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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.
My personal experience with mild-moderate depression are quite different.
It manifests as an utter lack of energy and clear anhedonia. I do occasionally feel great angst about certain things (my ADHD, my inelegibilty to give the USMLE as of this moment), but I wouldn't go so far as to say that self-pity is the defining factor.
I was having occasional suicidal ideation a few weeks back, but thankfully I still love and respect myself enough to never indulge them. It's more like intrusive thoughts than something I really want to do.
It does sounds like we have different experiences of depression. I might call mine more neurotic or distressed than what you've described. I appreciate your reply because it's making me think I'd probably rephrase my original post to add a few more qualifiers. It might reinforce my thought that depression is an analysis of a set of behaviors over time rather than a direct emotional experience. I revisited the depression symptoms list and it seems to me that a really wide range of causes could result in a subset of those symptoms.
I feel like my cause is very much a cultural learned behavior resulting out of a kind of toxic shame mindset, which I think is common, and I feel like I see it in a lot of depression communities, but it makes sense that it wouldn't be universal.
You have my sympathies, and I can only hope you recover on your own or find a treatment that works.
I'm hopeful that ketamine therapy, which I can get in the UK, might work. There's also ECT, but it causes some degree of memory loss, which scares me off it for now
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