My (very uninformed) impression is that too many people get diagnosed as clinically depressed nowadays, drugs make things worse for the majority and that people need to stop being full of self-pity. Is this true in anyway? I'm just interested. I've had periods of being down and I think just the fact that I believed I can change my mental state and become more positive helped.
Again I'll state I have no academic knowledge of this area and just want to know what the difference might be between myself when I was depressed and someone else who needs to go on drugs.
It may be true, it may not be. As a "illness" becomes more common and slightly less stigmatised more people come forward either realising they had it, or being less worried to let other people know. Unfortunately that leads to people seeing a sharp increase in diagnosed numbers, which then goes on to make people question those people and think they are faking. AMongst them will surely be people who aren't really depressed and those that are faking it on purpose and those that are borderline at best but doctors go overboard, diagnose and actually make the problem worse. Its kind of impossible to know.
However, real depression still has a lot of stigma attached to it because too many people say something along the lines of, "i feel down from time to time, i get over it fine,
those people are just milking it" or something similar. I guess the problem comes from people diagnosing themselves with severe depression because they were dumped/lost a job and down for a few days. Thats perfectly normal, real depression is much worse, a real thing, not simply beatable by thinking positively and not everyone can simply get over it.
Its also not helped when truly depressed people find their own personal method of working through it/recovering and INSIST other people can make themselves better in an identical way. When theres real chemical imbalance or other issues, theres millions of possibilities on whats wrong, by how much and how to fix it. Just because one person gets better on one drug, doesn't mean another person with similar symptoms won't get worse on the same drug.
AS for the frankly, idiots, that go on about depressed people being pathetic because theres people in worse situations. Again, some people are simply born with factors that give a much higher chance for depression. Also, as i think someone said, when you work all day long farming, hunting, going for water or whatever else you are busy. One of the worst things for anyone is simply a lack of things to do. For me, being in school where I was far ahead of the class, which literally led to me being forced to be in school for 8 hours without a single bit of work to do, I got depressed fora bunch of reasons but that was one for sure. I had no routine, i was bored without a choice at all to do something else. I got stick from teachers for not working constantly as if they see you not working they assuming you're slacking, not finished. It all add's up.
If I'd been busy every day my entire life I most likely wouldn't be depressed or at least as badly.
I've put off going to the doctors over it as, well, they've been terrible over so many other issues I simply don't feel like going. I also feel like I don't want the stigma of it on my record as people do look down on you for it.
Other peoples reactions are often what makes it hardest to recover from depression, which is disgraceful.
