The -lessness

Usually, medical descriptions of mental health problems are pretty cut and dry, and they should be. They should not require an elaborate explanation, they should be short and easily understandable. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, such a depiction will never truly capture what a mental illness feels like, making it all the more important for healthcare professionals to possess a certain degree of empathy, so that they can look beyond the buzzwords of their textbooks and really understand the patients in front of them.
While many mental health blogs are littered with stories of being horribly misunderstood by the ones that are actually supposed to help us, I am not writing about that today – not for lack of having experienced my own share of thick-headed doctors, believe me.

Today I want to talk about a description of depression so accurate that it is all the more impressive it came from a doctor, which is “die Krankheit der -Losigkeit”. Roughly translated it means “the sickness of -lessness” or “the sickness of lack of”.
Most people know that depression includes a lack of happiness but it is more than that. While depression includes phases of panic, anxiety and sadness, sometimes it just makes you completely numb.

Someone who has never experienced this kind of indifference might believe that while not ideal, it is at least better than raging agony but in fact it is its own kind of horror. Obviously being sad is not a good thing but it is something intense, something that makes you feel alive. Feeling pain gives you a sense of direction, something to escape from.
Depression entails a lack of motivation and while part of that stems from the fact that depression sucks all energy out of you, there is another aspect to it. Just as much as energy, motivation requires some kind of goal. But when indifference is all you feel, there is no point to any goal. There is no point to anything. If you don’t feel anything, there is no reason for you to do anything.

Depression does not just make you feel bad, it takes away all meaning. All struggles and strivings, trials and triumphs, victories and failures, all the highs and lows that make up a full life, they all mean nothing if you are depressed. It really is the lack of everything.