If you have been depressed, what is/was/has been the most difficult symptom, side effect or manifestation of the depression?
If you have walked with someone you love through depression, which part of their depression is the thing that was most difficult for you?
Either way, is there any particular aspect of depression which seems to be dangerous? I suppose with this question, I’m pondering what the specific thing is in depression that leads some people to consider taking their own life as an answer.
I keep thinking I have things I want to write about depression, and instead I just keep coming up with more questions and ponderables. I do have thoughts that aren’t questions, but because I think about so many things both linearly and from lots of different angles (each one in a linear sort of way), I quickly get bogged down by all the different details and have a hard time organizing them enough in my mind to transfer them to written words. So, for the time being, I find trying to write down all my varied thoughts on depression to be, well, depressing.
I would suggest that there are three main reasons why people who are depressed consider suicide. The first is the pain. Emotional pain is comparable to physical pain in many ways; only Tylenol doesn’t work on depression. When the level of pain reaches a certain point and goes on for an extended period of time, it becomes unendurable. The second one is medication. I have personally experienced suicidal thoughts that were brought on by mood stabilizers. Once I stopped the medication, thoughts of killing myself subsided also. But I believe the primary reason is that depression deprives a person of hope.
Kay Redfield Jamison put it nicely in “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”:
“…when people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace.”
Those are just some thoughts on the subject by someone who has struggled with the illness for over three decades.
Be well. Marco http://bipolarized.wordpress.com
Thank you so much, Marco, for your input here. Your analogy with pain is helpful, because pain is also the “known” thing that I keep thinking about to try to get my mind around some of my thoughts on depression.
One of my struggles, I think, in getting around to writing something about depression, rather than just asking questions about it, is that each person’s experience is, in some ways, unique. So, even though are some commonalities, the pain really is personal, and when I get close to making some sort of helpful (to me) generalization, I’m aware of how very not true, and maybe even unfair, my generalization might be to someone else.
I’m finding the comments in response to my questions to be helpful, though, in focusing and narrowing my thoughts. Thanks again for speaking so helpfully out of your personal experience.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been depressed in the clinical sense. Except maybe once, when I went through a few months (winter) of heaviness and sadness that followed a specific sad event that had happened. During that time I just felt slow, heavy, dark and wondered if things would ever get better–loss of hope. And of course, there was the “what if” game that goes on in one’s mind–”if I had only done X instead of Y, then things would have been different.” Also, there was this analysis that I was in a downward spiral, each little bad thing making the next little bad thing more inevitable.
Like Marco said, it was the loss of hope or expectation that things would ever improve that was the worst.
In my case, spring came and I felt better. (Sunshine really does help me to be happier.) Time really did heal a lot of the original hurt (along with myself intentionally making some specific changes to guide my thoughts into more positive channels). I know it isn’t that easy for most people who are truly depressed.
I’m sorry you’re feeling down. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help you feel more hopeful.
If you have walked with someone you love through depression, which part of their depression is the thing that was most difficult for you?
I lost a friend to depression I failed to see the signs. He was happy that day, something perplexing because he wasn’t a happy guy.
The sound of the gun clicking in my closet and the fact that he didn’t see the problem even when I insisted on help, even after seeing a therapist he failed to see it. He knew the gun wasn’t loaded.
It’s hard living with someone who doesn’t see how great life is. I wake happy to see the world and I’m happy to see my home. To live with a man who seeing the world as something against you and sees his home as a prison is painful.
Your other comments touch on this, but I think one of the key things about depression is that it is a very low-energy state. And this can set up a real vicious circle…one day the sun is shining and someone unexpectedly does something nice and you feel a little lifting of your mood…and then you look around at the wreck of your life– maybe just the literal wreck of your living room, where you have been camped on the couch for hours, unable to get to the energy to clean—or the wreck of your desk at work, if you still have a job– and realize you are two weeks behind and in your funk and depression, all of your co-workers are a little leery of you…and that mood can come crashing back down as you get overwhelmed and yes, other big point- feel hopeless. That cycle goes around and around long enough and it can be very, very hard to get out. That’s when chemical “lighteners” can make all the difference….
That’s some my experience, some what I’ve seen…I think it’s quite comparable to drug addiction in the sense that it sometimes, if not always, has to be looked at as a disease, and as such, requiring treatment…in the same way that “just stop drinking” only works for a tiny fraction of people, “just snap out of it” will only work for a tiny fraction of depressed people….
I don’t know if everyone would agree with me, but for a lot of people, where it gets dangerous can actually be as a person comes back up…which is one theory as to why mood stabilizers can be dangerous….
I remember being depressed at one point in college and really, really hoping during a storm that I would be killed by lightning. Just vaporized. But I couldn’t visualize doing anything any more active than lying on my bed to make it happen….
It’s my understanding that, for some people, what can be dangerous is having sunk very, very far, with all of the attendant “negative self-talk” (i.e. what is wrong with me? look at what I’m doing to those around me! I’ve made a mess of things! I am a total f*^$- up! etc….) and maybe attendant problems (job loss, relationship loss, etc.)…and then one starts to get a little energy back…. for some people, this can lead to suicide….they are still depressed, but now they have enough energy to ACT on it….
I only experienced one moderate season of depression that lasted off and on for probably 2 to 3 years. Triggered by a specific event- the hardest part for me- the complete lack of energy/ motivation/ and times when anger would rise up inside of me. I tend to be a very optomistic person with lots of energy so this whole thing drove me crazy. I felt like I was in emotional quicksand,
I am a therapist at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, and I have struggled with depression throughout my life. From my perspective, the most dangerous part of depression (or any mental illness) is hopelessness…probably because it is combined with such low energy/motivation.
When I’m depressed, I have difficulty “fighting” against the negative, untrue, unhelpful thoughts, which feed my hopelessness.
When I’m feeling more stable, however, I can have the same thoughts and recognize them as untrue, and focus on thoughts that are more true.
Hi Michelle, Thanks for your comments here. I’m not blogging much these days, but I continue to think a lot about this topic and appreciate each thought that others add to my thinking. Personally, my struggle with things depression-related is primarily tied into burnout. So I resonate most with the low energy motivation. For me, that feeds the hopelessness, rather than the other way around.
I’m also thinking a lot about the role of others in the lives of those who are depressed. I think there is a lot of value in others helping me to see what I can’t see when I’m depressed.