just my experience - your mileage may vary
Yeah depression is an illness that develops over a relatively long period of time. It doesn't have a specific start and end date. People don't develop depression and overcome it in the space of a week.
I think that would be better described as an intense period of sadness which I assume was triggered by a specific upsetting event.
That's a fair assessment.
For 'normal' people (and I use this term subjectively to describe the majority who do not suffer a clinical illness) there are many every day things that happen in life that can trigger lengthy periods of negative though patterns - bereavement/grief, radical change beyond your control, particularly in personal interactions, though not limited to those by any means. One could consider these as largely
environmental influences.
Clinical depression, whilst maintaining the appearance of some of these environmental factors, is generally much deeper rooted in the mind of the sufferer, chemical imbalance in the brain, irrational behaviour and thought on a level far beyond merely struggling with normalcy.
Angilion said it:
I would class it as a form of insanity, so it's difficult for a sane person to understand it. It's far from rational.
The difficulty is correctly assessing which is which and knowing how to deal with it.
For most people dealing with emotional and psychological stress in every day life is something we generally do without thinking about it. Typical self help is mostly common sense. Example: exercise and healthy eating, activities that engage you socially with others, things you like doing that give you a sense of achievement and satisfaction. All these things are a form of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and we train our minds to certain ends and goals and resilience, without realising we are doing it.
My take on all of this is that I fell into the bereavement/radical change category; sudden and drastic separation from a loved one 18 months (ish) ago has had a profound effect on the way I view the world and my place in it. Which is to be expected. I'm not as social as I used to be, nor as forgiving. But I have goals and interests of my own that I have used to train my thinking away from questions to which there are no satisfactory answers.
In short, I recognised there was a problem and the probable cause and made a choice to do something about it. This does not change what has already happened, but it makes for living with it a little easier for all that. The point is I
want to change.
The person I was referring to in my earlier post suffers a clinical depression. An almost total inability to deal with the commonplace, at times, and a will to deny it was happening - because if you refuse to believe it is happening to you, thereby not admitting that there's a problem, then there isn't one... you see the logic of it and it is very hard to reach someone who thinks like that.
It is something that will stay with me for a long time, experiencing the dissolution that comes with such an illness, watching a person change and being able to do nothing about it. It may sound fanciful, but what I say is absolutely true: I could see the eyes change; a sort of hardness (I don't know how else to describe it) that was not there a moment before, yet could disappear just as swiftly. It's an old cliché, but the eyes
are the window to the soul.
The choice for me would not have been to cut myself off from all emotional contact from those who cared about me and who were willing to step up and help, but that is what I had to accept, because nothing I could say or do was
enough. Ultimately I, and other family members, ceased to matter anymore.
That is a very painful thing to see in someone you love (never mind all the baggage of a relationship in there too).
I reconcile myself to the fact that there's only so much you can do to help, then you start damaging yourself. Add to that all of life's little irritations and hurdles and you have a position of stress from which you cannot extricate yourself, no matter which way you turn - this is why I commented that getting help is not just good for the sufferer (if they recognise it) but for those around them too.
Had I understood this more fully before, perhaps I would not have been as loyal as I was - I could have saved myself a lot of difficult experiences. And for this, my feelings are most certainly biased. It is difficult to let go, I'll qualify that much
Nothing is ever easy or fair about mental illness, be you a sufferer or someone close to a person who is.
