Depression Classic

It started by me having a pretty droll day at work, but the first indications something was really wrong (looking back), were when I went home, and literally wanted to do nothing. I didn't want to play or deal with with my young children or significant other, didn't want to eat dinner, didn't want to watch TV or read a book, or use the computer for any reason. I literally wanted nothing, and the best way to achieve that seemed to be to go lay in bed, even though I didn't want to sleep either.

The second day was much the same, but I also realized that I didn't like my job, or career, and wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life either. Needless to say, this didn't improve my outlook compared to the prior day.

The third day, when I woke up, I was scared. I wasn't sure what was going on, but I stopped taking the congestion medication just in case and because it was the only thing I could think of that had changed recently. I was feeling mostly normal within 24 hours or so. I can easily see how in that state of mind things could escalate. Almost a decade later, I still consider it one of the scariest episodes of my life.

Interestingly, 9-10 months later, a friend who I had told about the incident right after it happened told me the same thing had just happened to him from the same medication.

I'm glad you got everything under control. The brain is a crazy organ.

One plausible candidate is the word (and condition) "melancholia," which has the advantage of being identifiable by means of objective clinical indicators[1].

Melancholia was excluded from DSM-5, not because it lacked objective clinical diagnosis indicators, but because it possessed them. By being open to objective, impartial diagnosis, it set itself apart from the other conditions described in the DSM, in a way that would have exposed something about the DSM that its editors preferred to conceal -- the majority of the DSM's content lacks scientific substance[2].

A quote from the second linked reference: "A single disorder that met the scientific demands of the day, in other words, would only make the failure to meet them in the rest of the D.S.M. that much more glaring."

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3733615/

2. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/does-psychiatry-need-...

No we don't, it's called depression.

What we need is people to realize that depression is not 'people feel down sometimes.' That is feeling down. Depression is not something that you just work through, it is an actual, real thing going on in your brain.

But hell, most people act like armchair psychologists so ya, lets create another term that they'll also misuse.

And I'm speaking as someone who deals with this every day, not as someone who's recovered and is looking back. Recovery isn't possible anymore, unfortunately. I guess my advice to anyone is if you're not as far along as I am... Don't get off the merry-go-round. You really can't get back on.

'Psychomotor retardation (also known as "psychomotor impairment" or "motormental retardation") involves a slowing-down of thought and a reduction of physical movements in an individual. Psychomotor retardation can cause a visible slowing of physical and emotional reactions, including speech and affect. This is most-commonly seen in people with major depression and in the depressed phase of bipolar disorder...'

This was/is my most prominent symptom. I once sat in a chair for three days straight (fortunately I had a glass of water within arm's reach), during a two-ish week period where I couldn't summon the motivation to leave my house. It was godawful.

I wonder if it's a vestigial evolutionary trait, particularly in the case of seasonal depression. It would make sense in some contexts: if you're a hunter-gather, resources are scarce during winter. Your chance of survival might therefore be higher if you expended as little energy as possible while waiting out the winter...

Some words we already have include (descriptions from wikipedia):

anomie: a "condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals"

acedia: "also accidie or accedie /ˈæksᵻdi/, from Latin acedĭa, and this from Greek ἀκηδία, "negligence") is a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world. It can lead to a state of being unable to perform one's duties in life. Its spiritual overtones make it related to but arguably distinct from depression. Acedia was originally noted as a problem among monks and other ascetics who maintained a solitary life."

todestrieb: "the death drive (German: Todestrieb) is the drive towards death and self-destruction [...] This concept has been translated as, "opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts" [...] The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives."

weltschmerz: "(from the German, meaning world-pain or world-weariness, pronounced [ˈvɛltʃmɛɐ̯ts]) is a term coined by the German author Jean Paul and denotes the kind of feeling experienced by someone who believes that physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind."

joie de vivre: "a French phrase often used in English to express a cheerful enjoyment of life; an exultation of spirit."

ubuntu: "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity"

From the preface of Foucault's "Madness and Civilization": "...modern man no longer communicates with the madman [...] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence."

Emile Durkheim's "Suicide" is a work that touches upon the co-incidence of depression, existential apathy, and repurposed religion as affected by the industrial revolution. Here's a neat animated video by the School of Life: https://youtu.be/z9W0GQvONKc

The gifted (and, sadly, recently late) Mark Fisher's explanation of capitalist realism: "Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action."

It's definitely a difficult subject to put into words, though. Maybe comics are a better format?

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

"I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler. I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was. But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same... I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.

Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything."