I get annoyed when someone says “it’s temporary, you’ll feel better later”. I have had my depression as long as I can remember, as a child, and I’m over 40 now. When someone says it’s temporary, I know they have no idea what my experience is, and cannot help.
A mood is temporary, depression is not.
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Dear Denise
I agree with you that depression may have a long lasting effect. I myself have experianced long-lasting depresstion. Don’t let it get a hold of you. Try to take your mind off it by doing the things you like. Think and speak positively, it may help. Also, if you smile more, it can take off a bit of depression.
I feel the same sort of annoyance when someone says something like that. While some people are able to overcome, or at least lessen the severity of their symptoms, depression is not something that eventually passes, like a headache or cold. It’s also not synonomous with sadness. It’s a feeling of hollowness that can’t acurately be described by someone who has not personally experienced it. And even those who have experienced it often have difficulty communicating the debilitating effects of the condition.
In other words… I completely agree with you.
I wish I had something encouraging to say, but obviously saying “It will get better with time” probably would not be appreciated.
The key is to only listen to yourself and follow your own guidance as no one can validate your experience. I’ve learned to trust myself with everything that I experience and let go of anyone’s assessment whether it’s a doctor or anyone.
Depression makes you accident-prone, and also prone to making wrong decisions, or like me, not making decisions at all. The accidents and fallout from poor decision-making are with you for the rest of your life, so, it isn’t temporary. Much of it is permanent.
What I find really difficult are people who should know better, people who knew such and such a thing happened under duress, but who treat it as a wholly informed and irreversible decision or action on my part. When I try to tinker with an event to make it temporary in order that I might change it to help myself – they treat it as permanent and it becomes beyond my power to change. It’s like someone else locking you into the cage that is your life.
Because it is easier for society in general to deal with depression in such fashion.
By assuming it is temporary , they can use the normal cache of pills and counseling to make it go away.
And for society to actually admit that depression just might be more that can be dealth with by current means would open up a whole new can of worms.
Such as quality of life issues. And possible root causes of depression other than the ones covered by current psychological theories.
Absolutely! My depression/Bipolar has lasted for coming on four years now, which I know is a lot less than many other sufferers out there, but I know I will have to live with this for the rest of my life. What I find most frustrating is the people who think mental illnesses are ‘imaginary’ and can be pushed aside. And yes, I think people would rather think of it in a way they may be able to better understand, that depression is a mood rather than a life-long condition, in order to classify it as something far less serious than it actually is and therefore not have to deal with it.
Depression is hard to understand if you havent had it other people can be hard to deal with especially when you are told to snap out of it how do you snap out of something that is beyond your control…sometimes i feel like a puppet and someone else holds the strings bipolar is like that im on an “up” at the moment what terrifies me is the down that follows..hope this site helps you