Depression is more than just sadness. Despite the fact that it affects millions of people every day, the all-consuming hopelessness that characterizes depression often leads the depressed to feel alienated and worthless.
In this episode, Andrew grasps for adjectives to explain what being depressed feels like, and also offers advice to his 10 year-old self.
Follow along with the transcript: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1960832/10475239
Follow the show on social media: @catharticpod
Depression is more than just sadness. Despite the fact that it affects millions of people every day, the all-consuming hopelessness that characterizes depression often leads the depressed to feel alienated and worthless.
In this episode, Andrew grasps for adjectives to explain what being depressed feels like, and also offers advice to his 10 year-old self.
Follow along with the transcript: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1960832/10475239
Follow the show on social media: @catharticpod
When I had the idea to do this podcast, or rather when it came to me in bits and pieces over the course of the pandemic, I knew that it would be difficult.
I knew that sharing parts of my experiences with complete strangers, but also and maybe even worse, more scary, anyway, the people around me, the people in my family. That's a... It's a pretty difficult thing to do on the best of days.
But I thought that it was worthwhile to do it anyway.
We're still at the very beginning of all of this, so who knows what this will do or how far it will go or what it will become.
But for the moment I figured that I could just focus on one subject every episode and move through how I've experienced whatever mental illness, mental health struggle I've had to deal with over the years and that seemed good enough, that seemed like something that was worth doing and it would be difficult, but I could do it.
And now that I'm actually doing it, I'm finding first of all that it is helpful for me. It is cathartic.
But at the same time, some of this stuff is pretty heavy. It's difficult to deal with.
And it doesn't mean that I'm not going to do it, or it isn't worth doing. I think that's probably a good reason why it is worth doing, is because it needs to be done and it's difficult. And if I work through it then I can help other people too.
But today's topic is actually one that is, uh, proving to be a little bit more difficult than I had anticipated it being.
The topic for today's episode is depression.
Depression is the first mental health struggle that I was officially labeled with or that I diagnosed in myself.
And it's still the one that scares me the most.
Some of the other things that we’ll get into like my ADHD and anxiety issues, anxiety disorder. Those are scary and they cause trouble for others as well as myself, but they don't feel sometimes as serious almost or as intrusive or maybe even as life altering than depression has proven to be.
At the time of recording this, I don't think that I am depressed.
There are certainly challenges in life, just as we all go through them. You know, the pandemic hasn't been easy for some of us, for most people I would guess.
So, there are things that are happening in my life that are not ideal, but generally speaking, over the past couple of years, over the past, probably five years, I have not really had any major depressive episodes. I have not gone into prolonged periods of depression.
I do think that at some point I will become depressed again.
My past experiences have been various and of differing emotional quality.
Certainly, lots of good times in my life. Certainly, lots of bad times and that will continue. And as in the past, different good times and different bad times have resulted in prolonged periods of sadness and depression and hopelessness. They probably will again; the only reason they wouldn't is because of the work that I've done over the years, getting to know myself and accepting who I am and how things are while at the same time being willing and ready to change any behaviour that I need to change in order to not cause other people problems, I suppose. But also, in order to make my life as fulfilling and rewarding as it can be.
If you're listening to this podcast, then you probably already have some sort of an idea about what depression is and how it presents itself. You may even have personal experience with it, either as the depressed person, somebody who has dealt with depression or is dealing with depression, or from the other side of it where you are living with somebody who is depressed, or you have a family member who has gone through deep depressions over the course of your life.
But maybe you don't actually know. Maybe you are listening to this podcast to learn things, which would be great, because I think learning is pretty much the best thing out there.
So, if that's the case, let me try to give you a bit of a primer.
And as the intro says at the beginning of the show, like I am not in any way qualified to be explaining anything more than my own experiences, so that's what I'm going to do. This has been my experience with depression and what I have learned about the biology of it and thought patterns and so on and how it presents itself in people.
So, depression is not just sadness.
It involves sadness. If you are depressed, you are likely not happy much.
You are likely sad or despondent, a lot of the time. Or all the time, at least on the inside.
It is possible for some people, me from time to time even, to hide what we are actually feeling, but generally speaking, there's going to be some pain there.
