Tuesday, August 12, 2014

The Saddest Thing About Depression Is The Belief That It Will Never End

This title from a news story, to me, is the point about depression that you have to own or you lose. Something or some event or some person has to make you see that everything is not awful if you can view it in a different way, from a different angle. Everything looks bleak to someone depressed because honestly, the world can be seen that way. Who has not felt deeply saddened and powerless about the Israel situation? 

Things that are happy to someone else can be hard for a depressed person because that thing does not bring happiness to them and it seems like another failure to pull out of the sadness. If a happy thing cannot make me happy, then everything seems hopeless. 

But it is not hopeless.You can pull out and stay out. I know.

Billy Joel wrote this song about his depression and suicide attempt. 






People who have never had clinical depression just will not understand. They will think that their sad moments, that they have overcome, are the same as your profound depression. They are wrong. In fact, I suppose even those who have overcome a more serious clinical depression might not realize the critically different aspects of someone else's problem.

The solution for me was that I had to filter the world in a different way. A very good academic psychologist helped me see that I was focusing on my mother's death and filtering everything through that lens. It was hard to let go of my mom, but I did.

I made it. There is an end. And, I hate to say this, but it DID involve ignoring some aspect of life that seemed so terribly important when I was depressed. When I was depressed, I thought that it was a cop out to ignore what I thought was the reality of life. The deal really is that you can always revisit these issues when you have more experience, have seen more of life in a different way.

In my experience, don't expect a quick fix but continued effort to bypass the depressing thoughts...putting them off to a better time... when you can think more clearly. These thoughts may be with you the rest of your life but you can handle them from a stronger better state.

And get professional help. Getting over this is not something you can do on your own, in many cases. And you are not qualified to know if you need help. Just get it. You can always stop. I stopped immediately upon figuring out the problem. I only went back to say thank you years later.

Your goal is to get on the other side of this where you can look back with a clearer head.

You are only human. But you can learn. This takes time... give yourself that time.


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