Is depression anger turned inward?

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Depression = anger?

Yes
2
5%
No
15
41%
Somewhat
20
54%
 
Total votes : 37

Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby Piter Lauchy » Wed Jan 20, 2016 1:10 am

I chose "Somewhat" up there and here's my personal experience:

I was severely depressed for the first 20 years of my life (I'm 24 now) and I was angry with everyone and everything. It wasn't just anger, it was outright hatred. The main target of my hatred were the people who loved me because they were the reason I wasn't able to end it. I just couldn't do that to them. This of course means that I felt more than hatred for them at the same time, because why would I care about the feelings of people I hated?
So I hated myself for being such a fucking weakling. Too weak to end it, too weak to do something else about it. Too weak/embarrassed to tell anyone who'd be able to help. Until one day, I was at a party hosted by a family my mother and I were friends with. On the way home, I finally broke down and drunkenly confessed everything to her, which eventually led to me getting better.

cmsellers wrote:Depression is the absence of any feelings; it's just numbness.

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. :|
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 20, 2016 5:40 am

Piter:
Depressed people on antidepressants commit suicide at a higher rate than depressed people not on anti-depressants.

The reason given for this is usually that anti-depressants get people far enough out of depression to kill themselves, but I've always thought there is a different reason.

Whenever I've felt suicidal, it's when I've briefly come out of a depression, just enough to be overwhelmed with despair. It's possible that the despair episodes are part of depression, but if you constantly feel self-loathing, I rather suspect that there's something else going on.

There do seem to be a fairly large number of people who claim to be "depressed," who feel as you do, but I've always understood depression to be the complete numbness, and that's also what's expected in the official diagnosis. I don't know if the difference between the two groups has been studied, but I rather suspect that there might be something else involved in cases like yours.
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby Piter Lauchy » Wed Jan 20, 2016 6:16 am

It's possible that I remember it wrong. Those phases of hatred stand out the most, so maybe I remember them to have been more often than they actually were. I mean, I wasn't boiling with rage 24/7. Still, I distinctly remember wanting my emotions gone.
No idea what was wrong with me. The important thing is that's it's as good as gone now.
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The Oatmeal wrote:Live life passionately and love everyone like they are family, because Jesus is always with you. Jesus loves you seriously bigtime. He'd hug you until your eyeballs exploded out of your skull if he ever met you. He'd windsurf across oceans of dead Nazis which he personally slaughtered just to tell you that your new haircut is the bee's knees. [...]
Praise Jesus, especially when it's sunny outside because Jesus would totally be cool with you praising while you get a nice tan.
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby Daggermeister » Wed Jan 20, 2016 8:51 am

I can't speak for others, but I've always felt a lot of anger, both at myself and at everyone else. I was angry as a kid, and angry as a teen. Like many depressed people, I felt relief when I self-harmed. It's only after growing up that most of the anger was replaced by numbness and actually feelings of being depressed, but things are getting better. My family used to deny that I was even depressed; they thought I was being a drama queen when I told them how I felt. At least they acknowledge that what I feel isn't "just a phase" anymore.
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby Tesseracts » Wed Jan 20, 2016 8:55 am

Depression is a real and serious problem, unless it's a teenager.
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby Jack Road » Wed Jan 20, 2016 9:42 am

TLDR
For me total disconnect was a way to escape anger, and it was very obvious. I'd have someone in my face screaming at me, and there was no way to get them to stop. If I broke down and cried it would result in being mocked, if I got angry it would escalate into physical violence. The best response was to remove all emotion and just look at them with the gaze they required, making the sounds and gestures that indicated that I was listening. I was reading a vast amount of literature at that point, and I would often come across depictions of torture victims and spiritual gurus using similar techniques. From Auschwitz to Nepal, from Wizards to Monks. This was a way out of suffering.

A lot of times this wouldn't work. One of the most frustrating examples is that I would be asked if I was going to do what they asked and I would say "okay" in response. Then they would say "no, it is not okay." I think this was a mind game, designed to provoke me into reacting. I would try to rephrase and state that I agreed without using the word "okay." Generally by then it was too late, and physical violence was happening.

I found disconnect to be useful during physical violence as well. I could simply stop fighting and go somewhere else in my head, and it would be over eventually. This had the added benefit of frustrating my attacker, because the whole point was for me to struggle against them.

Once I left that environment, I discovered that disconnect helps you in all sorts of ways outside of abuse. It meant never having to deal with anything or any problem or any person. It meant never finding myself at fault, or trying to correct my behavior. I began to use it more and more frequently.

That is where the depression came from. Not from the disconnect, not from the feeling of numbness. Depression to me was the blanket of sadness on top of the disconnect. Understanding that I was missing out on a lot life had to offer. Understanding that I had significant problems that needed to be fixed, but that I couldn't connect enough to fix them. Basically depression was an understanding that I was damaged, and also a tool I used to convince me to never change. I mean, if you are a piece of shit, you can't ever be better, can you? You just are shit.

Then on top of all that was anger. It used to be anger at other people for allowing this to happen to me. But I discarded that as largely being useless. In the rant I quickly deleted a week ago, I had mentioned that my father is now almost seventy. A weak and frail man with no ability to hurt me, or even come near me, if I don't wish it. All my teenage churning towards thoughts of patricide have died a long time ago. When I talk about my childhood, I hear a lot of anger from other people, but don't feel any myself. Some suggest that itself is an example of something akin to Stockholm. I blame myself and all my anger is towards myself.

So no, depression isn't anger turned inwards. Depression and anger and disconnect just walk hand in hand. Anxiety is in there I guess.

Shits complicated, yo. But somehow not complicated at all.


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Last edited by Jack Road on Thu Jan 21, 2016 8:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby reallifegirl » Wed Jan 20, 2016 3:48 pm

I always associated self-loathing with anxiety more than depression -- I have more experience with the former than with the latter, so admittedly I may just be attributing it to one when it's really both.

My particular "flavor" of anxiety has always come with a huge dose of self critiquing. It's an ugly little voice that always tells me every decision is wrong. If I'm holding back from doing something or being quiet/lazy, it says do the thing. Do something. Get up. Speak up. Stop being a fucking coward/lazy-ass. Stop it. Just fucking do something, Jesus. And then when I actually do something it says: Why the fuck did you do that? That was terrible. It was awful. It was the wrong thing to do. You did it wrong. No one will like you if they know that you're like this. You're embarrassing.

The times I've experienced depression, or at least version I've experienced, has been a bit more about apathy. It's harder to feel happy and easier to feel sad, and everything feels more muted. I don't take care of myself, because who gives a shit? I stay at home and don't talk to people, because who cares? Nothing matters, so nothing I do matters.

Anxiety makes me care way too much, but depression makes me not really care much at all.
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby IamNotCreepy » Wed Jan 20, 2016 7:33 pm

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.

This is not to say that this is due to some moral failure, or that all someone suffering from depression needs is a change of perspective. I'm guessing that due to chemical imbalances or conditioning or whatever, depressed people just don't (or can't) view their circumstances in objectively outside of their feelings.

That's why I think the mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is so effective. It encourages people to look at their circumstances and to react in a purposeful manner rather than reacting automatically based on previous behavior.

Of course, I am speaking from the outside looking in, so I may be totally wrong.
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby Crimson847 » Wed Jan 20, 2016 9:24 pm

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).
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby KleinerKiller » Thu Jan 21, 2016 12:15 am

I feel the need to post this here. It's well worth taking the time to watch, especially if you've posted a personal experience in this thread.

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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby Piter Lauchy » Thu Jan 21, 2016 3:53 am

KleinerKiller wrote:I feel the need to post this here. It's well worth taking the time to watch, especially if you've posted a personal experience in this thread.


Well, this made me cry like a bitch manly man.
That was great. Thanks for posting.
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The Oatmeal wrote:Live life passionately and love everyone like they are family, because Jesus is always with you. Jesus loves you seriously bigtime. He'd hug you until your eyeballs exploded out of your skull if he ever met you. He'd windsurf across oceans of dead Nazis which he personally slaughtered just to tell you that your new haircut is the bee's knees. [...]
Praise Jesus, especially when it's sunny outside because Jesus would totally be cool with you praising while you get a nice tan.
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby KleinerKiller » Thu Jan 21, 2016 7:04 am

Piter Lauchy wrote:
KleinerKiller wrote:I feel the need to post this here. It's well worth taking the time to watch, especially if you've posted a personal experience in this thread.


Well, this made me cry like a bitch manly man.
That was great. Thanks for posting.


My pleasure. Zoey's genuinely one of the absolute nicest and most inspirational people on the Internet, and I can't recommend her channel highly enough, whether you just want a good laugh or you're dealing with horrid shit like depression; her stuff helped get me through a few pretty dark times. That video in particular is legendary for touching and helping everyone who watches it. She also regularly gives anyone who asks detailed advice on dealing with depression, anxiety, and other issues through her Tumblr, despite it making her more aware of her own problems, just because it helps those people.

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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby Tesseracts » Thu Sep 13, 2018 8:07 am

So I was thinking of making a new thread when I vaguely remembered I had made this one already. I don't really remember what I wrote here. Maybe I'll read it later. Something about depression probably. I think other people might have replied. That doesn't really matter though, what other people think isn't important.

Anyway in the past I have taken medications that treated my depression but made me irritable and blow up at people for no reason. So I stopped taking them, thinking I was reacting poorly to the medication. Not long ago I spoke to a friend who is a pharmacist and he said this is normal when someone is recovering from depression because antidepressants tend to make you feel energetic before they make you feel happy.

I haven't made any changes to my medication (Zoloft 50 mg) recently, but I have been making progress in therapy and in life. I'm less depressed. I'm also increasingly angry for no reason. Today I got mad because a hotel staff member was rude to me and yelled at me to get out of the office after I asked for the wifi password. This is a reasonable thing to be mad about but I could not stop being mad. It was really unpleasant. I had a snack and I felt a bit better but I wasn't really that hungry. All day I've just been mad about everything and I'm sick of it.
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Re: Is depression anger turned inward?

Postby Piter Lauchy » Thu Nov 15, 2018 12:22 am

One thing I've heard about and experienced is that depressed people don't take their own emotions serious enough. For example, "Nah, don't reach out to other people, they have lives and no time for your whiny bullshit, just suck it up".
As I slooo*wly get better, I don't experience more anger, but my bullshit tolerance limit has drastically decreased. In practice, this means that I just don't spend as much time with energy draining things or people as before.
Maybe your're experiencing anger that you'd have dismissed before and which now comes back with full force as you start to take yourself more serious. In light of that, this might be a good sign.

*ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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The Oatmeal wrote:Live life passionately and love everyone like they are family, because Jesus is always with you. Jesus loves you seriously bigtime. He'd hug you until your eyeballs exploded out of your skull if he ever met you. He'd windsurf across oceans of dead Nazis which he personally slaughtered just to tell you that your new haircut is the bee's knees. [...]
Praise Jesus, especially when it's sunny outside because Jesus would totally be cool with you praising while you get a nice tan.
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