Do You Feel Like Shit All the Time?

Despite increased awareness about the seriousness of depression there is still a label of personal failure attached to it. As if trying a little harder would make it all go away. If you went to your boss and said that you couldn’t make it to a meeting because you were going through intense chemotherapy she or he would probably be understanding and smile encouragingly. Now imagine you said that you need some time because you were going through intense psychotherapy. See what I mean?

In addition, although the medical profession treats depression just like any other disease most insurance plans in the US don’t cover therapy or they only cover certain therapies – the ones with a ten-step program to full recovery.

In part, what scares us – the depressed, their employers, health care providers, family and friends alike – is that we don’t really know when somebody has fully recovered from this disease or whether they ever will. Our mental well-being is harder to measure then our blood count. For how long will an employer have to show support? For how long will an insurance company have to cover the costs of treatment? For how long will a friend have to listen and understand?

In addition, we have a hard time accepting that feelings are just another part of ourselves that can malfunction, not that different from a strap throat. One reason for that is that feelings are seen as a somewhat amorphous entity of ourselves. They are habitually set in opposition to our rational being and are supposed to be controlled by it. In fact, gaining control over our feelings is at the core of our upbringing. Loosing that ability constitutes an intrinsic threat to our understanding of who we are. It shakes the very foundations of our selves. And as such, it confronts us with what we are afraid we may become. Social misfits. So, we choose to ignore malfunctioning feelings in ourselves and implicitly demand of everyone to do the same.

That, however, is not the solution. As a matter of fact, and we sort of know that already, ignoring a problem is likely to make it worse. I have suffered from periods of depression throughout my adult life and along with me have the ones who live with me. I also have known many people who suffered from depression – often undiagnosed for a long time.

In most cases, depression is not easy to detect in yourself or in others unless you are trained. Some people simply seem to have a ‘bad disposition,’ some are ‘born pessimists,’ others are ‘painfully introverted,’ or ‘withdrawn,’ and again others have ‘a hard time overcoming adversity’, or just seem continuously ‘tired and overworked.’ At a low level, depression actually will most likely go undiagnosed. There will be a degree of emotional discontent but the origin of it will always be seen in the outside world – anything from work to world hunger goes. And within a family, everyone will learn to cope – at times at a staggeringly high cost.

One of the worst effects of depression and the main reason for addressing it in yourself and in others is that over time it affects our brain by actually changing its structure. One could say the production line of the brain adapts to the negative input. It becomes used to a certain ‘gray’ state of mind and starts feeding it. It sounds trivial but over time a brain can get wired for negative thinking and it becomes much harder to escape the repetitive thought process. And although I am not an adamant advocate of the positive thinking league, I do urge everyone to investigate into negative thought patterns and scrutinize feelings of lasting anger or sadness. In my experience they are early signs of worse things to come.