hyperbole and a half and depression: not a depression bible 

shmotguy:

tl;dr while that depiction of depression is valid and true for that person and even many others, it is not for everyone, and going around propagating it as some profound and all-encompassing insight into everyone’s depression is going to HURT someone you know with depression because you will be forcing them into a framework that doesn’t apply to them


or: why i was scared for a whole five minutes that i’m not actually a depressed person and i might just be a worthless sack of shit

Read More

lq84i:

Depression Quest is an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression. You are given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment. This game aims to show other sufferers of depression that they are not alone in their feelings, and to illustrate to people who may not understand the illness the depths of what it can do to people.

I’m playing this right now, and as someone that’s currently working through dealing with depression this is a very accurate representation of how I’ve felt and some scenarios I’ve been in. The goal of the game is to raise awareness of depression and how it affects people, so if you or friends/family suffer from depression I highly suggest playing this. It really gives you an idea of why those with depression act as they do, and that it’s not always by choice.

It covers things like people saying “just go out with people more, you’ll feel better”, or “just work harder and push through” and other common things that are said to people with depression.

"One of the manifestations of depression for me is that I lose my will. And I thereby lose my ability to focus. I don’t think I’ll ever have the day-to-day consistency in my performance that something like This American Life has. If I’m not depressed and I’m on and I can focus and I can think through something hard and without interruption and without existential emptiness that comes from depression, that gives me – not mania. But I exalt. I exalt in not being depressed."

caterinasforzas:

the woods part of when: I believe intelligence and depression go hand in hand. we think way…

plenilune:

I believe intelligence and depression go hand in hand. we think way too much and we see life as it really is. anyone who is able to see all this pain and wrong in the world would get depressed about it. but we also get depressed because of all the beautiful things in nature, as we know nothing in this world is forever, every person, every story, every moment has an ending.

respectfully, screw this.

like, impale it to the wall with an effing broadsword because this is some poisonous crap right here.

as someone who has been clinically depressed for at least half her life (it’s difficult to tell, because a lot of my depression is wrapped up in my many other neuroatypicalities, some of which were, in retrospect, present in toddlerhood), I think I can pretty definitively say: depression is not insight. depression is not because of some special snowflake sensitivity. depression is not seeing all the cruelty and beauty of the world with preternatural wisdom and grieving over the transience of it all. depression kills you.

depression is an outside force that warps your understanding and takes away the things that make you yourself.

depression sure as all hell does not make me see life as it really is. depression exacerbates my apathy, my paranoia, my self-loathing; it makes me physically and psychologically confused and unable to follow through with basic tasks sometimes. depression sometimes makes it impossible for me to enjoy the things that make my life worth living; it takes away my ability to feel and give and receive love; to be angry; depression even steals my ability to grieve. that sounds like a paradox — depression means sad, right? but depression goes beyond sad, into dark places of sabotage and debilitating apathy, where I can barely think clearly enough to feed myself or get out of bed, even when life is offering me good things, even when there is no possible tangible reason for me to feel so empty that nothing tastes good to me any more. 

and the thing is, myths about depression being this magic sensitivity, where you grieve poetically about the universe, is actively damaging. you know what people with mental illnesses constantly do, despite all facts? doubt ourselves. we constantly doubt that there’s anything wrong, that it must be all in our heads, that we’re just making things hard for ourselves, that we’re just standard-issue failures. the funny part is the sheer level and irrationality of our self-doubt should be evidence enough to convince us that what is wrong with us is something much bigger than us, but, as always: depression kills you. 

when you’re told depression makes you create, write poetry, make art, that it attunes you to some secret truth of the universe, the fact that you can’t get yourself out of the damn bed any more and you haven’t washed your hair in five days and you used to live for writing but your ability to create has been obliterated tells you that you’re not really depressed, that you have failed even at this. it’s insulting, sabotaging, and poisonous, and it needs to stop. 

momalibrary:

Sad, Depressed, People. by David Horvitz

http://new-documents.org/books/sad-depressed-people

from the artist: “It’s called Sad, Depressed, People. A collection of stock photographs depicting depression. In the back is a collective-text orchestrated by Laurel Ptak. Its published by New Documents (Jeff Khonsary who publishes Fillip Magazine in Vancouver).”

From the back matter by Laurel Ptak: “Type the keywords ‘sad, depressed, people’ and here is what turns up: mental anguish styled in it most photogenic pose.”

