The Hilarious World of Depression

by John Moe

Depression has painted these good, happy, proud moments as inconsequential. Depression (who is a real dick) hides these memories from me so that when I think of junior high I think of pain and humiliation instead of being elected president of the eighth grade.

I had no idea why I was so upset. I lacked even the vocabulary to describe the things my brain was doing. Depression does its damage and then it hides, covering its tracks, making you think that it is not an illness, that you’re just bad and weird.

He couldn’t explain that behavior then and can’t completely explain it now. There’s no logic to it. A broken leg makes sense. You fall out of a tree, there’s a snapping sound, there’s a bone shard protruding from your skin, you need to get to the hospital where they will fix it. A mind? Not so much.

When I was on stage, I had respite from my head. Acting offered everything that the real world didn’t: I always knew what I would say and what others would say to me, I knew exactly how everyone felt about me/my character; there was no danger of anyone figuring out the dark secrets of what a weirdo I was.

Depression steals your ability to feel happy and proud even at the moments you should be happiest and proudest.

Depression shortens your fuse and then lights it.

This series of increasingly terrible thoughts took only a few seconds.

and thus if you are a person, you are worthy of being seen. You are worthy of help.

This awful buzzing weight, this monster in the open closet, this ever-present cloud of thick smog, this was an illness, not a fundamental part of my character. I wasn’t bad, I was sick.

For people I talked to, meds weren’t a ticket to some superpower; they were a ticket to being human.

America should run a mental health care system that isn’t shameful. America should offer people with mental illnesses like addiction, depression, and psychosis a chance to get help and stay alive. And yet here we were. And here was this thing, mental illness, that can be helped simply by talking about it.

But what do we as a society choose to do instead? We freely elect to NOT talk about it.

The body might be expending very little actual energy, but the mind is running a marathon combined with an obstacle course.

The laughter is an exhalation of relief.

lawyer. If more people understand the reality of mental illness and get disabused of the Hollywood myths about it, the stigma about getting help will diminish, and then we’ll live in a healthier society.

Depression was my personal New York Yankees or New England Patriots, and I was tired of it winning so many championships.

Depression can’t be cured by positive life circumstances because depression is not a reaction to circumstances.

Yes, there is discrimination against people with mental illness and, yes, it can be a scary thing to talk about. But the hunger to do so is there, and by being open yourself you can get that conversation out on the dance floor.

The terminology associated with mental illness is tricky to employ, and we as a society suck at it.

Screwing up words like this isn’t just a matter of being linguistically imprecise, however. It has the potential to cause real damage. By applying actual words with significant specific diagnostic meanings to much lighter circumstances, people are robbing and devaluing people with mental illness.

OCD can be a debilitating, life-destroying illness, but each time the term is used for pencil tidiness, the general public takes actual sufferers of OCD a little less seriously. That slide then contributes to an already huge understanding gap between the normies and the genuinely mentally ill. The normies wonder what the big deal is with untidy pencil storage, while the mentally ill are made to feel that they’re exaggerating their problems. This, in turn, leads to less treatment and worse health.

good. I have described depression as a disease in the past, but I’ve been gently corrected that a disease has a specific physical cause like a virus or bacteria, while an illness is anything that makes someone feel unwell.

She takes issue with the word “stigma” (a word we’d been using freely since launching the show), because all it means is discrimination against a minority group. And we already have a word for discrimination. Discrimination.

Even if someone has a bias against me for being a person with depression, I have plenty of other widely held biases that work in my favor, like racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia. I abhor all those things but there’s no question that, through no effort of my own, I’ve benefited from them. It’s important to understand how high the stakes are for people in groups that get dumped on.

I saw depression as something that was for the well-off, that you have the time to sit there and become depressed.”

For people of color in America, for people in the LGBTQ community, for any group other than people like me living in their castles high atop Mount Privilege, openly talking about depression is likewise an existential threat. What I’ve learned, and I had to be taught this because I’ve never lived it, is that opening up about depression can feel like giving one more weapon to someone who you know can use it against you.

wasn’t you. You didn’t choose this. No one would ever choose this. It’s not your fault.

I’m alive and I get to experience all this.