The new myth about depression

[matrixmann]

What can deeply disturb you about the "newly" created consciousness about "depression" is: The acting around it is like it's destiny to be depressed. Like it's something which drops from the sky and hits you or it doesn't hit you. And it's a constant thing which you're either born with as a temper or you're not.
This is completely wrong in most cases. The depression is there for a reason. Its origin lies in the outside world, in some circumstances which the brain simply reacts to. The human brain reacts with depression to something.
If you erase these outside circumstances which help generate the depression in the first place, the depression itself disappears again.

Comments

[urbanspaceman]

I apologize for jumping in as a stranger to comment here, but what you're saying here is SO TRUE; it really resonated with me. I have been diagnosed a couple of times in the past ten years with clinical depression. It is something that happens for a reason. I even know that reason, no matter what authorities say. At the outset of my most recent treatment, my doctor asked if I had experienced any life circumstances that might make me depressed. "My job," I said. "I am completely miserable in my job. I hate everything about it and it is destroying my soul."

"Everyone has job problems," he scoffed, and shut me down when I would have explained why I'm especially miserable, far more so than average, about my job. "What about your relationships? Your social activities?"

He was dissatisfied when I said I was OK except for my job and after implying that I was concealing things from him, he grudgingly put me on an antidepressant. I got a lot better, unusually fast; the cocktail was apparently just right.

Now it so happens that my job goes for about 10 of every 12 months and then I have a break. So when I got to the beginning of my two-month offseason, I withdrew myself from the antidepressant. And you know what?

Without my job weighing me down with constant horrible misery, I was fine. Even though I had a dying pet that summer and had to provide care as I watched him die, I didn't have the crippling suicidal depression because I wasn't working that job where my soul gets murdered every day on top of home stresses. I had aging parents who were difficult to handle, but I wasn't suicidally depressed. I felt isolated and lonesome, but I wasn't suicidal-- I was finding activities I enjoyed and doing things and functioning capably. I lasted about three months as a fairly healthy brain, in fact-- until my job resumed, at which time my job responsibilities and stress quickly increased to intolerable levels once more and the crippling depression reappeared, right on schedule.

I had to restart the pills about two months into my ten month job cycle so I wouldn't suicide. And it is my job that does this to me. Not me, not my parents, not unusual sad events, not home responsibilities, not my relationships, and not Seasonal Affective Disorder. Not destiny or "tendencies" or whatever. When something makes you absolutely miserable day after day for years? You get depressed! And doctors need to listen to what their patients say, instead of figuring they have the magic superior knowledge that "no, everybody has THAT, so what is it REALLY?" JFC.

In short, thanks for posting this. ♥ More people need to realize this is true.

[matrixmann]

I'm positively surprised to see someone responding here out of the blue!

This issue has been disturbing me in a subtle manner for a while already, I think.
There's lots of talk "person X killed himself because of depression", but me, knowing more in the psychological field, I just literally smell there's more reason behind that than just "mere depression".
It's more the question "what made somebody that depressed that he took his life?". And there were are in more complicated problems. Talking about "diving deeper" and sometimes finding that "this kind of life makes humans sick"...
...Or something else, something specific in someone's personal biography.

It seems like this stopping at the term "depression" is just a means to avoid really looking at things and admitting there's a lot of shitty stuff that humans are expected to deal with - just like that, just like it's nothing.
It's some kind of "see, we're admitting something!", but not really. Staying superficial. Actually nothing else than what happened before they gave the term "depression" an official okay to be used in media. Only making it seem on the outside like something moved in the general mainstream culture.

And - in fact... just imagine it the other way round, them admitting that economy needs to work slower, people need less duties, less financial concerns and anxiety about the future, more social securities. Would anybody be willing to cover that cost? No. In this society under the rule of money fascism , your destiny freely is to be the servant all your life. You wanna get rid of that duty? Well, get rich, idiot. Then you got all those freedoms making your life better.
All people who aren't rich can go to hell. They got no rights for anything.
- So says that class of people who generates their sweet life from the pains of millions of humans and other creatures on this earth. A straight "Fuck them all to death!", that's what they say.

So that's why "no health care" or anything else goes out to the plebs.

[urbanspaceman]

I agree with this also. We slap a label or two on a condition and throw drugs at it instead of doing anything about it, and unhappy people are expected to suck it up and tolerate intolerable living conditions while medicating ourselves enough to be able to deal with them-- just so that our wage slavery continues to benefit the super-rich...

[matrixmann]

That's what also makes it so hard to break out of the cycle which you're only able to keep continuing via drugs (prescribed or unprescribed - such as alcohol, media consumption etc.).
You would dearly like to end this so much, but day after day there's a demand that you keep going on like before instead of realizing different pathways into practice... The typical "I don't have time for this!" - and it never seems like you ever have time for doing it...
So time passes by with business left unfinished, you doing worse and worse, and anytime you realize you're running out of time to finally deal with what's actually on your mind.