
The Sickness That Is Depression - andreyk
http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/life/conveying-depression/
======
tachyoff
This hits home pretty hard. I've been struggling with depression for a while,
and I think it's slowly getting worse. That being said, I'm job hunting and
probably about to move so trying to find a permanent therapist (which is on my
todo list) isn't exactly in the cards.

A particularly insidious symptom, I think, is how depression creates a cycle
of negative thinking. I learned about Seligman's model of depression and
explanatory style recently and realized I've been doing exactly what the model
describes. People who are depressed tend to interpret bad events as being
permanent (stable), entirely their fault (internal), and applying to their
entire life (general). Good events, conversely, are interpreted as unstable,
external, and specific. So, if a depressed person fails a test, they're more
likely to convince themselves that they're stupid, that their entire life is
ruined, and that this is just the way they are. Similarly, if they pass, it's
obviously only temporary and can't possibly be related to their ability at
all. Of course, there's more nuance here in specific cases (sometimes bad
things /are/ your fault, and sometimes good things /are/ random, for example),
but the idea is that depressed individuals tend to use this kind of
attribution, whereas non-depressed people reverse it.

Anyway, I'm not a cognitive behavioral therapist, nor have I seen one (I would
like to, though), but I've been trying to fix my explanatory style. For
example, I recently passed an interview round and immediately felt depressed
instead of excited. When I read about negative attribution, I realized that
I'd been doing exactly that: /obviously/ I am actually an imposter and I'll
just be rejected next time, and of /course/ this good thing can't be
permanent, and /obviously/ I only passed because of random chance.

Of course those things aren't (entirely) true! I tried hard and I think I
decently know my stuff. I passed because I have a modicum of tech skills and I
was able to demonstrate them. I do believe that a large part of interviewing
is outside of our immediate control, but that means that even if I don't get
the job then it doesn't help to dwell too much on failure anyway because I had
little actual control over it.

So yeah, depression sucks, and when you're trapped in a cycle of negative
thinking and emotions it can indeed seem impossible to get out of it. But
cognition is a funny and powerful thing, and I absolutely believe (and the
science seems to bear out, at least with CBT) that you can do some
metacognition and change how you think. If you became depressed, you
absolutely can become "undepressed", as it were. It's not easy, but at some
point you have to try to claw your way out. Being aware of these types of
thoughts and trying to challenge them is one way of making them stop. It helps
to write them down, then write down all of the ways they don't make sense.

Maybe this helps someone else. At the very least, it helped me.

~~~
andreyk
I read through a copy of "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" when dealing
with this and would agree CBT is good at characterizing the sort of cognitive
fallacies depression tends to exacerbate. Realizing that I simply could not
trust my own instinctive thoughts and had to rationally challenge them more
than ever was a big help when I was in the midst of depression. For what it's
worth, I also did not stop working towards life goals and generally being busy
in the midst of it and though that may have slowed my recovery it was also
beneficial for me in the present. Hope you can get better soon.

~~~
tachyoff
Thank you, that means a lot. I'm happy to hear you were able to get better
too, and that you were able to keep pursuing the things that were important to
you. And I can see how working towards life goals would be helpful in the
midst of depression. From what I've read, setting goals (even small ones) and
trying to achieve them can be helpful too.

------
GeorgeCarlin123
"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make
sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounding yourself with a55h0le5."
\--attributed to many

