Hanna Silva
Lic. Psychologist
March 13, 2023
Here are 3 hidden aspects of depression that I wish everyone would be aware of:
1. Depression looks astonishingly different from the inside.
From an outside perspective, depression can be mistaken for chronic inactivity, lethargy or even apathy. In most cases, however, the opposite is true.
Just because your body looks slow and slumped doesn’t mean it’s inactive.
From the inside, depression is a persistent battle. Your body experiences an intense stress response every minute of the day. Your mental landscape is constantly invaded by the voice of depression. And you fight back, which means you’re engaged in a seemingly endless screaming match inside your own mind.
So, when depressed, most of your energy goes into managing your mental state, leaving very little power left to do anything else. And trust me, it’s exhausting. You fight harder than you ever have before just to get out of bed or leave the house.
2. Depression wants you to think that it represents the truth.
Depression is in most cases accompanied by gruesome beliefs about your own inadequacy, other people’s indifference and the awfulness of the world. Although deeply disturbing, the thoughts themselves are not the biggest problem. It’s that depression uses them to twist your reality.
When depressed, brutal thoughts about yourself, others and the world feel instinctively true. As if you’ve discovered the real reality. As if “the veil has been lifted” and you can see clearly. As if happy people are just fooling themselves.
This is one of depression’s most horrifying survival mechanisms.
When depression makes us believe that depression itself is the one true truth, we lose motivation to change it. We have taken the red pill and discovered the Matrix. And there is no point in going back because we know that the world is just one big lie.
It’s not though. But depression will do everything in its power to make you believe so.
3. Depression is a disease.
Yes, most non-depressed people are aware that depression is a mental health disorder, but it can be difficult to imagine what that means unless you lived it.
It means that:
You can’t snap out of it. You can’t cheer yourself up. You can’t recover instantly.
All non-depressed people have experienced small portions of depressive symptoms. And because they are somewhat familiar with feeling low, unmotivated, uninterested, fatigued, sleep deprived, critical, guilty, shameful and even hopeless or empty, they think they know depression. They mistake depression for the temporary emotional states that we all experience.
Non-depressed people fail to recognise that it’s the torturous permanence that is the hallmark of depression – to wake up to the same crushing waves of emptiness or negative emotion day after day without the instinctual comfort of knowing that eventually these emotional states will dissolve.
Depression is indeed a disease. And it alters brain function. It means that you simply can’t do what you normally do when depressed.
Depressed people know what’s healthy and unhealthy. They know it’s better to take a shower than to stay in bed obsessing over negative aspects of their lives. But the brain cells are not responding as usual. The neurons are not firing with the same intensity and they don’t form the same communicative pathways as usual.
So, you can’t snap out of it. Not without proper treatment. And there are many methods to try.
One suggestion is tDCS. It’s a non-invasive form of brain stimulation that targets the brain directly. And because it doesn’t disrupt your hormonal and digestive systems (such as antidepressants do) it has very few side effects. The treatment can be ordered online and used at home.
Hope this helps.