How To Cope With Depression

Almost half of us will suffer from

depression

at some point in our lives, but the illness remains widely misunderstood and therefore often poorly treated. At the heart of our collective difficulty with

depression

is a confusion about what it really is and, in particular, how it can be distinguished from a condition we all know very well and with which it has a number of distracting similarities: sadness. . . Because we unwittingly tend to apply a set of assumptions drawn from and more appropriate to depression to cases of depression, we end up suffering much more than we should. At first glance, there are some notable similarities between those who are sad and those who are depressed.

Both groups cry; both withdraw from the world; Both complain of apathy and a sense of alienation from their normal lives. But there is a categorical difference between depression and sadness. The sad person knows why he is sad; the depressed person does not. Sad people can, without difficulty, tell us what worries them. I am sad that my grandmother has died. Or that I lost my job. Or that my friends are being cruel to me. And, strange as it may seem, this is precisely what the depressed person is not capable of doing. They may be tearful and at a very low point, but they cannot conclusively identify what has robbed life of meaning for them: they simply say that it has no meaning per se.

They are not depressed about x or y like one might be sad about x or y. First of all, they are simply depressed. The depressed person's inability to give a concrete account of his or her state of mind may expose him or her to unwarranted accusations of malingering, malingering, or exaggeration. Friends who begin a well-intentioned search for a solvable problem may end up frustrated by the lack of progress. When pressed, the depressed person may latch on to quite strange or seemingly minor issues to explain his condition: he might complain that there is no point in going to work because the Earth will be absorbed by the Sun in 7.5 billion years.

Or they might insist that life is meaningless because they just dropped a glass on the floor and now everything is completely hopeless. By now you hear it said that if depression has no sensible psychological causes, the problem must be related to some kind of imbalance in brain chemistry, which would be kinder and more effective to treat with pills. an idea of ​​great appeal to the pharmaceutical industry first of all, but also to families, schools and concerned employers who long for quick and cost-effective solutions. But there is another approach to depression that, although slower and more arduous, can be much more effective in the long term.

This arises from ideas drawn from psychotherapy, the discipline that has arguably been able to understand depression better than any other. The basic premise of psychotherapy is that the depressed person is not depressed - as they suggest - for no reason. There is a reason. They are very distressed about something, but that something is extremely difficult for them to accept and has therefore been pushed to the outer zones of consciousness, from where it wreaks havoc on the entire person, causing unlimited feelings of nihilism. For depressives, realizing what specifically bothers them would be too devastating, so they unconsciously choose to remain dead to everything, rather than being very distressed about something.

Depression is a sadness that has forgotten its true causes; forgotten because remembering it can lead to overwhelming and unsustainable feelings of pain and loss. What could these true causes be? Maybe we married the wrong person. Or that our sexuality is not what we once believed. Or that we are furious with a parent for their lack of care during childhood. To preserve a fragile peace of mind, one “chooses”—although this may seem more voluntary than it really is—to be depressed rather than aware. We choose relentless numbness as protection against a terrible sight. To make things even more difficult, the depressed person usually does not consciously feel that he or she is actually lacking knowledge.

They are not aware of a gap in their self-understanding. Furthermore, today they are often taught to assume that they are "just depressed," since one could be physically ill, a verdict that can be attractive both to the pharmaceutical industry and to certain people close to the patient interested in hearing their ideas. . remaining buried. There is another key difference to keep in mind between sadness and depression. Sad people are grieving about something in the world, but they are not necessarily sad about themselves, their self-esteem is not affected by their grief, while depressed people are characterized by feeling miserable about themselves and being full of self-recrimination and guilt. , shame and self-loathing paranoia that, in tragic extremes, can culminate in suicidal thoughts.

For psychotherapy, the origins of these violent moods of self-hatred lie in anger due to another person in the world, but which cannot be directed towards them, and which has then been turned against the sufferer. Feelings of anger that should have gone outward, toward a partner who is relentlessly defensive and denying sex or toward a parent who humiliated him in childhood, instead return toward the victim and begin to attack him. The feeling: "X has disappointed me terribly" becomes a very unpleasant but somehow more bearable feeling: "I am an unworthy and unbearable wretch." One hates oneself as a defense against the risks of hating another person.

It's also worth noting in all of this that, in many cases, depression is associated with a seemingly opposite mood, a type of euphoric state called mania, hence the term "manic-depressive." The mania in question looks, from a distance, a bit like happiness, in the same way that depression can look like sadness. But in one area in particular, the relationship between mania and happiness is identical to that between depression and sadness. The common element is a denied self-knowledge. In mania, one is euphoric, but cannot delve into one's deep mind and discover the bitter truths about it. Which explains one of the main characteristics of manic people: their habit of running away from themselves, talking too quickly about nothing, exercising too much, working constantly or spending too much, all as an escape from the submerged pain, rage and loss. .

It is from this type of diagnosis that a suggested cure emerges. What people with depression need most of all is an opportunity to come to a deep understanding. To do this, they will tend to need a patient and extremely supportive listener. They may also, if used appropriately, benefit from the temporary use of medications to improve their mood enough to be able to endure a conversation. But the assumption is not that brain chemistry is where the problem begins or ends; Despair is caused by undigested, unknown, and unresolved trauma. Far from needing to be given reasons to trust that life is beautiful, depressives should be allowed to feel and remember specific harms, and granted a fundamental sense of the legitimacy of their emotions.

They need to be allowed to be angry and for that anger to settle into the right and uncomfortable targets. The goal of treating depression is to move the sufferer from a feeling of boundless despair to mourning the loss of something in particular: the last twenty years, a marriage, the hope of being loved by a father, a career. ...No matter how agonizing the perception is. and grief, should always be preferable to allowing loss to contaminate one's entire outlook. There are many scary things in every life, so it's totally normal to feel sad on a regular basis. But there are also always a sufficient number of things that remain beautiful and hopeful, as long as one has been allowed to understand and know their pain and his anger, and adequately mourn their losses.

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