DwD: Depression's Antidotes, part one

When you're depressed, there are plenty of days when getting out of bed in the morning is a statement of faith, and accomplishing the basic tasks of life is as courageous as scaling a mountain. But when you come out of the worst of it, there start to be days when you can figure out how you're going to handle yourself.

And then, of course, there are days you can't. But this post is about the days when you're still depressed but you're capable of thinking about an approach, a way to deal with yourself. The answers, as we've already said, are as individual as the people who experience depression, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about some of them.


The ways to respond to depression seem to fall more or less into two camps: the "befriend your depression, explore it, don't fight it" camp, and the "do something positive, get out and make an effort, fight it with everything you have" camp.

Probably everybody has their own particular mix of how those two poles work. Mine seems to be about 80% "don't fight it" and 20% "fight." If I go too far in the "befriending your depression" direction, I end up wallowing in misery. If I go too far toward the positive thinking camp, I get pissed off at how shallow and fake and dishonest it is. Your own mix may be the opposite, or maybe there are half a dozen other approaches I haven't thought of yet.

Today we're talking about the "don't fight it, acknowledge depression's truth" side, and tomorrow or maybe Thursday we'll talk about the other side.

Our culture is so obsessed with thinking positively, seeing the glass as half full, and being grateful that it can be hard to find any support for just being honest with yourself about how awful you feel sometimes.

Recent research by psychologists shows that forcing yourself to think positively when you're feeling crappy actually backfires and makes you feel worse. "Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, such as those with high self-esteem, but backfire for the very people who need them the most."

It can be a relief to just allow yourself to feel what you're feeling. The research in this field is probably too recent to make any dramatic universal conclusions, but at the very least it points out that different strategies work for different people with different personality types.

In the book The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, the authors say that while some people respond well to pep talks and positive ways of prepping for stressful events, others function better when they prepare by thinking through all the worst things that could happen. Both groups perform equally well when they have prepared in their individual ways.

In the opening chapter of his wry, witty book This is How, Augusten Burroughs talks about this. "Telling yourself you feel terrific and wearing a brave smile and refusing to give in to 'negative thinking' is not only inaccurate--dishonest--but it can make you feel worse....in order to feel better than you feel at this moment, you need to identify how you feel, exactly. You won't be able to get to California, no matter how many maps you have, unless you know where you are starting from" (slightly paraphrased for brevity).

Later he continues, "Truth is accuracy. Without being accurate about how you feel, you can't expect to manifest large, specific changes in your life." We need to start with the truth, "not the truth you tell yourself in order to not rock the boat, or to smooth things over to keep everyone comfortable. The [real] truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors of the hinges and fills the world with fresh air."

Yeah. So there, all you Power-of-Positive-Thinking people. I'm not going to argue for "all truth all the time." I'm entirely in favor of the social untruths that keep you from having to confront ugly realities when you're sitting at a dinner party with people you don't really know, or chatting with someone before the PTA meeting starts.

In fact, maybe the only person who really needs to know this inner truth is me. At some level, digging myself out of the pit starts with acknowledging what it's really like down there, and why I might be there.

Maybe we need to create a space inside ourselves, a bubble that maybe nobody knows about but us, where we can be completely and utterly honest about what we're really thinking and feeling. And then maybe we can begin to pull ourselves out.