I distinctly remember that when I am depressed the LAST thing I want is to be cheered up. This makes no sense at all, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who experiences this.
Is there an evolutionary/psychological reason for this behaviour? Or is it one of those ‘design faults’ of a human being?
I’m assuming you mean general feeling down and not clinical depression.
It’s satisfying to wallow in feeling bad. And, for me at least, people trying to cheer me up is just annoying and not helpful. When I’m mildly down (like PMS) I just want it to go away, but if I’m, like, crying or pissed, yeah, everyone else can just go to hell.
It is not that you don’t want to be cheered up, it’s that you don’t believe you CAN be cheered up, which might or might not be correct. And personally, I would prefer silence and solitude to someone who’s trying to jerk me around into being “happy”. Whatever someone does or says, it becomes nothing more than an unpleasant noise in the environment.
A “depressed” state becomes a familiar state. I dislike unfamiliar things
Sometimes I (ir)rationalize that if I become happy, it only leaves me at a higher chance of becoming depressed again. And that would suck. So I’d rather just stay down rather than have to go through the pain of going up and then falling. Because if you’re going to end up back down here again- why bother to set yourself up for a fall?
It took me a while to realize that the higher points in life were worth staying up there for, and to realize the faultiness of my terrible terrible logic.
It really would help to know whether you are talking about having the blues and feeling down or whether you are takling about clinical depression.
In either state, I can’t really say that I want to be cheered up, but it’s for different reasons.
With clinical depression, I can’t be cheered up. But even if I could, why should I expect a brain in a depressed state to behave rationally? The judgment center of the brain is impaired. I’m more likely to want to stop existing.
When I have the blues, I want to give in to the dictates of my hormones. They know best. I want to cry and listen to Patsy Cline music. Or maybe Simon and Garfunkel. That is how I make myself feel better. That is what gets it out of my system. It’s natures way. Nobody can do that for me.
It’s not so much not wanting to be cheered up, it’s more a case of “Eh, why bother? It won’t change anything, so it’s not worth the effort of even trying.”
It’s the sheer annoyance of having someone trying to be light and fluffy when you have weighty things on your mind. If you think about it, when your down, either from depression or just in a funk, and some completely random thing happens, like your cat races into the room, leaps towards the couch, totally miscalculates and winds up freaking out because she’s suddenly got her head caught in the cushions, you’re quite likely to start laughing, but if someone is trying to cheer you up, it’s just damned annoying.
You just needed the right person to cheer you up. Unfortunately, that right person is NOT easy to have in your life, let alone by your side.
I agree with this. When I’m depressed, I will actively turn people away who are trying to cheer me up. If I’m really cajoled into going out, however, I’ll eventually wind up enjoying myself. It’s like getting over the hump, so to speak.
In my experience it is always that the right person is never there. The people usually trying to cheer you up don’t give a shit about you and only want their lives to be better. By being depressed you are dulling their lives and they can’t stand that. So you would always get lame advice like go outside, meet some friends and have fun. Never mind how ridiculously narrow minded that is.
When I’m depressed I usually know what will cheer me up. It’s usually my situation that is messed up and fixing it will make things better. The problem is that I don’t know how and the people who try to help don’t either.
I think that if I actually had the right people by my side, I wouldn’t be so depressed all the time.
I’m not talking about clinical depression though. It think the OP is, however, because I can’t see a situation where I wouldn’t want someone to cheer me up.
It’s more comfortable, usually, than the painful anxiety associated with confronting the thing you are withdrawing from. Living is hard work–depression gives you an excuse to be psychologically lazy, to withdraw into the safe cocoon of not caring.
I find it scary to think that anybody could ever believe a truly depressed person wants to remain that way. It is not safe, it is not comfortable, and its familiarity only makes it harder to find hope. Severely depressed people would–and often do–choose death over remaining depressed.
Depression distorts everything, so if I’m in a deep depression and you come over with some hilarious antics you downloaded from YouTube, they’re not going to be funny to me. It’s not that I don’t want them to be, or I’m stubbornly refusing to crack a smile like we’ve all seen kids do, it’s that I honestly cannot see the humor in anything through the darkness of my own misery.
There are people who derive some benefit from being depressed or acting down, and I can see that they might not choose to be jarred from their mood and lose that benefit. There are a lot of others who wish they had some kind of choice in the matter.
It IS comfortable. Its this oh-so-safe I’ve accepted myself as this way and have gotten others to accept me this way and it takes no effort on my part and I can excuse all sorts of shitty behavior because “poor me, I’m depressed” comfortable. Its comfortable in the “well, I feel like shit, but I’m not going to be disappointed” sense. Sometimes it gets so comfortable that I get to lie around in bed all day in my pajamas and feel sorry for myself. That’s a hell of a lot more comfortable than facing expectations.
