What People Don't Realize About the Reality of Depression

Depression. A term thrown around like confetti and yet, an illness still so misunderstood. It seems like there is a tendency to compare mental illness to physical illness, with the vague hope it might help people understand if stated in layman’s terms. The problem is, in my experience, depression is not, and never will be, the same as a broken leg. You can’t wrap yourself in plaster and wait six weeks for your body to knit itself together again. In my experience, instead of your nearest and dearest rushing to brand their signature on your limb with a pink sharpie, people turn away — scared, shocked, out of their depth. You aren’t given crutches, there is no physio arranged for when you are better. Once ill and deemed “treatment-resistant,” you are put in the chronic box.

Despite supposedly being “highest risk,” you are left in the dark, ignored until you bring yourself to the surface again. Only then do people shake their heads, silently tutting at the mild inconvenience you are causing by taking up a hospital bed. Only then do the crisis teams raise their heads, ask a few obligatory questions before deeming you healthy enough to carry on struggling, or unstable enough to require their input. This input being a phone call every now and again, perhaps a home visit if you are “lucky.”

In my experience, there are often no flowers or get well cards. Everyone is tired of hearing it by now. How long has it been? Why aren’t you better yet? Your life isn’t that bad, what have you got to be depressed about? People like to search for reasons, find an answer to unanswerable questions.

And then, if you do die by suicide, there is often a pretense of shock. A tragedy, a waste. I feel like nobody wants to hear it when you are alive, yet suddenly everyone has something to say when you are gone.

Depression is all-consuming: it drags you to the lowest place you ever thought imaginable and then tries to haul you even lower. It convinces you that you are damaged, alone and unworthy. It makes you elevate death because living seems unfathomable. It tells you everyone would be better off without you. It brands you a burden, a disappointment, a waste of space. It severs everything you were once interested in, isolates you until loneliness is your only familiarity. It tells you to hurt yourself because nothing can be worse than the mental torment you currently feel. It makes the self-destructive things feel like comfort, like safety.

Imagine waking up on the darkest of days. You haven’t slept properly in weeks. You have fallen behind with trivial tasks: an overflowing inbox, letters that need posting, a house that needs cleaning. But you have also fallen behind on more important things: bills that need paying, a fridge that needs filling, family that need contacting. You know these things need doing, and yet you can’t bring yourself to do any of them. You ask yourself, what’s the point? What’s the point in any of it? What use is a clean inbox and a full fridge when you don’t plan on being around long enough to use it? When every day is dark, when every thought is occupied by the sheer insignificance of daily functions, it becomes easy to fall. And to fall hard.

So what is the answer? An abundance of physiotherapy and a bouquet of sunflowers? If only it was that easy. The truth: there is no single cure. Medication can be hugely beneficial to some and completely ineffective for others. Therapy, if accessible, can be that lightbulb moment and facilitate a slow, but significant recovery. It can also churn over a lot of previous trauma and make things worse before they get better. Talking is pivotal, patience is vital.

Being told suicide would be selfish, that people have it worse than you, only seeks to validate your complete lack of self-worth. It only enforces you are a horrible/unworthy/evil person who is making a mountain of a molehill and you should just get on with living because people are out their dying/grieving/struggling/all of the above. Even worse, if you are exasperating your situation with self-destructive behaviors, then you must be, of course, to blame. Drinking with depression? Starving yourself with a history of disordered eating? Overdosing, but not taking enough pills to kill you? A cry for help or merely attention-seeking?

Perhaps there is another answer. How about the consideration of drinking to drown out impulsive urges? Skipping meals because you have no motivation to cook for yourself? Overdosing because, in that moment, you want to kill your thoughts momentarily. You want out, you want oblivion. But you are also highly aware of the repercussions. The effect your actions would have on people if you were to succeed. Far from selfish — those who are suicidal often consider their actions the most. Churning over and over how life would be for those left behind. Churning over and over how life would be if they were to continue living.

There is no easy answer. There is no six-week cure. There are only brighter days, moments of better. To hold onto the hope things have not, and will not, been like this forever. One of my favorite quotes is by Matt Haig. It’s a reminder this state of feeling is temporary. A reminder that just because you have depression, doesn’t mean depression has to be your entire identity. Here it is:

“Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but — if that is the metaphor — you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”