9 ms·

Depression Classic

74 points by lermontov 10y ago

aaron-lebo 10y ago
Depression is a funny thing to write about. If someone is depressed reading about someone else's depression is preaching to the choir, but if they aren't or have never experienced it, it's hard to understand what's going on. But for both groups it's kind of crushing because it reminds you that some people just might not ever be happy and it's not really their fault and that's hard in a culture which says "be happy" or "just do X and you'll be happy". I saw the article mentions Noonday Demon. I've never read it but a book that cites it and I personally found a depression classic is Lincoln's Melancholy. It is remarkable both how miserable he was and how far he drove himself because of or in spite of it. I don't think you can know Lincoln, the Civil War, or his impact on the US without understanding his depression. Unfortunately it also makes a lot of modern politicians look very superficial and fake in comparison. https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Melancholy-Depression-Challenged-President/dp/0618773444 https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Melancholy-Depression-Challe...
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Yup. Telling someone with depression to just "be happy" is like telling a paraplegic to just get up and walk.
  - umberway 10y ago
    I agree. Yet scientific and/or moral discussions of depression and other mental disorders are becoming increasingly taboo.
  - SketchySeaBeast 10y ago
    "Just run it off."
    - webmaven 10y ago
      Yeah. "No pain, no gain" also comes to mind.
- labrador 10y ago
  In my opinion it doesn't have a lot to do with happiness or unhappiness. Unhappiness is an emotion that at least fills the void. I'm unhappy now and I'm happy about that because I have a plan to get happy. Clinical depression is about the void, the nothingness, can't find a reason to live and don't want to live because this emptiness and emotionless existence is dreadful.
  - NikolaeVarius 10y ago
    I find that stoicism helps with that feeling. Forces you to at least be somewhat functional.
    - Sundiata 10y ago
      Learning about stoicism definitely changed my outlook and attitude towards a lot of things, overall a much calmer and happier person even months into practicing the techniques
  - aswanson 10y ago
    Do you think it has to do with being detached socially from other people, even family members?
    - jschwartzi 10y ago
      For me it had more to do with being detached from myself.
    - lazyasciiart 10y ago
      No.
    - cflewis 10y ago
      My experience with depression is that it does what it can to feed itself. Whatever triggers it (for me I am certain it is brain chemistry) doesn't really matter. Depressed people detach socially from their support network because that feeds the depression, and any plausible explanation feels as true as any law of physics. All you have to do is pick one: "These people don't care about me/They can never understand/They are better off without me as I will just hurt them." One way I describe depression is that it's a detachment from reality. Whatever reality you are actually in, depression bends and warps it to such a degree that mentally healthy people could not understand even when described to them.
- agency 10y ago
  I think David Foster Wallace's description of depression is one of the best I've read. “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
labrador 10y ago
> Now you can no longer figure out what it is that moves other people to bustle about out there in the world, doing errands, rushing to appointments, picking up a child from school. You have lost the thread that pulled the circumstances of your life together. Nothing adds up and all you can think about is the raw nerve of pain that your mind has become—and, once again, how merciful it would be to yourself and others to extinguish this pain. We need another word for what is described above. Most people understand ordinary depression, because most people feel down sometimes and they have techniques for getting out of it. They try to get the "clinically depressed" person to try these techniques. When I was in my cycle of doom I would set as my goal of the day to get up and take a shower and often couldn't accomplish it. Forget doing the dishes. I knew I needed help, but without medical insurance I couldn't afford it and didn't have the energy or will to try to get medical insurance. Finally, my family intervened and I was locked up as a danger to myself after I verbalized a few dangerous thoughts. I'm on insurance now and taking medication and things are much better. I'm not necessarily happy, but at least the "black dog" is gone.
- jf 10y ago
  I'm glad that things are much better for you. Thanks for keeping up the fight.
  - labrador 10y ago
    Thank you. You be well too.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I have a lot of respect for people that are even able to maintain for a while during that state. My own experience with this (at least from all the descriptions of clinical depression I've heard it sounds the same) was with a bad interaction with medication as far as I know (Mucinex DM, absurdly enough). It started by me having a pretty droll day at work, but the first indications something was really wrong (looking back), were when I went home, and literally wanted to do nothing. I didn't want to play or deal with with my young children or significant other, didn't want to eat dinner, didn't want to watch TV or read a book, or use the computer for any reason. I literally wanted nothing, and the best way to achieve that seemed to be to go lay in bed, even though I didn't want to sleep either. The second day was much the same, but I also realized that I didn't like my job, or career, and wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life either. Needless to say, this didn't improve my outlook compared to the prior day. The third day, when I woke up, I was scared. I wasn't sure what was going on, but I stopped taking the congestion medication just in case and because it was the only thing I could think of that had changed recently. I was feeling mostly normal within 24 hours or so. I can easily see how in that state of mind things could escalate. Almost a decade later, I still consider it one of the scariest episodes of my life. Interestingly, 9-10 months later, a friend who I had told about the incident right after it happened told me the same thing had just happened to him from the same medication. I'm glad you got everything under control. The brain is a crazy organ.
