Depression in general

@tinman411

Hello,

I found this interesting.

I think it can be difficult when talking about what to say to someone who is depressed.

It is easier said than done.

However, I agree that hobbies help as a distraction.

Not just with depression, but several other life circumstances!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. 😊

All the best 💛✨

@tinman411

Hi tinman!

This is a great post that you’ve done here to describe two potential ways to find a path out of depression. To briefly summarize my understanding of what you just wrote, the first is to change how you think about depression, through therapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and maybe throw in a little bit of distraction by engaging in your hobbies. The second is to literally just “keep trying” or “try harder”, which as you mentioned often just doesn’t help at all, because you’ve been trying and trying and you’ve been getting nowhere.

You mentioned that learning to not be depressed about your situation sounds too defeatist and feels like it’s also saying to give up about your awful situation. I would say that there’s definitely some truth to that, but maybe it would be better to think about it as a partial solution. CBT, mindfulness, and related cognitive therapies train you to take control of your mind, which can be very empowering. There is a huge difference between constantly hating yourself or your life and being angry and hopeless and having negative thoughts echoing in your mind all day all night, compared to being able to take a step back from your thoughts long enough to think more clearly. You could instead be thinking of ideas for how to improve your life circumstance, or maybe have the time and energy to do something fun instead. You could be cheering yourself forward for each tiny success, rather than yelling at yourself for everything that’s not going well in life. So you could say that it solves part of the problem, and for some people that may actually be enough for them to get back up on their feet again.

I definitely agree with what you said about changing your circumstances by persistence. If someone just tells you to “just start”, “try harder”, “push yourself”, and “get over your sob story”, most likely it won’t help at all. Instead it could make it worse because it makes you feel like that person just doesn’t understand you. You’ve tried to use persistence before, and it hasn’t worked, and them telling you to try again doesn’t really make much of a difference. But I think there’s a difference when other people, such as a therapist and/or your family and friends, are continually providing you emotional support along the way for each tiny step that you’re making along the way. There’s a therapy called Behavioral Activation Therapy which is just that. This therapy pretty much helps you think of activities that you could do, maybe as simple as getting up out of bed and taking a shower, cooking yourself a good meal, cleaning around the house, or going outside to take a walk. Later on maybe those activities are “harder” things like hanging out with friends, doing something creative, going on a weekend mini-vacation, or other activities that you used to do. Now the point is that for each of these tasks that you take, you receive some positive reinforcement, like maybe your family notices that you’re doing these things and they smile and tell you that they’re proud of you for doing these things. Or maybe you get some points for each thing that you do and then when you reach a certain number of points, you receive a special reward (that you can also look forward to!). This guidance and positive reinforcement may just be the encouragement and motivation that you need to try more often every week towards where you want to be.

There’s also a lot of other things that you could try: You could task with a therapist and do traditional psychotherapy to figure out what you feel is the most wrong about your life. Then if you have no friends, you could sign yourself up for social skills training. If you’re struggling in your romantic relationship, family relationships, or existing friendships, you could go to interpersonal therapy or family and marital therapy. If you feel like your job is lacking, you could do some career skills training. If you have no money, you could enroll in free online financial skills training. The difference between training and pure “persistence” is that you’re being taught tried and true methods for how to improve areas of your life, rather than banging your head against the wall repeating the same ineffective methods over and over again to no avail. You’re finally learning about all those essential life skills that for some reason were never taught in school.

Of course, there’s always the option of medication like SSRIs that can help stabilize your mood, and generally make you at least feel less depressed, which can be that crutch that you need to finally get going, just like cognitive therapy can do for you. Often times when you’re depressed, nothing feels interesting in life and the days just drag on, but a mood stabilizer can give you the serotonin you could be missing to perk you up a bit and feel less sad about your life in general. And from there, you finally feel more “in the mood” to try to do something about your situation.

As for your last point, a method that involves understanding “how life works”, I think what you’re looking for would be life coaching. This would help if you’re just feeling lost and confused in life, and you don’t know where you want to go. Maybe you don’t really find meaning in what you’re doing, and it’s like you're just robotically going to your job everyday, coming home, and turning on the TV. Life coaching can teach you part of “how life works” in terms of how to live a life that is meaningful to you. Often times, this will start by identifying your core values (such as family, health, leadership, respect, etc.) and then help you to create a vision of what an ideal life would like for you that satisfies those core values. Now that you have a vision of the “good life”, you can start working towards it! Setting goals for each week, checking in with your life coach when you get stuck, receiving help about possible “mental blocks” that are making you stuck, and then making forward progress towards where you want to be in life.

Depression is definitely a really challenging situation to deal with, but hopefully I’ve outlined some more methods and also general attitudes for how to work through it. Maybe one of the above methods would help someone struggling with depression, or maybe it’ll take a combination of these methods. It’s definitely going to be a long and grueling process, whether you’re depressed because of having an awful life or for other reasons. But it’s always good to have hope that things will get better and at the same time have a toolbox of strategies for how to potentially get there. And what can really help is tracking your tiny incremental progress over time and getting support from a therapist and your family and friends.

I hope this post helps! You can definitely read more online at Wikipedia or Mayo Clinic and related websites, or in abnormal psychology or clinical psychology textbooks.

Hi, thank you for sharing that. I found it very similar to what i was going through 🌼

Please feel free to msg me whenever you wish❤️

Wish you all the best!