Some inner turmoil, some inner pain.
And depression feels different than just sadness. Sadness is: I feel very sad. My dog died yesterday, a terrible situation.
I'm only using it as an example because it needs to be a terrible situation. It needs to be something very emotional and sad, and having a family pet die is tough.
That's the example I used in the first episode, and it's another one that I'm using again today. It may actually be one of the closest feelings to depression, that's not actually depression. That may be why I keep going back to it.
At any rate, take the feeling that you have experienced. If you've experienced it, when an animal, a family pet, a family member who happens to be a dog, or a cat or something has had to be put down or passed away.
That hole, the H-O-L-E, the hole that is suddenly opened up in the space where they used to be.
That missingness is close to the feeling of depression, but depression goes a little bit further. Depression also has a feeling of neutral-ness to it.
It does hurt. It's not neutral, as in good or bad, it's like... take the colour beige and then add in a little bit of light grey and then turn that colour into an emotion, or into a frame of mind and you start to get an idea of what depression is.
So, you've got these deep-rooted feelings of hopelessness that overtake any and all logic that you would otherwise have, and they cast a sort of a sheen on everything.
I know there's been at least one study that indicated people suffering depression will not see colours as brightly, so when I say there's like a greyness, like a fog almost to everything, that's almost literally true.
At any rate, it works as a metaphor because activities that you would normally enjoy doing, or that you normally would do without thinking about them, even such as putting on your socks in the morning, those things become very difficult to do, and to find the motivation for.
Not the kind of motivation where you're sitting on a couch scrolling through your phone, and you just really don't want to get up and make your lunch for the next day, because that means you have to go to bed and then you have to get up.
But it’s, you know, it's like a motivation that you don't want to do something, but you're going to do it anyway and it's fine.
For depression, it’s, I want to, I'm trying to find the words to evoke this sense of vastness and universality and completeness of the whole universe of the whole dimension in which we live, and how all of that heavy cloud of grey is crammed into your viscera, into you, into your guts and your chest, and it just oozes through you, and nothing matters.
Nothing matters. Your life doesn't matter.
Getting up out of bed. It doesn't matter. Getting into bed doesn't matter.
And then you add a little bit of sadness to it, of a tear and what a tear represents when you're slightly sad and mix all that together. And that's what depression has felt like for me.
That's how I'm describing depression right now anyway, but not being a linear thinker, I'm sure I will bounce back to that subject at some other point.
So, if you've never actually been depressed, or you've never been able to quite grasp what's going on in the minds of your friends and family members who have gone through depression...
I guess the point that I'm trying to get across here is the sort of existential pain that takes over your brain and your body, and the numbness that comes with that as a way of lessening that pain, as a way of escaping the pain. Self-preservation, maybe even.
There's like a deep, debilitating ache of hopelessness.
And it's sort of scary sometimes, but there's a familiarity to it. There's like a comfort in knowing what you are feeling and how you've been there before.
And it's not a feeling of safety.
It's not, “Oh, I know what I'm doing. It's still, it's still hopeless and that vastness, that hole that has opened up inside you is still there, but it's like a warm dullness.
And there's a familiarity to that. You know what it feels like? You know what's going to happen. It's some sort of comfort in knowing what's wrapped itself around you has been there before.
Like the song lyric goes, Hello darkness my old friend.
It's the same thing. I don't know if that song was written with the same idea of depression in mind, but it fits perfectly. It's a familiar pain.
I keep trying to use different adjectives to describe depression to somebody who doesn't know what it feels like, and I don't think I'm going to be successful.
I don't think there is a word, or I don't think there are words that come close to representing what it feels like.
But this feeling, when it makes its way back into your point of view, into how you see the world, into your daily life, the changes can be monumental.
If you've never been depressed before, you may mistake being depressed for something closer to laziness or fear maybe.
And when you notice that fear, it may seem that you just are overwhelmed with the pandemic and how it's been affecting your social life or your school life, or sports or family life.
And it could be and probably is to be honest, but it may be something more than that.
And I'm not one to tell you if you are depressed or not, and I would not assume that I could or even wanted to be able to do that, but I think it's important to recognize that the possibility is there, that this pandemic has been tough on everybody, and I think the stat’s even out there that more teens are depressed as a result of the pandemic than ever before.
