pathetic, then there wa snothing I could do about it. But here was something tangible, nameable, definite, distinct: something I could fight and say, "I will not let you win!"

That helped for a couple of years, but it's documented on this blog how I had a severe breakdown a couple of years ago, and I've been on the SSRI tablets since then; but they are just another part of my, "I will not let you win!" So are the techniques that are familiar from Ms Fast's book.

Both Amber and Caroline, and also some of their commenters, talk about how people assume they know what it's like because they've been miserable at times in their lives, or they believe in the power of mind over matter and a Positive Mental Attitude. People who do that drive me up the wall, too. I don't know how to get through to them that sometimes, it's a triumph and a mark of utmost strength just to get to the end of the day without dying by your own hand. How do you get through to people that it's not just about feeling down, gloomy, miserable? That it is a system-wide malfunction with genuine physical consequences? That sometimes the only way I keep going is the sheer grim determination to keep putting one foot in front of another, with no real hope in my heart that anything good will be at the end of the journey? As Amber, and Caroline, both point out, if you haven't been there, then you don't know what it is. Maybe, through reading the words of the erudite amongst those with depression (like Caroline, or Amber, or any of those authors Caroline referenced in her post), you can imagine it, catch a glimpse of it, but to know, you have to have been through the endless months, days, hours, that are depression.