I think this is true for many people, especially women, who have ‘the blues’. They are relieved to have an excuse not to feel the need to please everyone or put on a happy face.
As for depression, like others here I don’t recall not wanting to be cheered up, just feeling that any attempts were futile. I sought out my favorite funny movies and stand-up acts… nada. If anything, watching/listening to things that had previously made me laugh and getting no response just made things worse, as did eating my favorite foods and deriving no pleasure from them.
I had the same concern myself when I started taking medicine. But I didn’t change all that much–I just became a person that I hadn’t seen since high school. I’m essentially the same person, but there’s a background buzz of bad emotions that the meds took away. I’m not constantly on edge like I used to be. (As a female it’s a huge blessing, because PMS always made it twice as bad)
When I have negative feelings (either “down” or anger), the folks saying things like “oh, cheer up!” or “sweetie, don’t get angry” just come across as the biggest patronizing morons in history. “Hey, I am angry already, ok? I can’t get angry, already am!” Or, “cheer up, what do you mean cheer up? Her boyfriend just got run over by a freaking truck and you tell her to cheer up? What kind of barn were you raised in?”
It’s not that I want to stay in the bad place, it’s the utter lack of empathy of the well-wishers, who sometimes are the people who triggered the bad feeling in the first place.
This refers to pretty mild emotions; I was quite depresed at one point (self-esteem somewhere in my antipodes), but nobody noticed, so nobody told me to cheer up.
PS: the truck example is real, from 10th grade. A classmate got run over by a truck, his gf’s “friends” were telling her to cheer up and to stop crying.
I remember one day, a fellow teacher said to me, “Oh, come on, it can’t be that bad!” I didn’t even realize I was walking around with any particular expression on my face or anything. Her tone of voice was, “Cheer up; life’s good!”
I could have said, but didn’t: “I just told my wife last night that I want a divorce. It’s taken me about a year and a half to come to that decision. Sorry to bum you out with the expression on my face.” Snap fingers. “ALL BETTER NOW!”
I think it makes plenty of sense. If you’re depressed for a reason, it’s probably something you think is fairly overwhelming at the time. By trying to “cheer you up,” other people are trivializing the reason for your mood, suggesting that it’s unimportant enough that a simple change of attitude on your part will solve everything.
There is a difference between being happy and being cheered up. When people are feeling really angry, sad, frustrated, or betrayed, sometimes they have a need to have the problem resolved or at least have their feelings validated before they can start to move on. If you try to cheer someone up without acknowledging that fact, you can come off as being either insensitive or clueless to how they feel. “Oh, sorry your girlfriend is sleeping with your brother, let’s go out for dim sum”. Also it may seem like the cheerer is doing it for selfish reasons, like an implied statement of “I’m tired of you laying around acting depressed; you’re not entertaining me anymore”.
It has to be said that when people are depressed, their brains aren’t working entirely normal, so the above perceptions may be pronounced in a distorted way. But woe to you if you try to point that out; people seldom like being told that they’re acting irrational. Oftentimes you can’t just cheer someone up with a fruit basket; if it were that easy nobody would ever be down.
(Speaking someone who has seen it from both sides).
Typically people try to cheer me up by saying, “Let’s go out!”
Number one, I am well aware that I am terrible company when I’m feeling lousy, whether it’s for emotional or physical reasons. So they’re basically saying “Please, come out with us so we can spend the entire night reminding you that you’re no fun!”
Number two, even if I can make myself fake being social, it’s only faking. So I’m sitting there forcing myself to giggle at something I don’t find especially funny at the moment, thinking, “They’re all laughing for real. Why do I have to fake it? What’s wrong with me?” There’s a part of my brain that sits there, remote from the action and even what I’m doing, just watching and wondering why I can’t be like everyone else, and why it’s so wrong that I’m not like everyone else that they feel the need to make me change.
Then when you drop me back home for the night, I sit there and cry because I am apparently so broken that it’s not even socially acceptable to acknowledge my broken-ness and just let me be sad, dammit.
It’s not that I particularly want to stay depressed for it’s own sake; it’s more that one of the worst things you can do to me at the time is haul me in front of a mirror and spend the night saying, “Why are you like that? You shouldn’t be like that! You’re wrong!” I realize that nobody ever really means it that way, but depression is screwy like that, and that’s how I hear it.
That’s what I mean when I say most people aren’t very good at cheering up. It takes someone with a special connection, not just a random somebody to say ramdom things.
Someone trying to cheer you up is annoying, but I don’t now if I’d call it patronizing, unless they’re going out of their way to it.
