This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Haverford chapter.
There’s a tendency among conscientious, good-hearted individuals, especially on a
liberal arts campus, to strive to be empathetic. We strive to understand each other by
considering what life is like from the perspectives of others. We try to see the world from
their shoes. We all want to have empathy, never sympathy. We all want to connect with
others by understanding what they’re going through, rather than simply watching from
an outsider’s perspective, only able to speculate as to what they might be going
through. We do this with the best of intentions, but the fact of the matter is that we can’t
know what everyone is going through. A straight person cannot fully understand the
perspective of a queer person. A white person cannot fully understand the experiences
of a person of color. And a person who doesn’t suffer from depression cannot
grasp the reality that is living with depression.
As conscientious, good-hearted individuals who don’t live with depression attempt to do
so, we come to a disconnect. Individuals without depression look through their own
personal experiences for anything resembling what an individual with depression my go
through. The closest thing, for anyone who hasn’t suffered from depression, are feelings
of sadness and despair. This is where the disconnect becomes most dangerous.
Depression can involve sadness and despair, but it is infinitely different from both of
those feelings. That’s the thing: depression is not a feeling. It’s a debilitating disability
with a wide range of invisible symptoms that are understandably incomprehensible to
the vast majority of individuals who have never personally dealt with a mental illness.
When conscientious, good-hearted individuals try to put themselves in the shoes of
people with depression, they understandably arrive at misconceptions and
misunderstandings. And this can be a problem for the interactions that occur between
the good-intentioned actions of people without depression and those who do suffer from
it.
So, on that note, if there’s one thing that’s least talked about or understood by
mainstream society when it comes to depression, it’s the fact that conventionally “good”
things can sometimes make us feel worse. Depression prevents us from feeling joy in
response to the things would normally make us happy, like hanging out with people we
love or getting a cute gift from someone or getting a good grade on an assignment or
getting a new job. When good things happen, mentally healthy people feel happy about
them. For people with depression, our minds fail to generate that response of happiness
and we subsequently feel even worse than we would otherwise. We feel worse because
we realize that there are good things happening, but we can’t experience the joy that
should come with them. The good things become a reminder of the fact that happiness
is a nearly impossible feat, and when it does rarely come, it is ephemeral and fleeting.
Sometimes, it’s easier to live with depression when bad things are constantly happening
to you. It might seem counterintuitive, but that way, the feelings of sadness that come
with depression feel like they should be there anyway. There’s nothing happening that
expects happiness as a response. It seems as though you’re in the right state of mind,
considering the circumstances. In this way, people with depression can often remain in
poor life conditions because it’s simply feels right to live that way. It might be sad, but
it’s less depressing. Being bombarded with happy things and not being able to feel
happiness is a lot more depressing than being bombarded with sad things and just
feeling sadness.
There is a distinct feeling of disappointment, frustration, and helplessness that arrives
when a depressed person fails to achieve the little moments of happiness that are
generally expected of us. We are expected to feel happy in response to certain things,
but we simply can’t feel it. This amounts to another failure, another disappointment,
another reason to loathe oneself. When society expects something of us and we can’t
deliver, it grates on our mental health. That’s why some of the ways our friends and
family attempt to deal with our depression can be counterproductive and harmful.
When a person who doesn’t have depression tries to help a person who does have
depression they often make the same mistakes. They come from the dominant mindset
in society that certain things make people happy. They possess an inherent, natural
expectation that kind things like bringing someone gifts or spending time with someone
or a myriad of other acts of generosity will create happiness in someone. For this
reason, people without depression tend to embark on journeys of kindness to “cheer up”
their depressed loved ones. The problem with this is that it sets up an of expectation for
the person with depression that they will experience happiness as a result of these acts.
Due to the nature of the illness, a person with depression is unlikely to experience joy
from anything, even if they may have at another point in their life. When you bring us a
gift, expecting it to cheer us up, and we feel nothing but emptiness inside, we are not
only reminded of our inability to feel happiness but also feel like we’ve disappointed
someone we love. We feel like we’ve failed to live up to an expectation that has been
set up. We feel like we’re dragging you into the helplessness of depression because
you also have no agency in the struggle against it.
Feeling like a failure and a disappointment can obviously be detrimental to the mental
health of someone living with depression. This is why it’s so important not to approach
someone’s mental illness with the intent of “fixing it.” The assumption that a layperson
can have the tools to fix a mental illness is only another symptom of the societal
perception that mental illness is less serious than other medical issues. If I talk to you
about my mental illness, it’s because I want a space to talk and share freely, not
because I’m asking you for the answers. You do not have the answers, and there’s no
reason you should, unless you’re a psychologist, psychiatrist, or some other mental
health professional (and maybe not even in those cases). If you approach someone with
a mental illness by presenting your recipe for getting better, you’re only perpetuating the
idea that mental illness is something that an individual can fix on their own, and not
something that is as serious as diabetes or a heart condition or cancer, which can only
be dealt with by a doctor. If someone with a heart condition came to you to talk about it,
would you tell them how they should treat it? Or would you just let them talk about it, so
that they could express how they’re feeling to a trusted confidant?
When someone comes to you to talk about their mental illness, that’s what they’re
doing. Talking about one’s mental illness can be a coping mechanism because it can
feel relieving and freeing. Therefore, the most effective thing you can do as a listener is
to just listen and occasionally ask questions that will show your interest and allow the
individual to talk openly. If you set up a structure in which you present steps for the
individual to take and goals for them to achieve and then expect for them to make
progress in recovering from their mental illness as a result, you’re already setting them
up to fail. As a layperson, you can’t possibly have the solution to someone’s mental
illness. Often times, there isn’t a solution. And if that’s the case, you’re only going to be
reminding that person that they have little to no control over their mental health
situation. This can make them feel like they’re disappointing you because you are trying
so hard to help them and that they’re once again failing to “get better.” Everyone always
expects us to get better, but sometimes we can’t. Or sometimes it takes years, or
decades. If you set up a conversation in an advice-giving structure, you’re setting up the
conversation to be goal-oriented. You’re setting it up to have some kind of resolution or
accomplishment or plan of action. That might be suitable in a doctor’s office while
drafting a treatment plan. But in this case, it’s destructive to the mentally ill person. It will
be another resolution they can’t make or another goal they can’t achieve, and even
worse, they’ll be disappointing someone they love in the process.
When you do something kind for a depressed person or offer some advice and then
look to them with those expectant eyes thinking, “So? Did it work?” you’re only making
us feel like a disappointment to someone we love and care for. Because we want to be
happy for you, but we just can’t.
Author’s Note: In using the word “we” throughout this essay, I do not mean to presume
that I speak for all individuals suffering from depression. I use the word “we” to express
solidarity with those who do feel that these words resonate with them.