When you go to see a doctor and you discuss depression with them, if they come to the conclusion that you may in fact be depressed, they may tell you about using a sort of a 1 to 10 scale to track your mood patterns and how you've been feeling. And the reason they do that is because being depressed is not just for one day, for one or two days for three days.
Depression sticks around for a while.
And again, as far as I know, these kinds of feelings, this, these depressive days, they need to stick around for a couple of weeks before it could be considered to be, to be some sort of depression. So, you may have those days that are not bad, but we're talking here about the average sort of trend. So, imagine a line graph even, and you plot the 1 to 10 values on your line graph over the course of a couple weeks, you're looking at your moods, and if generally speaking your moods are not great, you know, there's... we have a day here or there that's not too bad, but overall, the trend is, a mood is below the, you know the five level, the midpoint, then that's likely going to be something of concern.
So that may be something that you can keep as a tool in your own toolbox, this idea of tracking your daily moods.
It doesn't have to be on any sort of number graph or a 1 to 10 scale, but just in some way.
Don't underestimate the importance and the effectiveness of tracking your moods. I think I'm talking to myself there, so Andrew, don't underestimate the importance of that, because honestly, I have seen how it opens my eyes to things that I thought I had a handle on.
Even now, as somebody who has experienced a lot of difficult situations, I still like to think, oh, I don't need to journal.
I don't need to go back and reflect. I don't need to use these tools that I've learned about along the way, because I know what I'm doing.
But I don't. And also, even if I did, I still think it would be important to use those tools because we miss things. Our brains are weird, clumpy lumps of Jell-O, right?
Like, they're... we evolved to be, just good enough to pass our genes on to the next organism.
It's not possible to remember everything even if you have a very good memory, so, it's like rereading your work before you submit it; rereading it out loud, you are going to catch things. You are going to find things that you maybe didn't know were there.
It doesn't mean that you have to get somebody else to review your findings and, you know, agree with you or not, except a health care professional obviously. But I do suggest tracking your moods in some way and then maybe you will find that you do have some evidence and a reason to talk to the family doctor or a health care professional. Or your parents even.
Just to be clear here, I'm not encouraging everyone to self-diagnose and to panic and run to see their doctors as soon as possible. If this doesn't apply to you, then this doesn't apply to you.
But if you think it might, these are the tips that I wish I had known.
To explain a little bit about the history of depression, I'm going to be relying on Andrew Scull's book Madness in Civilization.
As I'll get into during the episode on ADHD, details and straight-line thinking are not super easy for me.
So, as I recount the history of depression and other mental illnesses, be prepared for me to jump around a little bit and to not have extremely specific dates.
But everything I'm going to recount, I'm saying in good faith, and I'm representing it as true, because this is how I understand it.
If there are any mistakes, please do let me know.
Depression has an interesting history, as do many other mental illnesses.
It's always been recognized as something that brings people down, to put it ever so lightly, but at various points it's been seen as an affliction that arose as a result of problems in the body and at other points it's been seen as a result of unearthly actions or upsetting higher powers in some way.
Going back all the way to ancient Greek civilizations in the classical period, there was an understanding of the body as being in balance, of four elements, of four humors. These four humors were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.
And at various points there were other civilizations and other societies that had similar or slightly different views, but generally speaking, this idea of a body being, needing to be in a state of equilibrium in order to function properly, the body and the mind, in order for them both to function properly, things had to be balanced.
And depending on what you did for your job and in your daily life, and depending on how sick you were or likely, even depending on how rich you were, if we're going to get into doctors exploiting people’s feelings of hypochondria, there were these imbalances that could occur.
And when yellow bile was out of balance, it resulted in melancholy, melancholia or whatever the Greek would be.
And that's why we still have this word melancholy today to describe sadness, to describe deep depressions.
The idea of the four humors stayed with Western medicine for a number of years, especially re-emerging in the early modern period, as classical texts were widely distributed and translated thanks to the printing press.
So, doctors still had this idea that the mind and the body worked together.
Maybe the four humors and the torturous remedies that went along with them, for melancholia, maybe that wasn't the greatest thing ever, but understanding that there was a connection between the body and the mind was on the right path.
