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I have not had a depressive episode in 2 months after dealing with high-functioning depression for about 10 years. Obviously that's not long enough to know I've really beat it, but I feel like I've had a real mental shift as a result of interrogating just about all of my beliefs in the past 3 years.
I'd like to document my thoughts in writing here in the wellness threads to organize them and spread the word of what I've learned, if others find it useful. These should be assumed to apply to healthy brains exhibiting unhealthy behaviors. Obviously the brain can have all sorts of conditions that are more deeply rooted or physically problematic that this won't apply for. These thoughts describe how a healthy person might become unhealthily unhappy through their upbringing, learned behaviors, and genetic predispositions, but nothing beyond that.
I'm going to start with just an outline that describes what I think are the essential qualities of depression. I hope to post more detail in a future wellness thread.
A depressive episode is a self-reinforcing dialogue involving shame and self-pity, where the self-pity is repeatedly justified to a skeptical observer.
Depression is less a state of being or description of action, but rather an analysis of actions over time. Rather than saying "I am depressed", it can be useful to say "I am pitying myself, and I am justifying why I have the right to pity myself, over and over again," because that better describes the actions in the moment.
If the pity must continually justified, the question is to whom? I think there is some inner skeptic that we are justifying it to, that remains unfooled, and I think that it's a really interesting avenue to explore why this is and what the results are.
There's also the question of why we pity ourselves. I think it's used as a coping mechanism for anxiety, and I think every depressive episode starts with an intense anxiety trigger. People who feel anxiety more intensely (neurotics) are more in need of coping mechanisms.
I think there are several large forces today promoting self-pity: progressive ideology, certain corners social media, the liberal internet more broadly, and aspects of the psychology establishment. A big part of my growth was understanding how my progressive worldview was deeply toxic to my self-esteem, and how I had fallen for a kind of internet-mediated social contagion. Along these lines, I see self-pity as a sister to ressentiment.
The quick answer on how to reduce depressive episodes is to (1) become less sensitive to anxiety and (2) when you pity yourself, and the skeptical observer asks you to justify it, admit that you can't, that the self-pity was foolish, and that you will manage your anxiety more productively instead. I will try to elaborate on strategies for this in future posts.
This requires understanding thinking-as-dialogue, which I think is how the brain synthesizes different points of view into a cohesive worldview. I think that most people probably do this without realizing it, and some may not want to admit it because it might sound like you are hearing voices or something. But I think that a healthy brain thinks in dialogue while smoothing it into a single "voice" that one identifies with. If you have issues with identity or have more serious mental issues with voices, etc. then that goes beyond what I'm describing.
Well said! I've gone through a similar transformation myself. It's deeply upsetting to me how many people are being led into unhealthy mental states nowadays.
Yep, this is something I would be curious about. My take is that there are about 1 million strategies out there, and you have to try a bunch with an open mind to find what works for you.
You might find this blog post interesting.
I would imagine that yes, there are a lot of strategies that different people could find more or less effective. I would like to go deeply into the strategy of having a solid belief system that makes doing those 2 things fairly automatic. And this doesn't have to mean fooling yourself, if you buy the premise that depression is a delusional state, where you are spending your precious time on Earth moping unnecessarily out of confusion.
So I'm going to go into what that process looked like for me, which was somewhat accidental. It's funny though, I know red-pilled can mean a lot of things, but just going through the left wing disillusionment after so long just felt such a powerful deprogramming, and was such an important part of the process for me.
That was an interesting article, and I think some of my thoughts could translate well into that way of thinking. That said I am a very non-visual thinker, and that may be giving me trouble with really accepting that lens. I read the article on that site about rejecting-not-accepting and did find a lot of that to be relatable.
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