Category: Mental Health

One of the things depression has up its sleeves to get you down is a constant feeling of inadequacy. Take my last post for example, The -lessness. It was supposed to be about all the things that depression takes away but in the end, it focuses mostly on emotion and motivation. I should have written about so much more, like sleeplessness, lack of confidence and so on. I also don’t think I fully captured what I wanted to say. If you already know what I mean you might understand but if you don’t then I am not sure I made it clear. And the different sections don’t flow into each other naturally and some wordings just sound weird. Every time I read it I could kick myself. I understand that mostly it’s the old “Depression lies” but understanding it and feeling it are two different things.

And if it wasn’t enough, this is where my anxiety kicks in. What if it is the first post someone reads on this blog and decides to move on because of it? It is yet another entry about mental health. What about readers that are interested in my other topics? What if the readers I already have decide that this blog isn’t worth it after all?
For someone else this might be a reason to do better next time, but my lack of energy makes it hard for me to imagine a next time. And my pessimism tells me I won’t do better. And my guilt tells me how horrible it would be to leave yet another project unfinished.

And so, all the different aspects of my depression work together like a clockwork of misery.

But it is possible to disrupt it. Right now, I am trying to make amends by writing this post, and maybe it will make me feel better. And if not, at least I tried. Sometimes trying and failing makes me feel even worse than not trying, but in the end, I don’t see what else I could do. Often I don’t have the strength to try, but I have learned it is important to forgive myself for that.

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.

Writing about the stigma attached to mental health problems is the 101 of mental health blogs, to the point that it is hard to say anything that hasn’t been said a hundred times already. While the situation is still bad, a broad front ranging from healthcare providers to patients, from relatives to celebrities is trying to raise awareness and more importantly, to educate the general public.

While this is definitely a good thing, it can sometimes lead to unintended results. I remember a conversation at a family get-together somehow shifting to a person I didn’t know and someone saying “no, she no longer has that job, she had a burnout”. With a condescending expression, one of my aunts said: “Burnout? From what?”

That was not the usual prejudice one would expect. If that conversation had taken place a few years earlier, the reaction might have been something along the lines of “oh she should just get it together”. But it wasn’t, because my aunt knew what burnout is, what causes it and that you can’t just dismiss it. And yet she managed to react in a way that makes my toenails curl up. She didn’t think bad of that person because having a burnout is a sign of weakness, she thought bad of that person because she apparently didn’t earn her burnout by hard work. The more I think about it, the more I think that this is a far worse reaction.

I am not even going to elaborate about how everyone with an illness deserves empathy, no matter how they got it. I am not going to elaborate on how what is perceived as a burden by one person is perceived differently by another.
What really grinds my gears about this is how an illness is seen as an achievement. Got burnout? Yeah that sucks, but at least it shows you are a hard worker! Well done! You got burnout? Well you don’t deserve that, you cheater!

There are just so many things wrong with that. First off, the idea itself is disgusting. It turns suffering from something that should be alleviated into a commodity that is needed to justify emotions or mental states. Secondly, this type of pressure environment is part of what drives people into burnout in the first place. Thirdly, this can lead to the idea that only people that have “earned” their suffering deserve help, treatment and empathy. And finally, this type of thinking can be expanded onto almost everything. You have depression? You never had it bad enough to warrant that! You have PTSD? What did you experience that was sooo traumatic?

We often hear complaints about how we live in a performance-based society that makes everything revolve around how much you can accomplish, that dehumanizes us by devaluating all other aspects of our individuality. But in many ways we have moved beyond that and live in a suffering-based society, where your status and your rights are dependent on how much damage you are willing to take, how much agony you are willing to put up with. This type of thinking is not just related to mental illness, this concerns everyone!

I guess I should end with some sort of solution. Well there is no simple solution to changing the ways of thinking of one person, let alone an entire society. I could end it with the old “If you want change, change yourself first” but I have an irrational aversion to these types of motto calendar catchphrases. I dunno, I guess thanks for reading and maybe thinking about it.