At other points in history and in other cultures, depression was seen as more of an affliction brought on by behaviour or due to the displeasure of the gods. Other maladies and mental illnesses were also thought to be of divine origin.
But the point is that you've got these two opposing views: the also modern view that the body and the mind are connected and how we treat the body can influence the mind as well as vice versa.
As that relates to humors, like Humourism, was not actually correct, but the sense that the body and mind were connected and depended on each other for good health was accurate.
So, there's been this ebb and flow over the centuries in the understanding of depression and mental illness.
I think we're at the point now where we're starting to come out on the other side of the pharmacological revolution that started in the 70s and 80s with Prozac and an attempt to control the mood through chemical means. And we're starting to understand, at least in popular culture, I am noticing that there is more of an emphasis and understanding of the importance of mindfulness and exercise and diet and so on.
Due to the various points of view and interpretations of mental illness and depression over the years, sometimes there was a sense of shame attached to it. Sometimes there was not, depending on the culture as well.
In our time, in modern 20th and 21st century Western civilization, I think there's been a great amount of work done over the past couple of decades towards ensuring people understand what mental illness is, what depression is, and how it's not just feeling sad, how it's an actual medical condition.
My mental health journey started officially at the age of 15 or 16.
I say started officially because that was when I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety issues for the first time.
My understanding of mental illness growing up as a kid from the 80s was that mental health was something that you dealt with yourself.
And depression and anxiety, and other mental struggles did not need to be shared with the world, shouldn't be shared with the world. It was a private matter.
I know growing up in school we must have had some talk about mental health in one form or another, but I certainly don't remember it being a large part of my school life. There certainly wasn't the kind of openness and willingness to bring out these issues into the public realm.
I remember being about 15, having a job working part time, going to school, realizing that something wasn't right.
I did not feel like things mattered. I did not feel that there was any reason in living.
I won't get into the subject of suicide in this episode. Save that for a later one. There's not a whole lot of personal history there to tell, but we will look into that issue at another point.
I still had an awareness about me, though. I was still, I was still aware that something wasn't right.
And I can remember discussing with my mom, telling her that I think I'm depressed. I think I actually took an online survey or an online quiz.
The Internet was definitely around in the late 90s. It was a bit different, but it was there. Websites existed and I found an online quiz about finding out, determining if you're depressed or not.
And something, something in me at the time knew that that's the direction I should be headed.
So, I had this self-awareness that things didn't feel right inside of me, and I can remember talking with my mom and telling her, “I think I'm depressed. I think I need to see a doctor.”
I didn't end up going to our family doctor at the time for a number of reasons. I actually went and saw a doctor who was new to the field. He was a recent graduate, and this was his first practice.
And I remember, I remember talking with him about my feelings and what was going on in my life. And I also remember him listening and then asking me about my life not just, “Why are you here? What's wrong with you,” but him just taking an interest in learning about me and...
Now I know that that wasn't completely for reasons to make me feel, to feel comfortable. He obviously needed some information about my family and so on to be able to help me with my mental health struggles.
But just the fact that he seemed to genuinely care about my situation and what I was experiencing.
I can still feel that feeling now; the feeling that somebody actually cared.
And that's not to say nobody did; any member of my family would have cared, would have helped if I, if they had known what was going on.
But the fact that he cared meant something — meant something different than if it was a family member.
I suppose at the time I might have said, I might have felt that family members have to care, and other people don't have to.
That's not my point of view necessarily anymore, I've changed a lot since then.
But here was this stranger who wanted to know what radio station I listened to, and felt comfortable in replying the radio station he listened to when I asked the question back, and that feeling of safety started to form.
And over the course of the next several months, I went back to the doctor every week. We would have hour-long sessions and he introduced me to something called CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy.
I'm not going to get too far into it because I only know what it is from my own experiences, but essentially, it's a, it's a strategy where you are aware of your thinking, and you actively work to change the thoughts that are incorrect or leading you astray or, however you want to put it.
And there's homework to do, and all of this kind of thing. And reflection is a very important part of it, and he cared if I did that too.
He cared if I, if I wrote down my thoughts or whatever the task was for the next week.
