I've Never Been (Un) Happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

There are a lot of challenges that arise when trying to explain what depression is to someone who doesn’t understand the condition or approaches it from a place of denial. One such challenge lies in the belief that mental illnesses can be tackled and overcome by sheer force of will alone. The absence of physical symptoms traditionally associated with disease makes it difficult for some to appreciate the seriousness of the condition. Depression doesn’t cause a 103-degree fever or a visible rash; the symptoms are psychological and therefore harder to conceive of as medical in nature. For many who live with it, the greatest obstacles on the road to recovery are family and friends who do not ‘believe’ in depression. The assumption is that if you have a happy and comfortable life you have no cause for, or right to, the despair you’re feeling. In short, you can’t be depressed if there’s nothing wrong or if you have no real problems. (Ironically, people who believe this also believe that those with ‘real problems’ don’t have the time or luxury to suffer from depression.) So those who are unfamiliar with depression are misled by the lack of bodily symptoms and tend towards familiar statements like: ‘Think positively.’/‘You have to want to get better.’/‘You’re only doing this for the attention.’/‘You’re just being lazy.’/‘You aren’t even trying to pull yourself out of it.’ Statements like these suggest your salvation lies in a choice you are simply electing not to make, but of cour...

Depression is the monster that’s hiding under your bed, and here’s the thing, monsters can only live in the dark. It’s when you turn on the light that you see that what you thought is a monster, isn’t a monster at all, but something you can tame if you learn how. Monsters like depression live in the dark, and the way to turn on the light, is by talking about it.

Note1 - monsters

The diagnosis of a person suffering from the vicious cycle of both insomnia and depression causes a classic chicken-and-egg problem. After long enough it becomes near impossible to determine whether it’s insomnia that’s causing the depression or the depression that’s causing insomnia.

Depression, when combined with a good broadband connection allows for a lot of time to learn things, I’ll admit. In the past hour I’ve learned a great deal about penguins, the commonness of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, Sjogren’s Syndrome, Spontaneous Human Combustion, the fall of Pompeii, super-volcanoes and the Greek origins of common English words. Did you know the word ‘telephone’ comes from the Greek words for sound (phon) and far away (tele)? You didn’t? Well, now you do.

Internet

You experience guilt when you do something bad. You experience shame when you believe you are bad.

[The] ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ . . . not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person . . . will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise . . . Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me . . . The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.

Building on fire

Discomfort is not a bad thing, and it’s one of the few emotional states that encourages growth. Physical exercise involves discomfort, but it’s an example of a good sort of pain. Pain that helps you grow. Mental and psychological aches, when they’re not severe, are good for you in a similar way. It doesn’t feel great while it’s happening but you are better for having lived through it.

Pain

Transience is something we’re all so afraid of, and we live in perpetual fear of a new, different reality. But thank God for transience because even though it means that happiness doesn’t last it also means that pain eventually passes.