will_pseudonym 10y ago
A great description of the feeling of depression can be found in the Netflix stand-up special of Neal Brennan, 3 Mics. (He's also the co-creator of Chappelle's Show, and quite funny.) It's really difficult to convey the feeling of depression to people who don't have first or second hand experience with it, and I think Neal did a great job with that task.
- spangry 10y ago
  The author of 'Hyperbole and a Half' also gives a fantastic explanation (the whole blog post is well worth a read, http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/depression-part-two.html http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/depression-...): "I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler. I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was. But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same... I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience. Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything."
  - will_pseudonym 10y ago
    I totally agree. I bought her eBook and binged it in one day. Reading about her initial escape from depression was great, laughing at the absurdity of a kernel of corn under her fridge. I should revisit that book soon.
ravenstine 10y ago
It sounds like the book in reference is talking more about clinical depression than, well, depression as a phenomenon. I'm not going to pretend like I don't still have issues to work out, but I've been heavily depressed many times in my life, and I eventually thought of an interesting question that changed my outlook: Watch some of those old home videos of you from when you were around 7 years old. The age isn't that important, but I think that's a golden number in this case. Look at that boy or girl who is playing in the fountain, popping bubbles, imagining dogfights with toy airplanes, and shouts "YEAH!" when asked if they want to ride the sled down the hill again. Is that child fundamentally who you are? Why not? Granted, this won't apply to everyone. I've known people personally whose early childhoods were lousy. But there are lots of people out there who, like me, are fundamentally happy, curious, and enthusiastic, but were lied to by society. Society told us big lies, such as that we can't be truly happy unless we have things to demonstrate our status. We're told that, by a certain age, we should have a significant other, cars, gadgets, a "career", and more. If we get the sequence wrong, or it doesn't happen on time, we disappoint ourselves. Even when we get those things, they're rarely as satisfying to have as we thought they'd be. This is largely because we sacrificed our inner child in order to seek the approval of everyone else, only to discover that most people around you don't actually care if you have any of those things. It doesn't matter how many things you have to show off your status -- if you're being a miserable person, you're not going to get the approval or acceptance that you're seeking. The idea of "loving yourself" first seems cliche and silly, and I thought it was, but there's a lot of truth in it. Taking a look back to childhood, before you were tainted by negative experiences, might give you the best insight into who you are. I began to feel much happier the more I got in touch with that 7 year old boy who only needed the unconditional love from his parents and an unabashed imagination. Getting in touch with your child doesn't mean behaving like a child, but it does mean learning how you could once experience happiness without the need to show status, own the latest fancy toys, have a "respectable" job, have an attractive partner, a backyard, retirement plan, yada yada yada. The irony of learning who you are through your child, and rejecting the lies of society, is that you can re-learn to be self-amused and radiate those positive emotions, which will get you far more approval and status than you could get with anything else. It might not be true for everyone, sure. But if that "missing piece" to your life has been inside you the whole time, and you aren't seeking it out, that's tragic. P.S. I know that clinical depression is not the same. I have first-hand experience with this, and I certainly wouldn't tell someone with serious issues in their life or inexplicable depression to just "be happy".
etangent 10y ago
> “Men,” she writes, “have cannily figured out how to sidestep the implication of moral failing that attaches to mental illness—as well as the specific criticism of self-indulgence that is attributed to more introspective accounts of this condition—by insisting on a force outside themselves, or on a purely genetic susceptibility.” I stopped reading here.
- rconti 10y ago
  I didn't, but perhaps I should have. From there it delved into how truly horrible and abusive her childhood was. Which, to me, is much more relatable to outsiders than having depression with no obvious cause. Like apparently men are genetically impervious to.
btown 10y ago
> Writing about a lack is difficult, and perhaps no one has ever captured exactly what it feels like to be depressed, simply because one can’t describe a negative. For those who haven't seen it, Allie Brosh's comics on the subject come as close as any other work I've found to "describing the negative" here: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-... http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part-two.html http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-par... Often the best way to grapple with the intangible is to do so through humor.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  I tried to describe it on my blog a little over a year ago: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/10/what-it-is-like-to-live-with-clinical-depression/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/10/what-it-is-like-to-live-w... It's definitely a difficult subject to put into words, though. Maybe comics are a better format?
- mrec 10y ago
  Allie Brosh is wonderful. Her toys analogy in part 2, and "Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything" is just so perfectly spot-on.

