theheromp3:
i have. a lot of big complicated thoughts about how people tend to treat depression as like. as if it’s nothing. like it’s the most basic easiest mental illness ever. why do we do this. depression kills people. constantly. people will throw around “depression and anxiety” and say they’re totally normalized nonstigmatized disorders and then you realize they only think mild versions of these disorders exist. i have a laundry list of mental disorders and the only one that’s ever actually put my life at risk was depression. if you throw around depression as if it’s the mildest least harmful mental illness ever have you considered shutting the fuck up.
There’s always judgement when depression takes a life because nobody wants to talk about suicide without judgement. Not really. We see obits and memorial pieces that say “Person died yesterday after a four-year battle with cancer,” but never “Person died yesterday after a fifty-seven-year battle with depression.” It’s usually an undisclosed cause that the family is aware of and friends/acquaintances only guess at (often correctly), but nobody talks about it. Or, if the person was famous, it’s made much of, with theories flying everywhere, sometimes for months or years, some right, some wrong (c.f. Heath Ledger, Robin Williams).
I wish those obits talked about how fucking hard it is to “fight” depression, how it is very much an ongoing, exhausting battle, how desperately tired and anguished a person must have been to concede the fight. And I think doing so would accomplish some of what OP is talking about by challenging the general assumption that only mild versions of depression exist and that taking long walks or practicing yoga or eating this or that food or whatever will snap someone out of it, as if depression is just sad daydreaming and people with depression could choose to switch to happy daydreaming instead.
I’ve lived with treatment-resistant clinical depression and anxiety disorder my entire life. When I was a teen in the 80s, “depression” was something people fell into and eventually emerged from, naturally, after trauma. It was so much less understood by the general public than it is now (which is saying something), and not considered a lifelong condition by anyone other than medical professionals who specialized in mental illnesses. It *certainly* wasn’t something that affected teenagers, regardless of how strong the evidence was, since every emotion a teenager had was put down to “moodiness” brought on by puberty (and, usually, put down to being female).
Medical treatment for depression before Prozac (which was only approved in the U.S. by the FDA in 1987 and went to market in 1988) was usually antipsychotics, and these were not prescribed to “regular” people. The kind of people who got medical treatment for the mental disorders we’re talking about today were only to be found in locked wards not that long ago. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t “regular” people who desperately needed help and medication–far from it–just that, despite how bad ignorance and misinformation about depression is today, it was so much worse just 40 years ago. It got better because of Prozac. Prozac was huge news, and so depression sort of became huge news too. But there’s so much more that should be common knowledge, and still so much stigmatization, and the only way I know of to make something common knowledge and reduce stigmatization is for people who have information to talk about it every chance they get.
I understand that mental illness is not the same as physical illness, and that there is a significant amount of nuance required to discuss suicide as a result of depression, especially because people are very reluctant to talk about suicide at all. (And there is the whole other problem battling the “talking about suicide will encourage people to commit suicide” barrier.) I know all about how the kind of help that exists for people at the far end of their depression is sometimes unattainable because of the depression, but talking about suicide as a result of disease, without judging the disease, could open so many doors for more help, more resources, more early warning signs being recognized and more understanding – discussion without judgement. Because when we recognize depression as a disease that is fatal to a certain percent of those who have it, we can then talk about solutions to reduce that percent.
Anyway, I hope this was somewhat coherent.