That really made a difference.
When he stopped his practice in our town and went somewhere else to work a couple years after I had, I had seen him for my depression and anxiety, I sent him a letter thanking him for all that he had done.
And I remember writing in that letter that he actually saved my life literally, and I believe that's true. If I had not been able to work with that doctor, I don't know how bad things would have gotten.
Another topic that will come up from time to time, especially as it relates to my own medical history, is the subject of medication but suffice to say over the years with the labels that I have been assigned, I've been on a number of medications and when I was 16 in that main rough patch that I was describing earlier, that's when I went on medication for the first time for depression.
And I hid that. I hid that and was ashamed of it, that me, a 16-year-old boy, you know, supposed to be in the prime of life, and having grand adventures at high school, that I needed to be on a medicine to make me think better or to keep me from having difficult thoughts or however I would have framed it at the time. That's not what I think antidepressants do now, just to be clear. I don't think they block any thoughts.
But I hid that, and I remember at one point getting in an argument with some friends about why I was not hanging out with them so much anymore. And I remember, I remember sort of using that as a weapon, saying to someone something along the lines of, “Do you know what it feels like to be a 16-year-old having to take medication for depression?”
And that was really me yelling at myself, I suppose. My frustration and, and shame; that's right in the title. The shame of it all for myself.
It was heartbreaking, it was... it was like slightly better than being depressed, because now I still had all this baggage that I'm carrying around and on top of that, I have to take happy pills, you know? That was my point of view at the time, and...
It wasn't until much, much, much later that I actually came to terms with the use of medication for myself, my own need for certain types of medication related to mental health.
Just before we get to the end of this episode, I'll describe one more scene for you.
I was probably about 10 or 11, grade 5 or 6, likely grade 5.
Sitting outside during recess, I think it was pretty cold.
We were in a portable classroom at that time, so there was a little wooden staircase that led up to the door.
And I was sitting there alone.
Wishing that I had friends, wishing that people wouldn't make fun of me, wishing that people wouldn't call me names, that I could just be cool.
I think I wished that. I think I wished I could be cool for one day or something like that.
But the point is that I was alone and alienated and aware of my aloneness.
Just sitting there crying.
Wishing that the pain would stop.
If I had to think about the first time, I was depressed that I remember, it would have been that moment.
I want to be able to talk to that Andrew to tell him that it may not actually get better, but you learn how to deal with it more.
To tell him that there is a lot to look forward to.
I've had opportunities to live and work in different countries.
I've met amazing people. I've had amazing experiences, alone by myself without people, because I do prefer to be by myself most of the time.
And there's a lot of good stuff and I want to tell him that it's OK also, that he's sitting there crying.
Because that was true feeling at that moment. That was, that was what he was going through.
But I just wish he knew that there is more to look forward to.
It doesn't all magically get better. The sadness doesn't magically go away even with medication, but there's so much to learn and along the way, what you learn can help other people feel valued which then makes you feel valued more too.
And if you learn to help other people, you're also learning to help yourself, and if you're learning to help yourself, you're also learning to help other people.
They go hand in hand and it's worth it and it will stop hurting.
A bit.
It may always hurt in some way, but the hurt goes down.
It diminishes and everything else at times will overtake the hurt.
If you're listening to this now and you think that might be me, or that's definitely me, and you think that it's not worth it, like... It's just not worth it.
Well, don't give up finding help. Don't give up on, don't give up on the idea of maybe sometime finding help.
Because maybe it's not, now maybe it's not the best time. Maybe you need to sit and feel what you're feeling.
Maybe not, you know, maybe... maybe it is now that you need to talk to somebody.
And if you do choose to talk with somebody, then be honest. Hiding and presenting things incorrectly does not help the situation at all.
It really just makes it mess up the whole thing. You need to be honest if you're going to talk with somebody.
And also, even if you don't believe me when I say this, keep, keep this thought in your mind: it probably took a lot of strength to be able to, to address what you are addressing.
You may not think that that's true, and you may think it's true for everybody else and not for you, but I'm putting that little, that little thought worm in your brain right now, that this is difficult to do and you're doing it.
And that counts for something.
Thank you very much for listening. Please take care of yourself.