Depression

I wonder if depression can truly be defined. I know some sufferers describe it as a complete void of emotion, or an emptiness, while others refer to it as a heaviness, a grief, or an unexplained overload of all the worst feelings imaginable. I would have to concur that it feels like all of these rolled into one giant nasty, and yet even that doesn't really touch upon what it's precisely like, does it? I am at a loss as to how best pen the nuts and bolts of depression. Many writers much greater than I can ever aspire to be have taken a stab at it over the centuries.  One of my favorite passages that I have come across regarding depression is from Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation:

 “Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake.

That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of effect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.

And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too.”

I certainly can't explain it any better than that. I only know when it's here, there is no escaping it. People will say Keep yourself busy. Do something you enjoy. Find a good friend to talk to. But nothing can really make it go away until it has run its course, much like the achings of a flu. The clear liquid friends may make it a little more bearable but they don't hold the answers any more than you do. And I think people who have never experienced depression are the worst individuals you could possibly cling to at a moment like this. They're going to be the ones that tell you about all the things in their life that have made them sad and how they felt better after a cup of hot chocolate. They're going to tell you to get over it. Grin and bear it. Snap out of it. Stop being selfish. But a friend who knows what it's like will understand why you feel so lonely and yet why you want to be alone at the same time. They will know that their silence or a quick "I love you" is all you need to hear. They'll know that holding you while you cry and not asking what the hell is wrong with you for the 12th time, but instead just being there, is a lot more important than trying to understand it. Those friends will know that they can't possibly understand what you are going through any more than you can when they are going through it, because it's different for everybody. I think I usually want to just know there are people who care. I don't want to see them, I don't want to talk to them, I just want to know they care about me and they'll be there when I get better.

Now it's your turn: How do YOU describe depression, and what helps you through it? Discuss below!