Most importantly, if you are experiencing life threatening depression, I highly recommend seeking professional help as soon as you can.
If you read nothing else, please know that no matter what you are thinking or what you are feeling, you are not the only one. In fact, it’s one of the many ways depression doubles its weight—making you think no one has ever been here before.
First of all, why should you read what I have to say about depression? What are my credentials? Truthfully, anxiety has a much bigger appetite for my mind. But I’ve felt the kind of depression that makes you afraid that you’ll consider self-termination about 15 times in my life. I’m 32. I’ve never made an attempt, and I know I would never seriously consider it, so let’s call that category 3 depression. 3 out of 5, I guess. 5 being, like, the big bon voyage. I typically have garden-variety depression that lasts anywhere from 6 hours to 2 weeks about three times a year.
To the uninitiated, depression feels like a lot of things. You’ve heard it described like: heaviness, weakness, fatigue, loss of interest in things you used to enjoy. Let me try to articulate it differently. Depression feels like you got dosed at a party with a drug that robs you of your will to participate in life and you have no idea if the drug is ever going to wear off. It’s like a bad trip but it has lasted for days and everyone said it would only last a few hours.
I say “bad trip” because of the panic it can induce. The loss of desire to live can be so strong that you feel trapped with this unquenchable thirst to escape from yourself and how horrible you feel. But it feels like there’s nothing remotely available for you to use. You can’t get in your car and drive away. You can’t hide from it. You’re always taking it with you. Any second in the day that your brain has time to think, it immediately magnetizes to the depressed vision, the depressed thought, this ineffable sense of pestilent emptiness.
It's not always the painful lack of desire that pushes people too far, it’s the raging desire for freedom.
My analogy for mental illness that can be treated by changes in thought goes like this: our thoughts are like trails in a forest. The more you think these thoughts, the deeper the trail gets and the easier it becomes for your mind to instantly trek down them. For those of us with anxiety and depression, those trails feel like they’re paved in asphalt. You simply cannot help but drive headlong down them.
To add acid to the wound, a lot of people have this attitude toward depression that reveals the belief that you can just “snap out of it”, that with enough willpower, or discipline, you can dust yourself off. Even if this were true, the problem is that willpower is the food that depression is consuming.
Cool, we know what depression is, what do you recommend?
3 immediate hotfixes. These will not cure your depression, but they might help you stabilize yourself long enough to find sustainable treatment. For example, if you don’t stop bleeding out, you can’t get yourself to the hospital.
First and foremost, distraction. When that horrific desire to escape feeling trapped in your mind is eating you alive, you have got to turn your mind off. Let that depression road in our forest analogy get overgrown so it’s harder to go down. There is a point at which your brain is so conditioned to spiral out of habit, that you need to reset yourself.
In 2013, I quit drinking for the first time. My anxiety spiked like a hammer to the face because for the previous two years, I had used a nervous system depressant to smooth out the day-to-day turbulence of life. Without that crutch, normal stressors seemed like monstrosities. I used media to distract me. I had to fall asleep to a movie every night for three months until my brain literally forgot how to leap down the most anxious path in my head. I had to actively keep my mind from thinking. For you, maybe it’s a TV show, maybe it’s cooking something simple. I recommend you be of service to strangers, start a conversation with a random person in public, call family, call friends, and—since we’re getting to it already—when you feel stable enough to speak, let people know what the fuck is going on.
It’s hard to know what comes first: the environment making you depressed or your depression keeping you from seeking a positive environment. In any case, if you have a partner and you haven’t been opening up to them, you gotta start now. Preferably when the time is right, you know, right when they get home from a double shift waiting tables—that should be perfect. Seriously, make sure you ask your person if they can make time for you to share what’s going on. Set and setting makes a huge difference. If someone isn’t ready to hear you, but it comes across like they don’t care, you could feel way worse.
Your family might be terrible, but if you’ve never shared yourself in this manner, I think it’s generally worth a shot. If they suck at listening, at least you won’t be surprised. If you’re worried about them telling you to go to church or eat more fruit or something, honestly, maybe you need to try those things. These conversations with parents or siblings might not make you feel a lot better but you will rest assured that you have made an effort to include important people.
If you haven’t opened up to your friends, do so. I guarantee one of them will know what you’re going through. If not, let them help you distract yourself with going to a show, going out to eat, or hopefully trying to laugh. And if your “friends” ever make you feel bad about sharing your mental state, they’re not your friends. Shit, they might be contributing to your depression.
If all else fails and the people you spend the most time with on a daily basis are coworkers, reach out to them—on a slow day, with the person you find most agreeable. They might even initiate by complainign about something going on in their life in a roundabout way, you know, making a joke out of it when they might be really hurt. This could be a great opportunity to ask them what’s going on. See if you can’t help. See if you can’t share your stuff.