"How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?"

"

You’re twenty-one or twenty-nine and your heart’s been broken somewhere between four and twenty times—fetal-position-on-the-bathroom-floor broken, real-country-music broken—and you don’t know how you can ever be expected to go on like this for fifty more years and change.

You have scars. You’ve injured your body in ways that will never fully heal, and you realize you are slowly, incorrigibly sliding away from some physical perfection you imagine you must have possessed sometime in the distant past. Maybe when you were fourteen. Maybe the day you were born.

You’ve gone on and off your medication and the bottle. You’ve had your first marriage and maybe your first divorce, or maybe you’ve always broken things off or been broken off. You’ve fucked and you’ve made love. You’re pretty sure you know the difference now.

You’ve thought of suicide in a post-adolescent way at least once. Practically. Stoically. Without any late-night phone calls. Just sober in a dimly lit bedroom, weighing cons and pros.

"

aseaofquotes:

Nick Hornby, About a Boy

theyearsthefearsthesleep:

osointricate:

shorm:

birdpear:

depression is like trying to peel a potato with another potato its not fun it doesnt work and you just wanna cry

…why is this such a good metaphor what the fuck

#and then people are like #God! Why don’t you just get a peeler!? #and then they HAND YOU ANOTHER FUCKING POTATO

and eventually you lay on the floor consumed by a pile of potatoes constantly reminded that they all still have their skin and god you suck at life.

and you go to stand up, but you trip on potatoes.

"It wasn’t until we were well past the middle of it
that we realized
the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,
far from being subverted,
had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed.
Mirrors and shop windows returned our faces to us,
replete with tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes
and not the doorway we had hoped for.
His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker that before,
scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt."

tw for mental health, ableism kind of

nnnn

ok

white privilege is very real and I very much have it and I am not trying to deny that

but can we not delegitimize depression when it comes from white people

because it is depression, not white whine, and there are -isms at work there too

"I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone."

"You may hear a lot of talk in your life about the hour of reckoning. People will say, you know, people talk about the moments that they face as if, you know, as if they got a notice from some office two weeks before the moment was going to come that says, ‘there’s a moment coming in two weeks, you might want to get your ass ready.’ You won’t get any such notice, there is no such office that does delivery. Instead, you may be sitting on the sofa, three beers deep, and two White Russians, staring at the television and thinking to yourself, ‘this can’t last forever’, hoping, praying that it will— or won’t!— last for the rest of your lifetime, because whatever comes next — it could be worse! You have evidence in your past that it could, in fact, be worse. But at the same time, you know it won’t be that previous worse. It will be some new thing. We live in an age that preaches the value of new things, but I am here to tell you there are some new things that are not so good … some new things suck gigantic asses. All day long."

Thoughts on activism and (vs?) depression  

[tw for depression and self-harm]

The other day I finished a really amazing novel on the Biafran War (Half of a Yellow Sun; check it out if you’re at all interested) and put it down feeling impressed and sad and angry and frustrated and ashamed.  Because reading about atrocities isn’t enough; I think we all know that.  We all know that reading about whatever terrible things don’t touch us, feeling bad for a bit, and then moving on, is not enough.  You have to do something.

Except right now I feel like I can’t do anything.  Going to work can make me want to hurt myself, but it’s better than staying in bed and hating myself so much I actually do it.  Does my poor mental health change what I’m expected to do?  Does it change what I should do, regardless of expectations?

Reading this novel energized me, though; I became angry about something outside myself and wanted, at least for a bit, to actually leave the house and be active.  To go for a run, to research actual responsible charities, to talk to people, to write.  So maybe my depression isn’t in the way at all; maybe activism would actually lessen my depression.  Except really, that’s also a problem; running around looking for “underprivileged” people to help just to make myself happier is patronizing and appropriative and really gross.  Like, “wow, your situation is so unjust, lifting my finger to marginally improve it makes me feel so much better about my life!  Bye!”  That’s not helping anyone.

I don’t know— this whole post is incredibly privileged.  If anyone has thoughts or input, I’d feel a lot more comfortable making this an actual discussion.

"

[tw for suicide]

It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death’s approach as the swell of a wave— a towering wall of blue. ‘You will drown,’ the world tells me, has always told me. ‘You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too.’ To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.

"