Devil's Advocate

[andrewducker]

People say "Just sort yourself out."

People say "If you'd just give it a try, you'd realise it's not that hard."

People say "There's nothing wrong with your life. Most of the planet would kill to live as comfortable as you."

People just don't get it.

If you're not depressed, if you've never been depressed, then you don't and can't understand.

People have this strange idea that we're somehow in charge of our minds, that with just a little willpower we can overcome our problems, get up and go.

Well, maybe some people can - people whose brains are balanced, or who have energy, people who can think straight without fighting through fuzz.

When you're struck down by fear, when you have no control, when your mind won't think straight enough to even understand what the way out might be, you can't just 'pick yourself up' or 'just get things straight'.

Sure, you might make it there eventually, with help and luck and time. But saying "Oh, stop being so pathetic and get on with your life" is about as useful as handing the flight controls to a caveman and telling him "Just land the damn plane, it's easy."

Comments

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

I agree, the problem is though that chemical imbalances asside, the only solution to these issues often does come from within the person who is depressed. Its impossible for someone else to fix it or help them, they have to do it themselves. This leaves others who want to help (or are just busybodies) with little choice with advice but to state the unhelpfull obvious.

A better reaction is usualy to be sympathetic and say not a lot, but that isnt easy for many people to understand, much less do.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, standing back and being supportive isn't easy. Especially when you care about someone.

[trizia.livejournal.com]

I think it is a bit dangerous to say 'they have to do it themselves' because if the person doesn't get better it will add to the feelings of guilt and worthlessness that often go with depression.

[magent.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know a few people who suffer from depression.

Its a whole vicious circle... you're depressed so you can't do anything. You can't do anything so you're depressed. And only the person in the circle can break out of it.

I've never suffered from this sort of depression and I'd rather like to think that I've got good willpower. So it's very difficult for me to understand why people can't pull themselves out of it. No money? Get a job. Bad health? Eat healthy, exercise, sleep. No friends? Join a club. Family hassles? Fuck 'em. Etc, etc.

Irrespective of my understanding, it has frequently been demonstrated to me that people can't just pull themselves out of it.

Its very frustrating for us people on the outside who can do nothing to help except have patience and tolerance.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

(all instances of 'you' in the follwing text are in the impersonal. 'one' is too stuffy and 'we' doesn't seem right either)

You can try (as I do) to make notes when you are fine, to try to remind yourself when you are not fine how to get out and that there is an out.

The notes remind you that you have to eat right, sleep enough, avoid anything that unbalances you or seems to offer a short term mood lift (sugar, booze, dope, random sex, whatever). To DO STUFF even if it is boring stuff and keep doing stuff until everything levels out. If you let your mundane life get messed up it just makes it harder to fight your way back to some sort of happiness (or at least non-misery)

Weirdly enough doing nothing drains your energy, whilst fighting through and piling on the activities actually seems to boost energy and clear the head. Just break things down into little itty bitty teeny weeny tasks to slay the monster of the dauntingly large and tackle these minimal, barely manageable units one at a time.

Accept that you feel shit. Keep acting as much as you can as if you don't and one day you'll notice that you aren't acting. It's like wrenching your knee - you never notice that is doesn't hurt any more until days after it actually stops hurting.

Thanks Andy, I actually really needed to be reminding myself of this stuff right now :-)

[andrewducker]

I actually wrote it because I felt guilty.

After writing the piece yesterday on how all of you bastards should just pull your finger out and sort your lives out, I felt I ought to say that I know that sometimes it's not that easy.

[tisme.livejournal.com]

Hence why when I'm depressed my house is immaculate. I just keep on going, hoping that eventually I'll come out of the funk.

You know things are really bad when the house is a mess.

[tisme.livejournal.com]

Um, what caused the change of heart? You have said all of the above things to me before, whilst I have tried to explain to you how I'm really, really sorry, and I wish it wasn't this way, but I'm trying, I really am. You've never been horrible about it, it's all come from out the frustration of which thepaintedone speaks, and which I understand too, but I was just wondering why you felt this so much it prompted an lj post, this morning.

Also, I wouldn't say it was like handing a caveman flight controls. I would say it was like handing a caveman a can of coke to open. Deceptively simple, obvious to everyone else but you.

[andrewducker]

Except that I don't think that it's as obvious as you think. I just think it's a task most people never have to deal with.

Maybe it's like a bird asking a person to fly and assuming that a person flying a plane is as natural to them as using their wings.

And this post was prompted by the post yesterday. It's just the flipside or rejoinder. A sign that I understand both sides.

[dapperscavenger.livejournal.com]

I believe I was depressed throughout the entirity of my fourth year at uni. I never saw a doctor, so I can't be sure, but I've been told the symptoms sounded right. It was pretty crap. I pretty much lay in bed for 6 months, because I couldn't see the point in getting out of it. There was nothing worth getting up for. I had so much uni work that had to be done that I couldn't even bring myself to start doing it. I hardly ate. I was tired all the time, and I would go and get pissed at 4 in the afternoon because it was the only alternative to feeling crap.

Then, one day, I got up and started doing my dissertation, and didn't stop doing it for two weeks solid. I don't know why I suddenly started typing. I didn't feel different until after I'd finished. I still got a crap mark though. :P

[andrewducker]

Yup, that's depression. It struck me in my third year, and I got further and further behind until starting was harder than not starting.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Or the tech support guy telling the blind man, "Click on the icon that looks like a frog." One of the things you'd need to follow the directions is just missing.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

I wrote an essay at school, which I thought I'd kept, but can't bloody find, which is really annoying, and.... going off topic.

The basic gist of it was "each person's world is as large as they are capable of carrynig on thier shoulders, because it is their world".