74 points by lermontov 10y ago

Depression is a funny thing to write about. If someone is depressed reading about someone else's depression is preaching to the choir, but if they aren't or have never experienced it, it's hard to understand what's going on. But for both groups it's kind of crushing because it reminds you that some people just might not ever be happy and it's not really their fault and that's hard in a culture which says "be happy" or "just do X and you'll be happy". I saw the article mentions Noonday Demon. I've never read it but a book that cites it and I personally found a depression classic is Lincoln's Melancholy. It is remarkable both how miserable he was and how far he drove himself because of or in spite of it. I don't think you can know Lincoln, the Civil War, or his impact on the US without understanding his depression. Unfortunately it also makes a lot of modern politicians look very superficial and fake in comparison. https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Melancholy-Depression-Challenged-President/dp/0618773444 https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Melancholy-Depression-Challe...

quantumhobbit 10y ago
Yup. Telling someone with depression to just "be happy" is like telling a paraplegic to just get up and walk.
- umberway 10y ago
  I agree. Yet scientific and/or moral discussions of depression and other mental disorders are becoming increasingly taboo.
- SketchySeaBeast 10y ago
  "Just run it off."
  - webmaven 10y ago
    Yeah. "No pain, no gain" also comes to mind.
labrador 10y ago
In my opinion it doesn't have a lot to do with happiness or unhappiness. Unhappiness is an emotion that at least fills the void. I'm unhappy now and I'm happy about that because I have a plan to get happy. Clinical depression is about the void, the nothingness, can't find a reason to live and don't want to live because this emptiness and emotionless existence is dreadful.
- NikolaeVarius 10y ago
  I find that stoicism helps with that feeling. Forces you to at least be somewhat functional.
  - Sundiata 10y ago
    Learning about stoicism definitely changed my outlook and attitude towards a lot of things, overall a much calmer and happier person even months into practicing the techniques
- aswanson 10y ago
  Do you think it has to do with being detached socially from other people, even family members?
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    For me it had more to do with being detached from myself.
  - lazyasciiart 10y ago
    No.
  - cflewis 10y ago
    My experience with depression is that it does what it can to feed itself. Whatever triggers it (for me I am certain it is brain chemistry) doesn't really matter. Depressed people detach socially from their support network because that feeds the depression, and any plausible explanation feels as true as any law of physics. All you have to do is pick one: "These people don't care about me/They can never understand/They are better off without me as I will just hurt them." One way I describe depression is that it's a detachment from reality. Whatever reality you are actually in, depression bends and warps it to such a degree that mentally healthy people could not understand even when described to them.
agency 10y ago
I think David Foster Wallace's description of depression is one of the best I've read. “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

labrador 10y ago

> Now you can no longer figure out what it is that moves other people to bustle about out there in the world, doing errands, rushing to appointments, picking up a child from school. You have lost the thread that pulled the circumstances of your life together. Nothing adds up and all you can think about is the raw nerve of pain that your mind has become—and, once again, how merciful it would be to yourself and others to extinguish this pain. We need another word for what is described above. Most people understand ordinary depression, because most people feel down sometimes and they have techniques for getting out of it. They try to get the "clinically depressed" person to try these techniques. When I was in my cycle of doom I would set as my goal of the day to get up and take a shower and often couldn't accomplish it. Forget doing the dishes. I knew I needed help, but without medical insurance I couldn't afford it and didn't have the energy or will to try to get medical insurance. Finally, my family intervened and I was locked up as a danger to myself after I verbalized a few dangerous thoughts. I'm on insurance now and taking medication and things are much better. I'm not necessarily happy, but at least the "black dog" is gone.

jf 10y ago
I'm glad that things are much better for you. Thanks for keeping up the fight.
- labrador 10y ago
  Thank you. You be well too.
kbenson 10y ago
I have a lot of respect for people that are even able to maintain for a while during that state. My own experience with this (at least from all the descriptions of clinical depression I've heard it sounds the same) was with a bad interaction with medication as far as I know (Mucinex DM, absurdly enough). It started by me having a pretty droll day at work, but the first indications something was really wrong (looking back), were when I went home, and literally wanted to do nothing. I didn't want to play or deal with with my young children or significant other, didn't want to eat dinner, didn't want to watch TV or read a book, or use the computer for any reason. I literally wanted nothing, and the best way to achieve that seemed to be to go lay in bed, even though I didn't want to sleep either. The second day was much the same, but I also realized that I didn't like my job, or career, and wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life either. Needless to say, this didn't improve my outlook compared to the prior day. The third day, when I woke up, I was scared. I wasn't sure what was going on, but I stopped taking the congestion medication just in case and because it was the only thing I could think of that had changed recently. I was feeling mostly normal within 24 hours or so. I can easily see how in that state of mind things could escalate. Almost a decade later, I still consider it one of the scariest episodes of my life. Interestingly, 9-10 months later, a friend who I had told about the incident right after it happened told me the same thing had just happened to him from the same medication. I'm glad you got everything under control. The brain is a crazy organ.

