Considering gnawing my leg off.
May. 23rd, 2019 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bladesparkDepression used to be thought of as a moral failing. You feel down? Your problem, your fault, you fix it.
These days people are pushing to think of it like an injury, like having a broken leg or a tumor or whatever. It's not your fault, it's a thing that happens, get it seen to like you would any sickness.
This often comes with a side of "it's just your brain chemistry being broken, so get some pills, ta-da" and I think like maybe that's the pendulum swinging a bit too far the other way.
Depression is like any other injury. But while sometimes, like the tumor, you just suddenly have it, other times, like the broken leg, something happened to make it that way. If you feel your life is pointless and hopeless, it may just be because there are real, actual, tangible things in your life that make it seem pointless and hopeless.
That doesn't make it any less a wound like any other, but if you're still lying there beneath the fallen tree that broke your leg, all the splints and casts and doctors in the world aren't going to fix it.
Why is depression on the rise? Oh, maybe because incomes are down, homelessness is up, hate crimes have risen, literal Nazis are gaining political power, the environment is probably fucked, and I could keep going here but you probably get the point. It's hard to be happy when your world is a miserable place and people keep kicking you when you're down. No amount of "happy pills" in the world is going to cure that.
I crawled out from under the tree that broke me, fourteen years ago. I started to heal. It was slow, but I was getting there. Then four years ago another fucking tree fell on me and I'm still here under it, clawing to get out somehow.
These days people are pushing to think of it like an injury, like having a broken leg or a tumor or whatever. It's not your fault, it's a thing that happens, get it seen to like you would any sickness.
This often comes with a side of "it's just your brain chemistry being broken, so get some pills, ta-da" and I think like maybe that's the pendulum swinging a bit too far the other way.
Depression is like any other injury. But while sometimes, like the tumor, you just suddenly have it, other times, like the broken leg, something happened to make it that way. If you feel your life is pointless and hopeless, it may just be because there are real, actual, tangible things in your life that make it seem pointless and hopeless.
That doesn't make it any less a wound like any other, but if you're still lying there beneath the fallen tree that broke your leg, all the splints and casts and doctors in the world aren't going to fix it.
Why is depression on the rise? Oh, maybe because incomes are down, homelessness is up, hate crimes have risen, literal Nazis are gaining political power, the environment is probably fucked, and I could keep going here but you probably get the point. It's hard to be happy when your world is a miserable place and people keep kicking you when you're down. No amount of "happy pills" in the world is going to cure that.
I crawled out from under the tree that broke me, fourteen years ago. I started to heal. It was slow, but I was getting there. Then four years ago another fucking tree fell on me and I'm still here under it, clawing to get out somehow.
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Date: 2019-05-24 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-24 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-24 09:13 pm (UTC)