Remember to always give acquaintances an out. Say, “If this is too much, I totally understand. I’m not trying to dump my shit on you. I just need to level with someone.” That way, when you’re sharing, you’ll remove a little concern that they feel stuck there listening to you.
The third immediate hotfix for depression in my experience is sustained, strenuous exercise. I’m talking about a long run, an hour lifting weights, a martial arts class, shoveling your neighbor’s driveway, whatever you have to do.
A quick PSA: exercise is not going to fill the hole. The existential one. The deep dark nameless pit we never talk about. But we’re talking about hotfixes here, not magic, not spiritual transcendence—just plain, adult solutions to problems that need to get stabilized as quickly as possible.
How on earth can exercise help? Get the image of two dudes on a podcast talking about how you just need to lift weights to change your life. Let me advocate here. Exercise takes all the energy currently working to evaluate your self esteem, your guilt, your downward spiral and diverts it to the mental faculties in charge of maintaining your physical performance. In short, when the activity is hard enough, you will not have the energy or time to think about how you feel. For those of you who are not currently dealing with an undiagnosed neural receptor issue that bars chemicals like serotonin from being communicated, hard exercise might make a big difference very quickly.
These three things, distraction, communication, and exercise, can help you gain enough solid ground to start doing the heavy lifting of seeking professional help, which unfortunately can take months to tackle. Between making “new patient appointments” and navigating insurance, the cost, the time, the fear induced by clinical rooms—it’s no wonder your fucking depressed.
If you don’t have a primary care physician, try your best to get one. If you don’t have insurance, many states have services that make primary care or equivalent services affordable. In Colorado there is a service called Nextera. It’s 90 bucks a month, no insurance required, and they can get you access to great doctors. I personally vouch for them. At the very least, they can recommend specialists, prescribe meds, do tests at a cheaper rate, and be a point of contact.
Speaking of meds, who wants their mental stability to be dependent on a pill? I understand the fear. I started Lexapro two years ago and it has worked well for me. I was afraid to start it because I didn’t want to feel better and regret that I hadn’t started sooner. Lexapro has thinned my depression in both frequency of occurrence and the degree of depression I feel. It took some adjustments to dosage, which was painless, and I want to keep taking it.
It might take several different prescriptions altogether to find something that really works for you. But it’s worth the struggle because you’re already struggling. Medication can save people’s lives. Suicidal depression is as serious as it gets. Half of us are taking speed to get through college, so for God’s sake, if you need to try medication, try it. These meds are not going anywhere and they are relatively affordable especially for those of you who are already wasting money self-medicating and making your mental illness worse. If you’ve exhausted other options like major lifestyle changes and creating a better environment for yourself—and you still do not feel better—please consider medication.
Another big solution that turns people off is speaking to a professional. The shrink, the head doc, the quack. Here’s all I’m going to say about it: these people have spoken to hundreds of patients who are saying the same exact things you are. And they have seen what techniques work and what don’t. Tap into their knowledge. Do not go in to speak to a therapist expecting them to be a guru of enlightenment or for some enchanting sentence to cure you. That’s not going to happen and you are going to galvanize your distaste for seeking aid. The solution is in the interaction itself. You are talking to someone who has made it their life to investigate this shit. They will show you, not just tell you, that you are not alone. Your suffering is not unique, it is not strange, it is not untreatable. And, at the very least, it is worth every penny to admit what you are going through and have a professional look at you and say, “No, you are not crazy.”
Life isn’t a game but let's think about it like that for a second. The point of a game is to win. Depression feels like you don’t even want to play anymore because it’s pointless and there’s no way to win anyhow. Read this carefully please. Some of us follow the white rabbit of depression because in its spiral there appears to be some promise of truth. It seems to confirm something we’ve known all along. “I knew I wasn’t good enough.” “I knew I wasn’t worthy.” “I knew it was never going to get better.” “Why should I live life if it’s just going to end?”
In this analogy of life as a game, the “truths” of depression may be truths. They might be the “secret hidden rules of the game that no one else will tell you”. Sure. They might make a hell of a lot of sense. That’s why we keep listening. But listening to depression—letting it construct your worldview in that disastrous perspective—is like letting the opposing team give you a pep talk before you hit the field. You’re going to believe it's not even worth playing. You need to feel empowered by cutting the rope on things that don’t help you win in your life.
If the point is to win—to be happy, to have fun, to make a positive influence, to lessen other people’s suffering, to adopt a dog, to make art, to have a family, to be good to people—how the fuck are you going to win by listening to depression?
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