I had even more than him, and I was suicidally depressed at one point.
It’s literally your brain being broken. What’s happening outside doesn’t really matter.
This is what those who have never experienced genuine depression will never understand. Everything can be going perfectly in your life, but you still can’t find the energy to bring color back into your world no matter what you do. The overwhelming numbness just eats away at you, and you withdraw even further. Some of us may even turn to substances to just feel SOMETHING, regardless of how fleeting the escape may be, and how much worse we know we’ll feel afterwards. You are unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the future is bleak, and you will die alone in a world that doesn’t give a fuck, so what’s the point?
So you finally find the courage to confide in somebody, and they tell you that you just need to “get past it, think positive!” and that they also “get depressed too”… and the worst part is, you are unable to describe to them in any way how it truly feels, because they’ve genuinely never felt it themselves, so now you worry that you’re just coming across as dramatic, furthering the desire to withdraw and keep your thoughts to yourself.
I’m currently going through a depressed period, if it isn’t obvious. I’ll be okay in another week, but it’s fucking horrible, and I wouldn’t wish this on anybody.
What I hated most about my depression is it would take anything that happened and make it terrible. I got a promotion? Great, more work to do. My wife cooked my favorite meal? Great, now there’s a ton of dishes to do. I’m gonna take a break and play a game? I’ll probably lose, why bother playing.
And this fatalism morphed into anxiety that made it so I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I’d lay there paralyzed with fear about failing at everything that day, to the point where I’d set my alarm to go off early just so I could have time to have a panic attack.
One thing that helped me a lot was to give that little voice a name, and then tell it to fuck off every time it spoke up.
another good trick is to give the voice a stupid cartoonish voice: make it say things like goofy… it disarms it if it sounds ridiculous
(also works for intrusive thoughts about yourself: they’re late because they don’t want to spend time with me, they say they like my thing but they sounded sarcastic, etc)
I would go as far as to argue that if your life sucks and you aren’t happy about it that probably isn’t mental illness. That’s just having a shit life, and is a healthy response to your shit circumstances.
Not to say that can’t cause depression, of course. But just being unhappy about your shit life is not in of itself depression.
Yeah I think a lot of 4chan has other mental issues (often failure to launch or other sociodevelopmental problems, maybe not even innate or biological) that results in a shit life and being miserable and so they think they have depression when the reality is their life just sucks.
I don’t have depression but I’ve been in a bad place in life, when I improved my life or got what I needed I felt better. And sometimes it’s other issues that can look a lot like depression. But those of us like that need to remember y’all because what worked for us won’t work for y’all,
That’s kind of inaccurate. The whole brain being broken thing. Sometimes depression is caused by outside factors. To say it’s just your brain and it’s broken, implies that it can’t be fixed. And many times it can be, by fixing the outside factor that’s causing you to go into depression
I think we as a culture need to learn to separate those two conditions. I have what you describe, when certain things go wrong I tend to numb up about it. But my wife has the other kind where her natural mental state is numbness and it requires a combination of medication and lifestyle and cognitive behavioral changes to fix. I can understand that because I have anxiety and adhd that work like her depression.
In general if you have depressive symptoms and your life is shit or you have something you think might help you should try fixing that shit, whether it’s eating better and exercising or getting out more or something like trying hormones (gender dysphoria often has a similar blanket dullness feeling to depression), but if all that doesn’t work or if you’re unable to achieve these things or you have other reasons to believe it’s the broken brain sort medication can help, but it has its own trade offs for you and your doctor to discuss and decide.
Never gatekeep mental health. Every person is stuck with the life they live inside their head, no matter what it looks like on the outside.
OK, but this is fiction. Someone made Mr. Robot up. There’s no gatekeeping here because there’s no real person trying to be recognized for their MH problems.
however implying because this fictional character has sex and has a good job means your depression is somehow “less” is problematic; fictional or not
i have a well paid job and have plenty of sex, but my depression is very much real… to someone in my situation struggling with working out their mental health, the kind of sentiment on display might make me reconsider whether my problems are “big enough” or whether i should “just get over it” or that “other people have it worse so my feelings are invalid”
fictional or not, the situation has parallels to real life, and real people are in similar positions. the damage is in reinforcing that their problems aren’t worthy of mental health support, and i can absolutely tell you that in this situation, acknowledging that you’re worth the support exactly because your problems seem trivial is a huge issue
Speak for yourself. I’ve never seen a movie or read a book that so succinctly captured exactly how my mind works before. It actually scared the shit out of me, stopped watching the first episode because I almost had a panic attack. I both realized I’ve never seen someone else process things the way I do and seeing Mr Robot was like looking into a mirror. It was terrifying, but I quickly got addicted to her show.
It’s almost like the point is to show that depression is a thing that’s not very well treated by having super cool things happen in life. That’s the scary thing. Being successful, but still not being enough for yourself. Having friends having lovers, but still feeling like you’re not worth the time of day. If everyone with depression only suffered from SLS, depression would be way less compelling and way less prevalent.
Also a lot less relevant. What’s the point of all that storytelling if you can’t make a relatable situation for the viewer?
Because it is relatable to a lot of viewers. Viewers of the show often have depression, which is different from just having shit life syndrome. The two often go hand in hand but are not the same. The scenarios in Mr robot are depression scenarios, not shit life syndrome scenarios.
Shit life syndrome is having no job, having no love, having no hobbies, having no money, etc. Does this make people depressed? Yes, often times. Is this a requirement for depression? Not in the slightest.
Exactly. Most people seem unable to comprehend that you could have depression when “you’ve got it made.” You see it often enough in the music industry (Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain for starters) - people that are very successful in their careers, had people close to them that cared about them, but that doesn’t “solve” depression.
On a personal level, I am fairly successful in my career, have financial stability and the ability to take vacations, and am married to a wonderful woman. My depression isn’t nearly as bad now as when I was a teenager, but it’s not like I’m just fine now. Sometimes a random thing (work stresses, physical pains, etc.) will cause my depression to spike, making it significantly harder to want to do anything. It makes my with suffer, my relationship with my wife, I’ll slide in doing exercises, and don’t get enough sun… All of which just make the depression spiral. Fortunately after a bit of that, either I find something to kick me back into “correcting” mode or my wife pushes me into healthier habits (like going out for walks) to get me back to at least “manageable.” All of that to say that people with depression can ebb and flow regardless of how “good” their life is, especially when viewed from the outside. And sometimes the inability to be happy when you “should be happy” just make it worse.
“ I don’t understand the show I watch. Everything is about me. “
Your average joe isn’t out there having casual sex with random drug dealers.
He’s not allowed to be depressed because he’s friends with a woman? Why?
Incel logic: “Everything wrong with my life is because I don’t have a woman, if only I had a woman things would be alright.”
What they don’t realize/refuse to understand is: no, they wouldn’t. That’s not how it works. It’s just this conspiratorial-mythological story they tell themselves and each other.