Just because someone's problems are difficult for you to relate to, doesn't make them trivial to that person. We can all handle different levels of difficulty in our lives, just as the things that cause these difficulties change from person to person.

When I remind myself of this (which isn't as often as I should), I remember that people ALWAYS deserve kindness and help if there's something getting them down, regardless of what that something means to you or me. If it's enough to bother them, then it's enough for the rest of us to try and help.

I still thought yesterday's post was aimed more at yourself. It sounded very introspective.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Rassum frassum typos. I can spell both "carrying", and "their". I knew I should have re-read that before clicking 'OK'.

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

All experience is relative, hence the inhreant absurdity of 'count yourself lucky you're not starving in Africa'.

On an objective scale, almost anything bad which happens to us is insignificant compared to the suffering some people endure, but having never suffered like that its meaningless. We dont feel emotion on an objetive scale, its totaly and utterly subjective.

The inverse is true as well. Something simple like a nice new car can give huge joy to one person, but someone else who has always had a nice car would see it as trivial.

[neriedes.livejournal.com]

The thing is with depression, no-one really knows much about the decease. Doctors can spot the symptoms, diagnose the patient with suffering from depression then help them deal with the symptoms. But our knowledge of the cause of depression and what the decease actually is and when it goes away why it went away is quite limited.

So due to this and lack of education on mental illness with the general population (people are becoming more aware but there is still a vast amount of ignorance out there)people won't understand why someone with depression just can't seem to get their act together. Also the fact that you can't SEE depression they don't appreciate it as a decease , "it's just all in her head, snap out of it" becomes the only explanation to people who have never experienced depression.

[andrewducker]

S'true. If there was a physical change associated with depression then people would take it more seriously, I suspect.

(Oh, and it's "disease")

[ex-digitalis869.livejournal.com]

Then there are those of us who work our asses off trying to get out of it, and still want to die on an almost daily basis.

Family problems, aloneness, no job, poor health and no medication for it (not just not eating right or exercises, but chronic pain from interstitial cystitis and psoriasis and bad hips), an inability to get back into school because of lack of funds, etc. Not just one thing at a time, but mutiple things that are beyond your resources to solve.

And still we keep slogging away, one step after another through thickest mud.

It always looks easy from the fucking outside.

I think the people I hate most are the ones who say "It's easy to get into school, just apply for fin-aid," piss me off more than anyone else. Because they're invariably people whose parents got them into uni and helped them fill out all the paperwork, and at the very least paid all the application fees. They're people who entered right out of high school with the help of public school advisors who did their jobs.

And i've realized that people who don't understand depression have had similarly easy lives in some respects.

When i had the money, i went to therapy, i took medication, i flogged along on my own, with a job and an apartment and a car whose payments were made on time, and I dated and I got up every morning even when I wanted to die. When everything is going well, it's manageable. I can "pull myself up by the bootstraps." But when everything is crashing down and has been for two years I feel like I'm swimming in quicksand.

This means nothing to anyone else but me and I fucking shouldn't expect it to.

[andrewducker]

Have I ever mentioned that you and kpollock remind me of each other?

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

"I think the people I hate most are the ones who say "It's easy to get into school, just apply for fin-aid," piss me off more than anyone else. Because they're invariably people whose parents got them into uni and helped them fill out all the paperwork, and at the very least paid all the application fees. They're people who entered right out of high school with the help of public school advisors who did their jobs."

Invariably? I did it by myself at 25. One of my close friends is now doing it by himself at 24. I spent years bitching about how hard it was to get into and more importantly pay for college, and when I actually tried, lo and behold, it was easy.

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

Having, in the past, fallen victim to this sort of depression, I'm still sort of torn on the issue. I mean, I failed out of high school and later community college because I was too depressed to care about my grades. I lost a decent job because of it, too. But for all I've look at my circumstances and how they changed, I can't see anything that would account for the fundamental shift in myself that allows me to press on and finally get my proverbial shit together. I changed. And while I can't say it was easy by any means, I still think there are a lot of people who don't even try because they've convinced themselves nothing is going to change.

(Second half of this reply deleted because I don't feel like having someone start a flame war with me.)

[andrewducker]

Seems reasonable.

I actually have a theory that people grow up out of the teenage/angsty depression as they get older. Not everyone, of course, but I've seen research which shows that certain bits of the brain are 'inflamed' during the traditionally angsty teenage years, and calm down later on. This would tend to mean that as you come out of it, you start realised how to cope with life, sort yourself out and get happier.

Of course, it could be that being angsty causes the inflammation, but I suspect that's another one to be answered by the psychologists of the fuuutuuuure.

heh

[josephgrossberg.livejournal.com]

As someone who's dealt with it, I find that the best way to explain it is to emphasize the physiological component to it.

Saying "just cheer up!" to a depressed person is about as effective as telling a diabetic "just start producing insulin!"

Re: heh

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

diabetes is a damn sight easier to explain the mechanics of than depression. At least I would find it so.

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

Yes!!!

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

That's what the drugs are for.

*sigh*

[andrewducker]

That _can_ be what drugs are for. And they _can_ help. But they don't always and for some people the cure seems to be worse than the original situation.

[autodidactic.livejournal.com]

I say, "I am. It's just not all that pretty, sometimes."

I say, "Oh yeah? Can I have ten thousand dollars? That's all it would take to pretty much eliminate every last depression-inducing problem in my life. What? I should work for it? You first. After all, you say it's not that hard. Here, have my body to do it in. I want to see if it'll work. Come on, chin up, aenemia's not all that bad..."

I say, "Fuck you."

The caveman could land the plane with enough education, kindness, time, and sympathetic people not just handing him the controls before he's got the proper tools.

A.