will_pseudonym 10y ago

A great description of the feeling of depression can be found in the Netflix stand-up special of Neal Brennan, 3 Mics. (He's also the co-creator of Chappelle's Show, and quite funny.) It's really difficult to convey the feeling of depression to people who don't have first or second hand experience with it, and I think Neal did a great job with that task.

spangry 10y ago
The author of 'Hyperbole and a Half' also gives a fantastic explanation (the whole blog post is well worth a read, http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/depression-part-two.html http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/depression-...): "I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler. I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was. But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same... I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience. Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything."
- will_pseudonym 10y ago
  I totally agree. I bought her eBook and binged it in one day. Reading about her initial escape from depression was great, laughing at the absurdity of a kernel of corn under her fridge. I should revisit that book soon.

ravenstine 10y ago

It sounds like the book in reference is talking more about clinical depression than, well, depression as a phenomenon. I'm not going to pretend like I don't still have issues to work out, but I've been heavily depressed many times in my life, and I eventually thought of an interesting question that changed my outlook: Watch some of those old home videos of you from when you were around 7 years old. The age isn't that important, but I think that's a golden number in this case. Look at that boy or girl who is playing in the fountain, popping bubbles, imagining dogfights with toy airplanes, and shouts "YEAH!" when asked if they want to ride the sled down the hill again. Is that child fundamentally who you are? Why not? Granted, this won't apply to everyone. I've known people personally whose early childhoods were lousy. But there are lots of people out there who, like me, are fundamentally happy, curious, and enthusiastic, but were lied to by society. Society told us big lies, such as that we can't be truly happy unless we have things to demonstrate our status. We're told that, by a certain age, we should have a significant other, cars, gadgets, a "career", and more. If we get the sequence wrong, or it doesn't happen on time, we disappoint ourselves. Even when we get those things, they're rarely as satisfying to have as we thought they'd be. This is largely because we sacrificed our inner child in order to seek the approval of everyone else, only to discover that most people around you don't actually care if you have any of those things. It doesn't matter how many things you have to show off your status -- if you're being a miserable person, you're not going to get the approval or acceptance that you're seeking. The idea of "loving yourself" first seems cliche and silly, and I thought it was, but there's a lot of truth in it. Taking a look back to childhood, before you were tainted by negative experiences, might give you the best insight into who you are. I began to feel much happier the more I got in touch with that 7 year old boy who only needed the unconditional love from his parents and an unabashed imagination. Getting in touch with your child doesn't mean behaving like a child, but it does mean learning how you could once experience happiness without the need to show status, own the latest fancy toys, have a "respectable" job, have an attractive partner, a backyard, retirement plan, yada yada yada. The irony of learning who you are through your child, and rejecting the lies of society, is that you can re-learn to be self-amused and radiate those positive emotions, which will get you far more approval and status than you could get with anything else. It might not be true for everyone, sure. But if that "missing piece" to your life has been inside you the whole time, and you aren't seeking it out, that's tragic. P.S. I know that clinical depression is not the same. I have first-hand experience with this, and I certainly wouldn't tell someone with serious issues in their life or inexplicable depression to just "be happy".

etangent 10y ago

> “Men,” she writes, “have cannily figured out how to sidestep the implication of moral failing that attaches to mental illness—as well as the specific criticism of self-indulgence that is attributed to more introspective accounts of this condition—by insisting on a force outside themselves, or on a purely genetic susceptibility.” I stopped reading here.

rconti 10y ago
I didn't, but perhaps I should have. From there it delved into how truly horrible and abusive her childhood was. Which, to me, is much more relatable to outsiders than having depression with no obvious cause. Like apparently men are genetically impervious to.

btown 10y ago

> Writing about a lack is difficult, and perhaps no one has ever captured exactly what it feels like to be depressed, simply because one can’t describe a negative. For those who haven't seen it, Allie Brosh's comics on the subject come as close as any other work I've found to "describing the negative" here: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-... http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part-two.html http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-par... Often the best way to grapple with the intangible is to do so through humor.

smacktoward 10y ago
I tried to describe it on my blog a little over a year ago: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/10/what-it-is-like-to-live-with-clinical-depression/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/10/what-it-is-like-to-live-w... It's definitely a difficult subject to put into words, though. Maybe comics are a better format?
mrec 10y ago
Allie Brosh is wonderful. Her toys analogy in part 2, and "Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything" is just so perfectly spot-on.