Piter Lauchy wrote:This is something that always baffled me, and still kinda does. I'm pretty sure I was depressed (and my doctor and therapeut both agreed with me) and numbness was what I deperately longed for. I was of the impression that the negativity of bad feeling far, far outweigh the positivity of good ones, and I wanted to feel just nothing. Death was the only way for me to achieve that. I never got the people who harm themselves just to feel something. I envied them.
To summarize, in my personal experience depression isn't just anger turned inwards. It's anger at fucking everything.
I'm perfectly aware that that's just my own story and others' will differ greatly, but I hope I could give some insight.
Feel free to ask stuff if you're curious, although judging from the other posts here I'm far from the only one who has dealt/is dealing with this. Man, you guys. You're all brilliant. Please get better. :|
My understanding is that the "angry at the world" presentation and the "dead to the world" presentation are both classified as depression, but most likely represent different levels of severity. Notably, "angry" depression is more likely to metamorphose into "passive" depression if left untreated than the other way around--what seems to happen is that beyond a certain point even the anger feels pointless, and you just shut down completely.
This may seem like heaven when you're being tossed about in an emotional storm, but the kind of numbness we're talking about here isn't like the kind you get from using heroin--it's not a comfortable numbness, but a numbness that is somehow more agonizing than the storms of rage and grief were.
Like...imagine that you put your hand on a hot stove. At first you'd feel a lot of pain, and then little or no pain after the nerves burned away, right? So after a while you're not feeling any physical pain, but at the same time you're watching your hand melt and have this vague sense of alarm at the fact that your hand is burning away and you can't feel a thing. You know intuitively that the pain only stopped because it burned away the part of you that cares, that tells you to take your hand away from the burner before you ruin yourself. That part of yourself--the part that cares on some level what happens to you--is gone, and that absence is somehow more miserable than the physical pain ever was.
IamNotCreepy wrote:I used to think I was depressed, but looking back I was (justifiably) unhappy with my situation in life. I had a terrible, low-paying job, and I was lonely and desperate for a girlfriend.
In hindsight, there's a big difference. I think depression is something completely separate from life circumstances and is more to do with how one reacts to their situation. Someone can be in a crappy station and life and still be content (not necessarily happy, with a proportionate reaction to circumstances), and someone could have everything going for them but still be discontent.
There is some variation in people's resilience to mental illness. For instance, many cases of PTSD are due to sexual assault, but most sexual assault victims don't get PTSD as a result. Variation in the strength of people's support networks, self esteem, belief systems etc. account for a lot of this, as do varying genetic predispositions toward mental illnesses.
That said, this doesn't mean that circumstances are "completely separate" from mental illness. Not everyone who experiences a traumatic event develops PTSD, but everyone with PTSD has experienced a traumatic event. Likewise, external circumstances and environment are almost always part of the problem when it comes to depression; they just aren't the entire problem, as evidenced by the fact that the same circumstances don't usually induce depression in everyone who experiences them.
The only time you're likely to see a mood disorder that's
completely unrelated to a person's life circumstances is in certain cases involving severe physical damage to the brain. This is very rare, however.
That said, what
is often the case is that depressed people take a bad situation and turn it into an
absolutely hopeless and intolerable one in their heads. The initial stressors that triggered the condition were genuine problems, but they've since been blown out of proportion due to the effects of the disease. For instance, a kid who's bullied in school and becomes depressed as a result may go from "the kids at school are bullying me and nobody's standing up for me" (an objective truth) to "I am pathetic and no one could ever love me" (which almost certainly isn't true).
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn