by Crimson847 » Tue Jan 19, 2016 10:25 pm
It's more that anger and depression are two different ways of reacting to similar problems. The most popular theories behind depression are strongly based around the concept of learned helplessness. The most famous experiment on this subject involved dogs being put in a box with an electrified floor. Some of the dogs were able to push a lever that opened a door allowing them to escape the periodic shocks; others were trapped with no means of escape. The former group all figured the lever out quickly and experienced no discernible long-term effects, while the latter group developed symptoms virtually identical with those associated with depression: apathy, low energy, lack of interest in usually desired activities, and so on. When both groups were then put in boxes with escape doors, the dogs in the experimental group didn't even try to open them--they just laid down on the floor and howled. Trying to get out hadn't worked before, and being trapped in the shock box had convinced them that it would never work in the future either, so they just gave up.
That said, reading about this experiment didn't make me depressed; it made me angry at the scientists, for inflicting clinical depression on a group of dogs. I wasn't trapped in a shock box, and I knew perfectly well who was responsible for the dogs' pain, so I reacted emotionally to the situation in a very different way than they did.
Something I've noticed anecdotally is that depressed people generally have damn good reasons for being depressed. I've lost count of how many people have told me horrific, heartbreaking stories with the same tone of voice you'd use to comment on the weather. They did that because those stories weren't anything new or noteworthy to them--they were so commonplace in their lives that these people were convinced that's just the way life is, and there's nothing to be done about it. When some form of successful therapy breaks that perception and gives them hope again (breaks them out of the box, if you will), often the first visible result is a wave of anger at their current situation and at slights long forgotten. You teach a mouse to speak, and the first thing out of its mouth is a roar after years of being treated like a mouse.
"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