Grub Street

This is meant to be a fandom journal, but what the hell, I'm going to discuss mental health stuff and rec Coming Out In A Dangerous World at FWD Forward.

Particularly this comment:

One of the things which is so toxic about depression, from the inside and from my own experience, is it can hit you good and hard with an awareness of exactly what you have to be happy about – everything from breathing right the way up – and then scolds you with an awareness of precisely how happy you aren’t, and how dare you feel that way? This is why “counting your blessings” isn’t always the best advice for someone who’s depressed – believe me, they’re intimately acquainted with their blessings, and they *know* they should be feeling better, and the knowledge is only making them feel *worse*.

Yeah, exactly.

Depression is a Catch 22 situation. You feel bad, and you're told that you're a bad person for feeling bad. You feel like you're a massive burden on society, but suicide would be proof of your own moral failing. The only way out of it is to get better, but that's incredibly difficult given that mental health isn't an exact science, and the stigma surrounding mental illness just re-affirms your own guilt. You're constantly being told mixed messages: that you should take responsibility for your illness, but seeking help and making allowances for yourself is a sign of weakness. After a while, it gets recursive to the point of absurdity; you feel guilty for feeling guilty.

It's incredibly difficult to break the feedback loop by yourself. Depression is... well, okay, I was going to say that I imagine it's a bit like being possessed, but I don't like using analogies when I try to explain a mental illness, so I'll just say this instead: it's like there's this thing inside your head, and sometimes it seems like an alien entity all by itself, while other times, you can't tell where the thing ends and your 'real' personality begins. Sometimes, it seems like the most normal thing in the world. You fight it, of course, but it's exhausting, and you rarely feel like you're winning. So having people standing on the sidelines muttering about how you're just lazy/weak/ungrateful really doesn't help.

It's a fucked up situation all round.