People who haven't experienced it really just can't "get it" fully, IMHO. When I was at the hospital day program, a lot of the other patients were people with "unipolar depression" -- I guess that's the full clinical term for what I always thought of as just depression.
Many of them would talk about just how hard to impossible it was just to get up off the couch or out of bed, as if it were a physical thing, like they had been drugged with a paralytic agent or something along those lines. Or they would talk about not changing their underwear for weeks, or about not eating for days on end, not bathing, things along those lines.
And I really didn't "get it" in the sense that then, and now, I still wonder how a person could do that to themselves? And that thought is what is hurtful to people with this condition, because I, like so many people, haven't experienced their problem so I can't fully "get it".
As a corollary to that, all of them said they resented the platitudes of friends and relatives, who would say things like "well, if you would just try ..." Because there is something in their minds that just won't let them, and it is something they can't seem to change or control without a lot of outside intervention no matter how much they might want to.
And several of them said that they couldn't relate to my version of depression, either. For me, depression was always that "oh, why was I even born, why the Hell am I still alive?" thought pattern, but it never had a physical component. Even at my lowest points in life, I might allow myself to cry myself to sleep at night or for a nap, but I never just stayed in bed for hours on end. Frankly, an hour or two of that would be all I could take before I lost it completely and got up and did something out of pure nervous energy. My form of depression always was "God, I hate myself, I hate my life, I wish I were dead, but I better get out there and trim the privet hedge because it's overdue now." So, I would go out and trim the hedge, clean the garage, whatever, and it usually in the end made me feel better because I had accomplished something.
I guess it's like this, if I ever did decide I had to off myself in the garage, I would have to spend about four or five hours cleaning it first so I wouldn't be embarrassed after my departure from this earth by someone finding me cold and stiff in a messy, cluttered garage. And by the end of cleaning it, I would feel better and no longer want to do it. So I guess that explains my 47 years of existence and lack of suicidal intent.
Anyway, it's a beautiful sunny day in Detroit. I hope it is wherever you are, too. Enjoy life, I am these days a lot more than I have in a long, long time. Have lamictal, will travel. Forward!
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