When I was at my worst after losing my job, I went to a family gathering. these are always happy times, and I was absolutely miserable because I couldn’t get with the spirit of the event. It was like rubbing salt in a wound because I was dragging everyone else down instead of rising to them.
One book I like to plug wherever I get an excuse is “How The Mind Works” by Dr. Stephen Pinker. To my mind, it makes an excellent try of doing what the title suggests, and sheds interesting light on subjects like these.
One hypothesis I found fascinating was that the purpose of extremely negative emotional states is simply as a deterrent to avoid whatever gets people into those states. It’s the doomsday device from Dr. Strangelove. For example, a parent may know (or imagine) the grief from the death of one’s child, thus they do all they can to safeguard the child. Alternately, we know that some people when provoked and distressed can go on senseless rampages; thus we try to keep the people around us happy and not antagonize people unnecessarily. There is no benefit in deep grief or murderous rampage. The benefit is realized in the avoidance of these things. But if the potential to trigger these emotions didn’t exist, then the deterrent wouldn’t work.
Thus, when something awful has happened that no amount of grieving will undo, we cannot simply shrug off the grief as a mere inconvenience, even though it changes nothing. And likewise this may be why we get people flailing around trying to cheer us up with their superficial imprecations; they don’t want to see you do something that might make them feel bad either.
It’s annoying having someone try to cheer you up because you feel the way you feel for a reason. Someone coming along and asking you to turn that frown upside down doesn’t change what is making you feel bad and invalidates your feelings.
I’m surprised how many here imply that there’s necessarily a direct link between the clinically depressed person’s avoidance and the reason for the depression:
I don’t think there has to be a link at all. And I don’t think it’s about comfort. It’s about inaction for it’s own sake. While anxiety might lead to depression over time, it’s not equivalent to depression.
Or how some would imbue it with judgment:
“Hmm. I want to be lazy, but how can I justify it to my friends? I know! I’ll get depressed!”
Or that it involves some kind of elaborate, teleological reasoning:
“First I go out with my friends. Then I feel distant and alienated. Next I wonder about what’s wrong with me, in vain. Finally, of course I end up crying, because it was meant to be from the start. It doesn’t pass the cost-benefit test, so I won’t do it.” I don’t think it involves this kind of thinking.
Or even an existentialist philosophy: The world is “futile” or “pointless.” These are not feelings so much as beliefs. And you can’t have a belief if you don’t have motivation.
Clinically depressed people lack certain brain chemicals which cause motivation. (The causes of this lack involve both extremely complicated psychological origins as well as physiological ones.) I don’t know much about biochemistry, but I’m pretty sure that the reason why a dog will fetch a stick over and over again, or why a cat plays with a string, is that they have chemicals in their brain that spur it on. You can call it “fun,” but what this chemical component of the brain really does is trigger behavior that produces dopamine, while developing muscle strength, and physical and mental agility. It’s the same thing that makes you want to play any sport or solve a crossword puzzle or play chess.
For someone to get cheered up, it’s a two-way street. But the clinically depressed person lacks motivation–not motivation specifically to be “cheery,” but just motivation in general. The cheering up won’t happen with a one-sided interaction. This probably explains why the cat mentioned above jumping up and hitting its head can bring on mirth in an otherwise joyless person: It doesn’t require social orchestration.
So, IMHO, it’s not that the depressed person wants to remain depressed–it’s that the person doesn’t want, period. And it can become an endless circle, often self-fulfilling, and leading to self-hatred, etc. Fun, joy, interest–even indignation–aren’t possible without motivation.
True, but it’s not the hard work that keeps a depressed person from engaging in basic, day-to-day actions. It’s the lack of will.
Speaking of comfort and sad–I don’t want people telling me to ‘cheer up’ or even really leave me alone. I want people to comfort me. Even though I’ve withdrawn it doesn’t mean I don’t want people around, it means that I want them to come to me and let me know that I’m wanted and that they care about me. It’s not that a depressed person wants to stay depressed (as has been said, you lose the will to want much at all), it’s that they need others to acknowledge them and let them know that people care. Trying to cheer them up without acknowledging that is playing into what’s making them depressed in the first place (or at least was for me–I think mine stemmed from too many years of people not caring. My parents did, but when you’re having social issues at school that’s a very cold comfort.)
This is by no means a complete explanation, but in my experience it accounts for at least some of it in a lot of people: We are creatures of habit; we prefer the familiar, and fear change. What we know is safe; what we do not know is dangerous. This is a survival adaptation, part of how we’re wired. It can backfire if we get into a pattern of dark emotions. This is the “comfort of feeling sad” – it’s not the comfort of sadness, it’s the comfort of familiarity. We decide, superficially, that we don’t want to end the depression not because it feels good but because it feels familiar. After a sustained period of feeling down, we begin to tell ourselves, “I know how to do this. I understand this. I know how to live like this. I don’t know how to live any other way. Change is frightening. I don’t know if I can deal with it. So I won’t change. I don’t necessarily enjoy the way I’m feeling, but at least I know what it’s like, and I certainly don’t know that another way wouldn’t be worse. So here I am, and here I shall remain.”