I went to a spa today. I love spas, especially saunas, but I have never been to this one before, which is why it was kind of a big deal for me. My social anxiety is always there, but especially hard in a new environment and going all on my own did not help. But that actually was not the hard part because at least no one bats an eye in a spa if I don’t talk to anyone. The hard part is something I can only describe as the feeling of defeat. Today I did something that is hard for me, something I wanted to do for quite some time and when I did, I enjoyed it. But now that I am at home, it doesn’t feel like a success. It feels like a defeat, it feels as if I somehow lost, was not good enough at enjoying myself. Sure, it was not as fun as it would have been with a friend, sure, I only did three rounds in the sauna instead of the four I was planning on but still, there is no good reason why I feel this way and yet I do.

This feeling is one of the things you don’t expect from depression. It does not really show up in any medical textbook or anything like that, at least not in a way that makes me feel like it is described accurately. Depression makes it difficult to enjoy things and this is true in my case too. Healthy me would have had a lot more fun. But that is not the problem, I did have fun. Maybe not everyone with depression has this feeling, maybe it isn’t even my depression but another issue. All I know is it sucks. But at least I am aware of it. There were times when this feeling made me do stupid things, like drink, make impulse purchases or do other things that would make me happy temporarily, just so that I could look back at my day in the evening and think “Yes, good one”. Of course acting this way catches up with you eventually, one way or another. Now I know that it is best to ignore this nagging feeling and simply try to have a good evening. Even when it feels like I lost the battle of the day.

For my first “proper” entry I thought I would write about something that is quite often the topic of blogs or AMAs when it comes to mental illnesses, which is simply “If there was one thing you wish people understood about mental illness, what would it be?” Most people would assume that I wish others could understand what it feels like but that is not what I will write about.

For one straight up describing what depression feels will always fall short of the real thing. Describing what an experience feels like is only possible if you can relate it to another experience that your reader has experienced as well. I can describe red by saying red is the colour of this or that. In the case of depression, I could talk about some symptoms like sadness, lack of motivation, lack of emotion, hopelessness and so on or use colourful metaphors and what not. But in the end, it would be a hopeless endeavour. And secondly, even if it were possible, I don’t want anyone else to feel what it is like because I don’t want anyone to experience something like this.

After a while I realised that the first thing I wish people understood was something that took me some time to understand as well, which is that mental illnesses are not something normal taken to an extreme. That sounds pretty nonsensical but bear with me. Many symptoms of mental illnesses are often viewed as character traits, character flaws or emotions that healthy people have as well. Sadness is a symptom of depression, but healthy people experience it too. Lack of motivation is a symptom of depression, but healthy people experience it too. Shyness is a symptom of social anxiety, but healthy people experience it too – some of them at least. For one this is bad because it is often the source of misunderstandings. Healthy people believe they can understand what a mental illness feels like, even though they cannot. Sometimes it is also the source of some of the stigmata that surround mental illness, such as someone with burnout being called lazy or someone with PTSD being called weak.

Thankfully, most outsiders understand over time that they can in fact not understand what it feels like (which doesn’t mean you can’t sympathize) and that it is inaccurate to believe someone with mental illness is weak or does not have enough willpower to overcome it. Often they do so simply because they realise that the intensity, the “quantity” of it all is far greater than anything someone healthy experiences. It hits you like a sledgehammer and trying to “outtough” it is as absurd as trying to stop a tornado with your fist. But that is only a part of the whole story. The most important thing that I wish people would understand about mental illness is that emotions or character traits that are part of a mental illness are completely separate and different from the normal emotions or traits of said person. The idea that someone melancholic is sad and someone depressed is simply “extra sad” or the idea someone shy is shy but someone with social anxiety is “extra shy” is completely wrong. Mental illnesses are not something normal taken to the extreme. Depression can strike the happiest person in the world, social anxiety the most outgoing person in the world.

Another problem is that separating person and illness is not only hard for an outsider, it is often hard for the affected themselves. I once had a friend explain to me that she didn’t want to get better because she was afraid she would lose herself, her identity. A severe mental illness takes over every part of your life, it overwrites everything you are, rests over you like a veil and only outlines and contours of your true self are visible. And when this lasts for years, you eventually forget how it feels without it and who you are without it. When I had my first better phase since my depression began I noticed myself reverting back to behaviours I had not shown in years, character traits that I believed had gone away simply as time moved on suddenly re-emerged. Experiencing this can be truly frightening but it can also be really important. If you are afraid of what you might become if you get better, remember that you are not your illness. Try to stop associating yourself with it and don’t believe that there is any reason to hold on to it. And if you do get better, you will not lose but in fact rediscover who you are.