Could you explain the whole "i don’t really have depression, i’m actually just a lazy piece of shit" = you've got depression, thing? It rang a bell for me and I'd like to know what you meant. Thanks :)

one of the most insidious things about depression is it doesn’t ‘feel’ like depression. even when you have it, you know you have it, you’ve been diagnosed—you still find yourself thinking, no, nope, this isn’t it, can’t be. it’s like the mental illness equivalent of that knight in monty python that keeps going ‘it’s a flesh wound! i’m fine, really! this is just a scratch, i’ll be up in a moment!’ even after all his limbs have been hacked off and he’s lying there helpless.

one of the most common narratives around it is that no one realizes they have depression until they start checking off what they consider to be normal aspects of their lives—and personal character flaws— against the checklist for depression symptoms. really key symptoms include:

any one of these symptoms drains away your ability to do work, cope with setbacks, overcome difficulties, or stop procrastinating. multiple symptoms create a pretty perfect storm of intertia and anxious self-loathing. you stop doing anything because it’s hard to get going, unpleasant while you’re at it, and afterwards there’s no reward. why bother, right? and when you’re always tired you get conservative of what little energy you can manage, and when you only feel emotions on the ‘empty to miserable’ spectrum you get really aversive to making mistakes. the whole mess very quickly and very insidiously loads every single thing in your life with toxic emotional baggage.   

and then someone says to you— or you say to yourself, ‘stop being lazy’. and that haunts you forever. because you’re lazy! the work is so easy. everyone else does it. everyone but you, you lazy asshole, lying around all day not doing this totally easy thing that you should be able to but aren’t. you don’t have depression! of course not. mental illness is for victims, is for blameless innocent people who can’t be blamed for being so understandably sick. but you can be blamed. you have a character flaw, and it’s getting worse by the minute. 

and that is how people who have been diagnosed, who have been medicated, who have been through therapy, can still spend all day hiding in bed and chewing themselves up over their failure to just somehow magically be a good, healthy, useful person, instead of treating themselves to a sick day and saying ‘yup! it’s depression. i need to be kind to myself.’

That gif set is from an ad that's selling a pill to take with your usual antidepressant if you feel it's not working correctly for you. The yellow pill represents the not-working drug and later it's joined by a blue one after consulting a doctor and the lady seems more content but doesn't go through metamorphosis or anything. It's been a while since I saw the ad but that's the gist of it.

Ah y the tag novel is just sort of…the story in my head when I look at the gifset, not really trying to find the “correct” interpretation since I didn’t have the context of it, not saying that my interpretation is how it was intended. That’s not incompatible—I think they both show that the pill isn’t working for her, but in the commercial it’s because she needs another pill, in my tag novel it’s because her life is going in a direction she doesn’t want and she’s been made to believe there are no alternatives. I think either could be true for different people, and I mean she’s just a cartoon person.

Basically my “unpopular opinion” on psych meds is that they work about as well as OTC cold and flu medication does for colds and flus—they manage the symptoms, and make you functional. That’s useful, and I totally take DayQuill if I have a flu and need to get shit done anyway. For some people, mental illness is just a rough patch to be gotten through, and managing the symptoms keeps it from being too miserable an experience until they get better. And I mean there is a certain logic to there being no point in suffering nobly with your hacking cough when there’s a bag of cough drops right there—I’m not anti-medication. But I also think there’s a flaw in the thinking that meds are the CURE for mental illness, or the only real treatment. Using DayQuill to try to force your body to feel like it’s not dying and overwork yourself can actually weaken you, make recovery take longer, or lead to a secondary infection. I know someone who totally got pneumonia because she didn’t slow down and take care of herself when she was sick. DayQuill alleviates some suffering, but it doesn’t magically make you not sick.

Part 2 of unpopular opinion is that I don’t think mental illnesses are illnesses—I think they’re syndromes. The difference is that an illness has a specific cause, while a syndrome is a cluster of symptoms. I think that the things we know as “depression,” “anxiety,” “schizophrenia,” “psychosis,” etc, are clusters of symptoms that can have a variety of causes, and therefore, appropriate treatment can vary widely with the individual. I think the causes are both physiological and psychological, and can be combinations of the two. I also think of it a lot like how allergies work, how there’s a “bucket” of tolerance for assorted bad stuff, and when that “bucket” is full suddenly every drop in it overflows. Like when you are constantly exposed to one allergen, you may develop allergies to other things, which may even go away once you reduce the amount in your “bucket.” So mental illness, like allergies, is often about reaching a breaking point that can be a combination of physiological and psychological factors, which like allergies, can be things that are innocuous to others but toxic in your own life. Personally, while I know my own problems have psychological factors and some are the result of trauma, I also notice that the better care I take of my body, the better condition my mind is in—it’s like keeping my body in good condition means it has more resources to actually process and deal with the psychological bullshit—or maybe like the physiological bullshit builds up pressure and the psychological bullshit is just the faultline everything breaks on. I don’t know, but I know that dealing with my shit on both a psychological and physiological level is what’s effective.

