Invisible Depression

I remember when I was depressed, I kept taking these tests to see if I was depressed. The fact that I was suicidal, planning ways to kill myself, and spent nearly every waking minute of my life wishing I was dead so I could stop being in pain was apparently not enough in my head to go for help. But every test I took, I came up not depressed. Why?

Because I was functional. Meaning, I got up every morning, did a workout, made breakfast for the kids, did my work for the day, and was able to manage dinner and bedtime routines. I did what I was supposed to do. If I had responsibilities in my church, I did them. I had my little checklist of things I had to get done that day and I checked them off every day. This had nothing to do with how I felt inside. I was running on automatic, I guess you might call it. You might also say that I was so judgmental of myself that I wasn’t allowed to think about the ways I wanted to kill myself until my list was finished.

I know there are probably a lot more depressed people who look depressed in traditional ways, can’t get out of bed, aren’t functional, but for those of us who are functionally depressed, it isn’t either better or worse than the other kind. I did eventually find a doctor who dismissed immediately my thoughts that I didn’t count as depressed because of some checklist. He listened to me talk for about a minute and said, you’re depressed and tried to help me figure out what medications to try. (Sadly, I never was able to find one that didn’t make me really sick.) I did find a therapist I worked with and that helped.

One of the weird things about this depression to me was how truly invisible it was to almost every single person I knew. I think only my husband realized how sick I was. Every single other person I was successful at fooling. Why did I want to fool them? In part, I felt like I didn’t “deserve” to take up anyone’s time with my sad thoughts. They had their own busy lives. In part, it was because I had SO MANY negative experiences when I shared how I really felt with others. They just said things that hurt me more deeply, and I started to learn not to do that. I don’t know how much of the fault there lies with them and how much lies with me. My brain was too sick for me to trust my recollections of the events at the time.Even my kids really had no idea how depressed I was. I was functional, which is what most kids notice. I suspect they would just say I was “a little sad.”

My point here isn’t a pity party for me. I’m not depressed anymore. I’m good. I think I figured out the hard way what I needed to do not to get in that place again. But for those of you who know people who may be invisibly depressed—don’t let them get away with the facade of being fine. If someone has suffered a deep loss and you think they are dealing with it “amazingly well,” they aren’t. You just aren’t seeing the reality. Maybe you don’t want to see the reality. Maybe you are part of the problem. If that sounds harsh, sorry!

When people would say to me how I was such an inspiration or how they could never handle what I had handled as well as I had, I would say thanks and I suppose act in something of a normal fashion. But in my head, all I was thinking was that they were making it harder for me to tell anyone the truth. Because it seemed so clear to me no one wanted to listen. No one wanted to know that I wasn’t an inspiration at all. They didn’t see how they were contributing to the long period of time in which I operated as two different versions of myself, the one that everyone saw who was hyper competent and inspirational, and the real, smaller me hidden inside, so afraid to be seen that she had built this elaborate pretense/shell of a person to carry around everywhere with her.

It isn’t easy getting through a shell. It takes time. A long time. You can’t expect to be told the truth the first time you ask. Or the third. Or maybe even the twentieth. You have to prove first that you will stick around and keep asking, and that you don’t judge. Anyway, that’s my advice. Invisibly depressed people are the ones who kill themselves and everyone scratches their head, having no idea that they were suffering. We are the people who are smart enough to figure out how to do it right the first time, and not end up in a hospital with people crowded around ready to help. But I do think that we can be saved.