6:15am August 18, 2014

“Until I started taking my antidepressants, though, I didn’t actually know that I was depressed. I thought the dark staticky corners were part of who I was. It was the same way I felt before I put on my first pair of glasses at age 14 and suddenly realized that trees weren’t green blobs but intricate filigrees of thousands of individual leaves; I hadn’t known, before, that I couldn’t see the leaves, because I didn’t realize that seeing leaves was a possibility at all. And it wasn’t until I started using tools to counterbalance my depression that I even realized there was depression there to need counterbalancing. I had no idea that not everyone felt the gravitational pull of nothingness, the ongoing, slow-as-molasses feeling of melting down into a lump of clay. I had no way of knowing that what I thought were just my ingrained bad habits — not being able to deposit checks on time, not replying to totally pleasant emails for long enough that friendships were ruined, having silent meltdowns over getting dressed in the morning, even not going to the bathroom despite really, really, really having to pee — weren’t actually my habits at all. They were the habits of depression, which whoa, holy shit, it turns out I had a raging case of.”

—

Not Everyone Feels This Way — The Archipelago — Medium (via brutereason)

I wish that more people would acknowledge that… this is a real thing.

But so is everyone telling you that you have a chemical imbalance when really you’re miserable because you’re being mistreated.

So is having depression that gets *worse* with therapy and medication.

And so is being read as depressed when you have really bad executive dysfunction for another reason.

And I feel like… most people either pretend that neurological depression doesn’t exist, or pretend that the other things don’t exist and that anyone who doesn’t think they’re depressed must just lack the insight that comes from being properly medicated.

And it’s really frustrating. I wish I knew how to make it better. Both misconceptions hurt a lot of people.

(via madeofpatterns)

Agreed.

Also I think pure neurological depression is much rarer than people make it out to be, and yet it’s the version that gets the most attention as to what “real” depression is supposed to be like. Depression rates are known to vary based on a lot of situation and cultural factors, for instance, and yet we’re supposed to believe that all depression is a simple ‘chemical imbalance’ and that taking meds is 'just like diabetes and insulin’. Mind you, meds can work even on situational depression sometimes, but they don’t always, not by a longshot, and in many cases they do no better than placebo overall.

But again, nobody’s supposed to talk about that. All mental illness is supposed to be purely neurological or biochemical in origin. And for some reason the SJ community has picked up this particular bias and run with it. I remember it starting to solidify back with certain disability rights bloggers, and wondering how it was a disability rights stance to completely deny the experiences and questions of a large portion of the ex-patient community, in favor of basically the line favored by the psychiatric establishment. And to say it’s ableist to do otherwise, at that. That really confused me when I first started seeing it happening, and it confuses me to this day.

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