And yep there’s definitely a place for meds in that. I mostly self-medicate for reasons other than having a problem with prescription meds—basically I have a lack of access to healthcare, and a fear of dependency on a system that historically has caused more problems for me than it’s fixed. But a drug is a drug, and what I do has the same basic idea to it as prescription meds, and I have suggested prescription meds several times in the past to friends who did have access and I thought could be helped by them. I know a lot of people take meds to manage their symptoms while also trying to work out their problems through other channels, such as therapy and looking after their physical health, because it is fucking impossible to take good care of yourself when mental illness has laid you out flat, and they need that help to get functional enough to even look at the problem. And some people aren’t looking for the “fix,” they’re just trying to get through the day in one piece, and you know what that’s fine too, you don’t owe health or recovery to anyone, you do what you need to do to make it from one day to the next. Survival is always a priority and fuck anyone who tries to load more on you when you can’t carry it. But I think there is still this danger, of basically like…people who’ve reached their limits pushing themselves too far in a direction their mind doesn’t want to or can’t go, who use meds to silence those warning signs like turning off a fire alarm while the building’s still burning, and keep pushing in that toxic direction until there’s no medicine that can hide the pain anymore. This isn’t like taking allergy pills to get through hayfever, this is like expecting a Benadryl to get you through eating an entire buffet of things you’re allergic to because you can’t or won’t change your lifestyle.

And I think we live in a world that is engineered to be more stressful than it needs to be. School is an environment of extreme stress that’s directly harmful to learning rather than aiding in the process, most jobs have ridiculous levels of stress that are in no way necessary to the work or help the work get done. Stress is often the thing that builds up and triggers “mental allergies,” you can literally be psychologically allergic to your school, your job, your SO, your parents, your choices. And you know it’s a judgement call whether you want to keep those things in your life because you find them rewarding in other ways and see what else you can do to improve your coping skills, or if you literally just got arm-twisted into this and you never wanted it and you’re circling the drain because this life someone else planned for you isn’t worth fighting for.

It’s no secret to those with mental illness that it can get better or worse in sync with your circumstances. Some people get better in college because they got away from their toxic parents—other people get worse in college because quite frankly they never wanted to go, they just thought they had to. Powerlessness is often a factor in this, like someone staying in a godawful job because they can’t afford to quit, and may even have kids to feed. Sometimes it isn’t about choices because there is no choice, it all just falls to meds as pain management. And that’s fucked up! It’s extremely fucked up that we live in a culture that causes and exacerbates mental illness, that pushes people to the brink of what they can bear and then expects them to medicate themselves just so they can carry a little more without collapsing, with no hope or true relief in sight. It’s not the pill’s fault, the pill would still probably be useful in a utopia because mental illness happens, but the fact that our society is set up in a way that’s so disrespectful to our needs and pushes us to our limits, that uses painkillers in lieu of rest and recovery and doesn’t care if that compounds our injuries, that’s fucked up.

The thing about my reading of that gifset is that it doesn’t look like Team Lady + Pill Vs. The World, it looks like Team World + Pill Vs. The Lady. There’s this skeevy air of compulsion to it. And like I said above, it’s not that that’s the intended interpretation or the right interpretation—it’s just the feelings I subjectively get when I observe it. Everyone’s interpretation of media is a bit different, and that’s okay. It’s why I just rambled in tags instead of trying to make a point about it, because I didn’t really have a point, it was more that I was sharing my reading of it and the feelings it gave me.

Anyway I kinda wrote a book about mental illness here, I guess I did it because I’m trying to make it clear that I’m not anti-medication, I just don’t think meds are a magic bullet either, and I think there’s a certain danger to treating meds as the ultimate or only solution, ignoring the real problems which in many cases are systemic and disadvantageous to the individual while being advantageous to corporations (such as hostile and toxic working conditions demoralizing laborers or the whole fucking Thing with our education clusterfuck, both of which are other rants for other times). I think we live in a culture that puts sugar in everything and sells us insulin, that gives us the disease and sells us a lifelong addiction to drugs to manage it. That doesn’t mean stop taking insulin or you’re weak-minded and a slave to capitalism if you don’t get rid of your diabetes with the power of woo. This isn’t about judging people who take meds, or implying they don’t need them—you know, they do, and it’s not their fucking faults. But it does mean that if you’re on that downward slide, if it starts feeling like the pill is part of the juggernaut of things in your life forcing you into things that feel bad for you…maybe those things ARE bad for you. And maybe you’re not crazy for thinking that.