I’m not sure that I agree with the idea that it’s the comfort of familiarity.
I’ve been a pretty happy person lately, and can get to a happy state fairly effortlessly. Last week something happened to bring me down. My first thought was to get back to happiness, but I decided not to. It’s not that my depressive thoughts were more comfortable, but that I needed to process them. I think it’s sometimes necessary to dwell on a bad feeling, toy with it, and experience it before moving on. When this becomes a bad thing is when you fail to move on.
I think that where a lot of people get into trouble is that they lack vision when they are depressed. Depression’s nature is that it takes over so much that you can sort of forget that other states are possible and you give up even trying.
Personally, I just try to recognize that it’s a temporary state, and I embrace it. It tends to disappear pretty fast that way.
It’s feeling blue, or as another poster put it, feeling sorry for myself.
I think it would be helpful for all to understand that there are different levels of depression. Certainly feeling bummed out is not the same as clinical depression.
This whole drive to fight, to believe in the absence of evidence … It sounds like, when you’re down, you can still see a reason to carry on. that you are sure enough of yourself to believe the depression is worth conquering because there can be a payoff, even though you may not know what it is at the time.
I’m not one to say you’ve never been depressed or anything but, well, have you never found yourself unable to fight? That there IS no payoff and that even if there were, you are not worthy of it? That it would be a mercy to the rest of the world to withdraw your sorry ass from the race and let someone else have your place in line because, face it, wouldn’t it be a waste of a break to give it to you?
Cheer me up when I’m down? You’re just rubbing my nose in the “fact” that I’m incapable and unworthy of any positive outlook. You will not appear to be caring, quite the opposite.
This thread is really starting to make me a little angry.
Guizot, when I said this:
I wasn’t trying to make a value-judgment, I was
a) speaking from the pain of my own depression
b) only suggesting one of many reasons depression may perpetuate itself.
For me, depression is absolutely the pinnacle of psychological laziness, a giving up, a closing out of the world and of feelings, a refusal to engage with reality. At some point all the anxious energy becomes too much and everything implodes in on itself. This might not be true for everyone, but it’s true for me. The very first thing I do when I get depressed is think about quitting my job, running away, or even killing myself. I couldn’t possibly be rejecting the world and all its difficulty more at that point. Though I certainly do agree that where depression burns is the lack of will. I consider that the same as laziness, though I’m often chastised for calling myself lazy (you’re not lazy, you’re depressed!) Okay, so what if I am depressed? What it comes down to is, I don’t want to do this thing because it’s too hard and I don’t care about the long-term possible benefit because I am so wedded to this moment and the agony of living it.
If depression weren’t impermanent, I would have committed suicide years ago. I had the word impermanence tattooed on my body just to remind myself that depression is impermanent, lest I become so irrational that I forget. Nietzsche once commented that the way he survived his own anguishes was by promising to kill himself the next morning instead of that moment. A common crisis intervention technique is to tell yourself you’ll kill yourself another day–you only have to commit to this one.
Depression, like all emotional states, like all of life, is impermanent, evolving, ebbing and flowing. tdn, I would gather, based on his past discussions of Zen, is talking about accepting depression as yet another inevitable but impermanent emotional state. I believe that our suffering is intensified when we try to reject something that is happening whether we want it to or not. Many people have found that when they accept their depressive states and stop resisting or judging, it opens up a spaciousness and a sense of self-compassion that allows them to relax and be okay with themselves. And once the ‘‘I’m okay just like this’’ thoughts start generating, the cycle of self-hatred is broken, the negative self-talk stops, and the depression lifts. Last night I was sitting in the bathtub trying to figure out a way to kill myself without leaving a mess to clean up. Today I was singing out loud at work and genuinely looking forward to the future. You know what made the difference? ‘‘Oh, right. This is temporary. And also totally okay.’’ I’m still depressed, but at least I’m not making things worse by hating myself for it or deluding myself into believing I’ll always feel this way or perpetuating negative thought patterns.
What depression is for one person could be experientially totally different for another person. I don’t see the point in telling others their experiences or perceptions are not valid. Maybe some people do like being depressed, maybe it’s familiar to them and they take comfort in it. Maybe others don’t experience it that way. Maybe that’s one reason it’s such an insidious disorder – it manifests in all the colors of the rainbow and what helps one person might not help another.