Depression pushes you against surfaces, and adds heaviness either atom by atom or all at once until the strain of this motion dominates all else. It is one-pointed, claustrophobic, and circular. It doubts, denies, and questions everything that comes in contact with it.
I offer you all the nodes ever written about depression. Enjoy your meal.
Personal experiences with depression:
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Literature, and writers who suffer from depression:
Depressing Music:
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In economics, depression is a period of severe decline in a national or international economy, characterized by decreasing business activity, falling prices, and increasing unemployment. Sort of like a recession on steroids.
Contrast this with hyperinflation and stagflation.
The Great Depression was said to have started in the great stock market crash of 1929 (Black Thursday) but the seeds of it were planted during the heyday of monetary mismanagement in the 1920s. It lasted through much of the 1930s - the U.S. economy didn't really pick up until America mobilized for World War II.
Other good descriptions: a weight around your neck, apathy of the soul, wanting to sleep and not wake up.
On a more advice-like note, depression is, for most people, not something to be dealt with alone. Depression is an illness. It can be diagnosed, treated, and cured. It can be fought. Be strong, and get well.
It's like drowning without the water ...
Every single day, every hour, you're pulled down to a depth you've never been to before, one you have no knowledge of: the only time you've been so totally screwed, so unable to move, or think, or breathe, was in your nightmares...
You want to just sleep and lie in your dark room forever, until you get it together enough to snap out of it or shuffle off the mortal coil, but "life" intrudes and you still have to do the stupid things that prove you're still "okay" to your family and friends...
You don't want to be like this (who would want to be so miserable, so pessimistic, so ready to die, or burst into tears, at any moment?) but you have no choice. Before you open your eyes you're feeling the weight of the life which has been assigned to you sitting on your sagging shoulders, and the last thing you feel at night is the memory of all you've done wrong and fucked up during the day.
It's all pointless; we're all going to die, and not one of us is going to make a real difference to the world which will exist thousands of years from now, so don't even try to change tomorrow's society.
When 'futility' is the word you believe in most there's nothing for you to look forward to.
Your whole life you're just wanting it all to be over and done with. You want to wake up and find that it's all been a dream.
At least if it was a dream, you could wake up. Yeah, you wish, you psycho.
This is a general account of how I feel when I'm depressed (I am now on an anti-depressant, Zoloft)- by no means is it designed to describe how everyone feels when they're down.
While depressed one might catch a glimpse of the edge of this great nothing, but it will be dashing around a corner, mocking you. It will leave a trail of laughter echoes, like glass breaking in your heart (oh wait, that was your heart!) If you try to catch it you might pass your hand through it's shadow. This will sting.
You never really get a chance to wring its' neck because while it is there it plays tricks on you. It pretends to be the thing it knows you won't look at. It hides in places you won't have the energy to poke around in.
And when it is gone, you will be so fuckin' relieved that you will want to think it was all an elaborate hoax. You won't invite the thing to tea to ask about motives because then you would have to hang out with it some more. Instead you forget all about it.
Then, one day you fall asleep with the windows open and it creeps in, a funk in the periphery. You will just lie there in your bed, under the blankets with the lights off, while the sneaky little devil freaks out all your friends, swallows up your cash flow and erodes your faith in the future, AGAIN.
I see it as not just a mindset, not something you can "snap out of" (but those close to you may think you can, and subtly show how annoyed they are that you can't just fix it yourself). I think part of it, at least, truly is a disease of the mind.
In depression, things that should make you feel good, just don't. It's like eating food and not being able to taste it. (I've had sinus infections where I lost the sense of taste for weeks at a time). Anything that makes you feel bad is just magnified. Any mistake you make, anything you do wrong, lingers and echoes and reverberates in your mind.
It's like being in a pit that you cannot climb out of. And the worst part is this: no one understands. No one can, because (unless they are depressed themselves), they are functioning normally - they can take things in stride. A setback isn't a big deal to them, because they are resilient. They can't see what it's like to be depressed, when there's no such thing as resilience. And many times they can be unknowingly hurtful by belittling the depressed person's feelings, which only makes them feel more isolated, more like something's wrong with them, more like they are failing.
Depressed people can offer each other a great amount of solace, though, because they see the world in a similar way, and they understand each others' pain. This is one of the few comforts for a depressed person.
I know how it seems to make no sense for someone to take their own life, but for them, it can often be the option that offers the least amount of suffering, and sometimes they just can't take it anymore. For me, I knew I couldn't really do it because I knew I didn't *deserve* to have a release from my suffering. Terribly pathetic, but that's how it was. And I knew I couldn't justify hurting my family like that just so *I* could end my pain.
I will never forget what it was like to be depressed. Part of me will always be in that pit, in a way. When I hear that someone committed suicide, my first thought is compassion, to think of how much they must have suffered to want to die just to make it stop. And I think that in some small way I am glad that they aren't hurting anymore. (No, that doesn't make it right, at all). And of course I recognize the terrible waste and feel badly for the ones left behind.
Beth
I was dignosed depressive a year and a half ago but I think I had been suffering for a long time before that. But I couldn't see it. I didn't believe what people were telling me. I was just tired. I couldn't sleep, and becuase I couldn't sleep I wasn't eating. I wasn't eating because I wasn't sleeping, and I wasn't sleeping because I was busy at work, I was busy at work because I wasn't performing, I wasn't performing because I wasn't sleeping.
Thats all I thought it was, that my sleep pattern had been disturbed and wasn't settling down.
It took an awful lot of persuasion from my partner and a couple of good friends to make me go to see a doctor. I was tired, not sleeping, thats all.
I hadn't been to a doctor for years and wasn't sure what to say when I did get there. Over an hour and many tears later I walked out of the surgery with a prescription for clomipramine hydrochloride. That was the beginning of the future for me. I started sleeping more (actually much more than I should have been!!) and I started seeing a therapist. It took a lot of effort but it was worth it.
18 months on I'm still being treated but things have improved a hell of a lot. I'm still on medication, a different one from where I started and I feel great.
For me medication has been the crutch that I needed to improve my life. Just like a broken leg needs a crutch to provide support, a dysfunctional mind needs something to support it too. Pharmaceutical support may not be for everyone but it is something to be considered. Anti-depressants can have a certain stigma attached in certain circles but this is a lot less prevalent than it used to be. Before I was diagnosed I was sort of aversed to taking a-d's but I was talked in to trying it and now I see how much I was helped.
De*pres"sion (?), n. [L. depressio: cf. F. dépression.]
1.
The act of depressing.
2.
The state of being depressed; a sinking.
3.
A falling in of the surface; a sinking below its true place; a cavity or hollow; as, roughness consists in little protuberances and depressions.
4.
Humiliation; abasement, as of pride.
5.
Dejection; despondency; lowness.
In a great depression of spirit.Baker.
6.
Diminution, as of trade, etc.; inactivity; dullness.
7. (Astron.)
The angular distance of a celestial object below the horizon.
8. (Math.)
The operation of reducing to a lower degree; -- said of equations.
9. (Surg.)
A method of operating for cataract; couching. See Couch, v. t., 8.
Angle of depression (Geod.), one which a descending line makes with a horizontal plane. --Depression of the dewpoint (Meteor.), the number of degrees that the dew-point is lower than the actual temperature of the atmosphere. --Depression of the pole, its apparent sinking, as the spectator goes toward the equator. --Depression of the visible horizon. (Astron.) Same as Dip of the horizon, under Dip.
Syn. -- Abasement; reduction; sinking; fall; humiliation; dejection; melancholy.
© Webster 1913
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