But other people trying to cheer you up - that’s just patronizing and infuriating.
I’ll second that plus I suspect that there are many people who confuse self pity with being depressed.
True clinical depression means that you look on the world as a bad,futile,pointless place and that everything that has/is/will happened/ing is equally futile.
It is not thinking I should have got that job/girl etc. poor little me.
Because you are attached to your suffering and in some perverse way are reveling in it, indulging in it. At least that’s my current perspective looking back on this phase in my life.
We must be talking about different concepts of “depression.” For me, there is nothing comfortable in it, no acceptance of it, no giving in to it. It is a constant fight for my life, and the most difficult fight is the one to keep believing that there is any way out of it when there is no evidence to support that belief. Lying around in bed all day feeling sorry for myself? I don’t have time or energy for that kind of indulgence.
I’m with you on the patronizing and infuriating thing, though.
This describes me well. I think depression stems from a coping mechanism of avoiding your problems. It also saps your will to do anything (at my worst point, I’d lost interest in everything, and mostly just wanted to spend the day in bed). It’s not that you don’t want to feel better, but (for me at least) the stress eventually pushes you over the edge to a state of not caring anymore. Sure, deep down you care, but on the surface you just can’t be bothered to work up that much enthusiasm.
Honestly, there were times when I felt on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and even now I don’t know how I held myself together (sheer stubbornness I suppose). At times I wanted to let it happen, because breaking down and letting the pent up emotions carry me away seemed easier to deal with than trying to deal with my life–I could stop fighting myself. The only reason I didn’t let that happen was because I was afraid I’d never recover if I did.
I know when I get really depressed, I convince myself that I’m this hopelessly ugly, stupid, unlovable person who’s just better off living under a bridge, if at all.
I can laugh at something my cats did or enjoy a good meal and still feel like this. I can go into work and tell a joke in the breakroom, and then go back to my cubicle with simmering thoughts of suicide. I can sing along with the radio and then cry myself to sleep just thirty minutes later. For me, being depressed doesn’t mean being constantly wrapped up in a cloak of sadness and darkness. It’s just that the sadness is always there in the background, occassionally poking me on the shoulder in case I forget it.
It’s kind of like when you’re mourning someone for a long time. You go about your daily life and on the surface, seem to be hanging in there since you smile and laugh on a regularly basis. But the grief keeps you from feeling really happy. Every good thing that happens to you is dampened a bit because of the pain you’re suffering from. It sucks, but would you really want someone to cheer you up and make it all better? No. Not only do you feel entitled to the sadness, but it would feel like betrayl if you were to put on a happy face. Being happy won’t change the reality of the loss.
Even when I’m not feeling depressed, cheerer-uppers get on my nerves. Constant laughter and silliness are just as annoying as grouchiness and severity. I’ve found that people who are constantly happy and cheery are usually the worse people to go to when you’re dealing with problems, because they always manage to say belittling platitudes like “It’s not the end of the world”. Or my personal favorite, “Think about all those people who are less fortunate,” as if simply recognizing the problems in one’s life means that you aren’t grateful for anything. So lately I’ve been training myself on keeping my negative thoughts to my self.
I think there are different kinds of and levels of depression. Everybody gets down from time to time and if we’re talking about a basically happy person who had a patch of bad luck…well, I wouldn’t know.
For those of us whose brains need chemical assistance to shake off depression, hmm.
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Freud said something to the effect that depression is anger turned inward. If I don’t respond to your attempts to cheer me up, it’s because I’m not done berating myself yet. I think Steven Wright is credited with something like, “Depression is anger without enthusiasm.” Funny, but wrong: you don’t see the enthusiasm because it’s internal, like a program using up your computer’s memory in the background.
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I think I’m reality-based, which could make anybody depressed. I bet other depressives will resonate: when someone gets all chirpy about life, I wonder, ‘Are you not paying attention to some of the shit that’s going down?’
I will also add…(sorry)
Being dysthymic means that you suffer from low-grade depression for so long that you forget how life is without it. And you become convinced that it’s a major part of your personality.
I don’t think most people want to change their personality. For me, at least, I know there are parts of my personality that are abnormal, but I don’t think they’re unhealthy. If I give up the sadness, will those other quirks go away too? Will I become the kind of person that I previously couldn’t stand (manic, overly talkative, judgemental, insensitive, uncompassionate?) Or will I get to keep the things I do like and just get rid of the bad? How would I ever cope with a “new” personality?
I suppose that’s why I have been so reluctant to seek counseling.