While discussing my chronic depression with my doctor, he asked me to describe what it feels like. I had a hard time. It is not the same as being sad. The closest I came to describing it was saying that it feels like a weight on my brain - but not really. It makes me feel tired - but not really.
If you suffer how would you describe it?
(BTW, he caught me equally off-gaurd with a similar question about my restless leg syndrome - for which I will be starting a different thread in the near future.)
I would describe it as a state of numbness, with episodes of intense agony. Basically, nothing felt good or right. You aren’t excited or happy about anything. Your favorite foods don’t taste as good. Your favorite songs don’t sound the same. Doing things that normally bring you joy does nothing.
The only expression that has ever done it justice to me is “I’m in a black hole”. It’s sadness, but not ordinary sadness; it takes over your entire life and makes it seem like it will never ever end and will always be the thing your life revolves around. There is a pervading sense of pointlessness. Nothing will ever help. Nothing will ever change. There is no point in doing anything. Kind of like living in a black hole.
There are different types of depression. The last few have just involved a profound sense of disconnect. You keep moving, but it’s mostly out of inertia. It felt like I had been completely hollowed out inside. There’s a sort of blankness to it, and in a sense, you have “turned off” because it’s the only way to get through the day. About the only emotion I felt was an intense hatred for myself.
Weirdly, when I was depressed (way back) in high-school, there was a more active component to it. It involved a lot more hurt and frustration. Instead of blankness, though, everything felt incredibly intense. Almost beautifully so. Virginia Woolf had a line in (I think) Mrs. Dalloway about the freedom of the condemned (referring to the suicidal) which was exactly how it felt. Of the two, I actually miss this feeling.
Unsatisfaction. You don’t want to do anything, but you don’t want to sit around doing nothing. You try to think about something to do that will cheer you up but nothing is appealing.
You’re just unsatisfied.
You end up just sitting there wishing everything was different but not knowing how it should be different, and your mind dwells on all the bad things about yourself.
You disregard everything good that happens to you (you’re not even aware of those things), and blow everthing bad that happens to you all out of proportion.
Your emotions overwhelm you and you don’t know how to handle it, so you handle it in unhealthy ways. Cutting yourself, drinking, immersing yourself in movie after movie and TV show after TV show, crying uncontrollably.
You wish you were dead so you wouldn’t have to keep struggling through all your confusion. But there’s a hope that stops you from doing it, because maybe things will get better. You don’t know for sure, though. You’re just toughing it out until the end of the ride. Just to see how it ends, because you’re too curious to just off yourself and never know if things might have worked out okay.
You could win a million dollars the next day, and you wouldn’t feel any different.
That’s how I felt all the time, before I started therapy and medication. Now I only feel like that most of the time. Progress!
It was like being in a thick, dark fog. Moving through the fog was exhausting. Everything was muffled and distorted - like when you were a little kid in your bed at night and you thought the chair or the tree limb outside your window was a monster? Like that. Any positive comment or happening was “Just luck” or “They don’t really know me.” Everything hurt. I heard an endless litany of my inherent worthlessness, unlovableness, stupidity and ugliness, that I was damned to hell because of my grandfather’s sins, that I was nothing, less than nothing, that I should never have been born and had no right to live and take up resources that a real person could use. Something lurked out there in the fog and whispered seductively, “just give up, I’m going to win in the end and you know it, just give up, it would be so easy and you won’t hurt anymore, just give up and let go, it will be better when you’re dead, just let go…”
To sum up, when I was depressed, I felt half dead, numb and inhuman. Now, I have feelings , I feel human and alive. This was a very alien feeling for quite a while, as I had depression starting in childhood, so I’ve never had a “normal” life before. I missed out on a lot, just trying to stay alive for one more day. Now I know that I don’t owe anybody an explaination for why I haven’t done X, Y or Z, but that used to be one more reason to beat myself up.
I’m on a relatively new medication, Cymbalta, that actually works and hasn’t pooped out yet, which is amazing, because every other med I’ve been on has either made me a zombie or sent me on a fast ride to hell. However, as much good the medication has done, it wouldn’t have been near as effective for me without all the therapy I had to go along with it. I really had to work to get better, it didn’t just come with taking my meds every day. Of course, I was depressed for decades and had a lot of crap to dig through, so YMMV.
You know that lead apron that you get to put on, at the dentist’s office, so that they can take X-rays?
Feels like I’m wearing that . And also a feeling of being doomed to forever feel that way. I also agree with the hollowness - like being a shell of a person.
My dad used to express it this way - with a weary, plaintive “I don’t know why I get up in the morning”.
Also sometimes I feel like I’d like to sleep forever.
Sleep! Oh god, yes, the desire for sleep. I think I used it as sort of a suicide substitute. It didn’t even have anything to do with being tired, you just wanted to not be for as long as possible. Maybe things would be different when you woke up. At least you weren’t thinking about anything.
Yup. A number of people have mentioned being weighted down. Exactly. It feels like a physical weight you can’t get off you. (I ususually hate those drug ads they run now, but there’s one that talks about depression causing physical as well as mental pain…I kind of appreciated that. Maybe people would understand beter? I wonder if it it actually works??)
I would agree with this as well (except that as a photographer…which I am when I’m not depressed…I prefer B&W. ) But when you’re depressed you can’t see the world, you can’t taste your food, you can’t feel sex. I guess if you wanted to explain it to someone else, go with the food. It doesn’t taste like anything anymore.
I can sum it up as “Life doesn’t work”. Your pleasure/ pain balance system is completely offline because simply existing is pain, and next to nothing is pleasurable for more than the briefest moments. The only emotions you feel are anger, numb exhaustion, and a sadness that tears would be an improvement on. In my worst depression I didn’t pray to die: I prayed to be retroactively erased from time.
This pretty much describes what I felt, along with the feeling of vague dissatisfaction. I didn’t feel pain, which makes me think that it was mild depression, but I just couldn’t feel any emotion whatsoever good or bad. My grades dropped, but I couldn’t get worked up about it, I could not communicate with my folks–not that I wanted to anyway–and I lost my virginity, but it was all just . . . meh.
I think I realized I was over my depression when I started feeling emotions again. That was the real turning point.
Like looking at the world through a plate-glass window. You can see what’s going on, but you don’t really interact with it that well, and feel separated from everything.
Exhausted, constantly. Even if you’re not sleepy, you still feel worn down.
That’s perfect. Heavy, with everything inside you scooped out, and eyes looking through things instead of at them. Watching yourself go through the day but not really experiencing any of your actions, and through it all, the overwhelming desire to just go back to bed and make everything go away.
I always describe it as going through life tied into a wheelchair. I’m physically able to walk, but I can’t untie myself. And no place is wheelchair-accessible.
) But when you’re depressed you can’t see the world, you can’t taste your food, you can’t feel sex. I guess if you wanted to explain it to someone else, go with the food. It doesn’t taste like anything anymore.