As someone who has dealt with depression their entire life it's really something to start to see people who have never, ever dealt with it begin to try to compartmentalize their lives from their depression and look for every other option before declaring it depression. Like it's some horrible disease you'd never want to catch, like any of us have the option.
I really hate that it took this but I've had my feelings/depression talked down so much by people who don't understand depression, don't believe it's a real thing, etc.
I've had so many conversations with friends this year that go like this; "I've lost my entire personality, I can't motivate myself to get out of bed.. whats wrong with me, is this depression?"
Yes, yes it is. Maybe it's temporary, maybe it's acute or chronic, but that is depression. You never know how long it will last, what it will take from you or how quickly you can overcome it.
Be kind to people.
edit: Reading this again I can't shake that some of you are just so far removed from actually understanding your own feelings and emotions that you can't even recognize that you're depressed. It's absolutely fascinating. "What are depressive symptoms?"
I'll say that one positive of this struggle throughout my life is that I've learned which emotions and feelings I can trust or let guide me. I often don't get it right and focus on the negative but I'm very glad I'm cognizant and it's a bright burning fire of "Yeah I'm depressed this week oh boy let's work on this, I need to make some changes."
> some of you are just so far removed from actually understanding your own feelings and emotions that you can't even recognize that you're depressed
For example, I am quite aware that I have some feeling X. I am just not sure whether other people use the word "depression" to refer to X, or something else. Maybe "depression" actually refers to 10 times X, how am I supposed to know?
Sometimes people use the same words to describe different things (or different degrees of the same thing), sometimes people use different words to describe the same thing. I don't have a direct access to your feelings, so how am I supposed to tell whether my feelings are the same?
A similar problem is when one person says "I am unable to do X" and another person says "I find it extremely difficult to do X, but with lot of suffering I somehow manage to do it anyway", you never know whether the second person had more willpower or better strategy or maybe more supportive environment, or simply their symptoms were less strong.
No matter how you decide to see it, it ends up blaming someone. If you decide the problem was the same, then you can blame the first person for not trying hard enough: "see, the second person had the same problem, but they didn't give up, they thought positively, tried harder and overcame the problem, why can't you do the same?" But if you decide that the problem was not the same, then you can blame the second person: "see, you were able to do it after all, which shows that you were only pretending to have the problem, unlike the people who actually suffer from it and cannot do anything about it!"
Of course in real life many problems are on a scale; for different people doing X may be "easy", "difficult but possible", or "impossible". But many people want to round this to "yes" or "no". -- "Either you have depression or you don't. Either it is possible to do X when you are depressed, or it is not. If it is possible, then people who claim they are too depressed to do X are just lying. If it is not possible, then people who manage to do X with great effort were lying about being depressed." -- It works similarly for topics other than depression, too.
I really hate that it took this but I've had my feelings/depression talked down so much by people who don't understand depression, don't believe it's a real thing, etc.
I've had so many conversations with friends this year that go like this; "I've lost my entire personality, I can't motivate myself to get out of bed.. whats wrong with me, is this depression?"
Yes, yes it is. Maybe it's temporary, maybe it's acute or chronic, but that is depression. You never know how long it will last, what it will take from you or how quickly you can overcome it.
Be kind to people.
edit: Reading this again I can't shake that some of you are just so far removed from actually understanding your own feelings and emotions that you can't even recognize that you're depressed. It's absolutely fascinating. "What are depressive symptoms?"
I'll say that one positive of this struggle throughout my life is that I've learned which emotions and feelings I can trust or let guide me. I often don't get it right and focus on the negative but I'm very glad I'm cognizant and it's a bright burning fire of "Yeah I'm depressed this week oh boy let's work on this, I need to make some changes."