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All my life, I've gone through long periods of crippling depression. Depression and I are old adversaries, like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, The Doctor and The Master, MacGyver and Murdoch. This post is for all my fellow depression survivors and especially those who are new to the club.
I was once asked if depression could make a person hate being around people. My answer? Hell yes.
Depression is exhausting, and social interaction uses up way more energy than we're normally conscious of. Also, depression is usually accompanied by its old pal low self-esteem, which can make us unusually anxious about upsetting other people or damaging relationships with them. If John Paul Sartre never suffered from depression, he summed up the experience nicely in his famous "hell is other people" line.
It really helped me to learn that there are a number of kinds of depression, and a person experiencing a depressive episode often goes through a number of them. One of them is sometimes known as 'irritable depression'. As I understand it, it's actually a combination of depression and mild mania. It can be hell to go through, but it can also be a sign that you're coming out of the depths of the depression, starting to recover. Your system is trying to get your moods back in balance, and over-correcting a bit at both ends (huge thanks to another fellow survivor, Andrew Solomon, who explained this in his magnum opus 'The Noonday Demon').
When I'm suffering from the irritable stage of depression, I find it helps to limit contact with strangers or new people (although being alone in a crowd can be strangely comforting), and spend as much time as I can with old friends and family that I'm close to. People who I know I can tell about how I'm feeling, and will forgive me if I'm a bit prickly to be around (although they tell me I feel like I'm harder to be around than I really am). YMMV :)
It also helps to keep telling myself "this too shall pass". In fact, I would go so far as to say this mantra has kept me alive at times. Good luck!
I was once asked if depression could make a person hate being around people. My answer? Hell yes.
Depression is exhausting, and social interaction uses up way more energy than we're normally conscious of. Also, depression is usually accompanied by its old pal low self-esteem, which can make us unusually anxious about upsetting other people or damaging relationships with them. If John Paul Sartre never suffered from depression, he summed up the experience nicely in his famous "hell is other people" line.
It really helped me to learn that there are a number of kinds of depression, and a person experiencing a depressive episode often goes through a number of them. One of them is sometimes known as 'irritable depression'. As I understand it, it's actually a combination of depression and mild mania. It can be hell to go through, but it can also be a sign that you're coming out of the depths of the depression, starting to recover. Your system is trying to get your moods back in balance, and over-correcting a bit at both ends (huge thanks to another fellow survivor, Andrew Solomon, who explained this in his magnum opus 'The Noonday Demon').
When I'm suffering from the irritable stage of depression, I find it helps to limit contact with strangers or new people (although being alone in a crowd can be strangely comforting), and spend as much time as I can with old friends and family that I'm close to. People who I know I can tell about how I'm feeling, and will forgive me if I'm a bit prickly to be around (although they tell me I feel like I'm harder to be around than I really am). YMMV :)
It also helps to keep telling myself "this too shall pass". In fact, I would go so far as to say this mantra has kept me alive at times. Good luck!
