Coming here as often as I have been over the past few weeks, I've seen a lot of people with different problems but fundamentally can be linked to depression and anxiety; people complaining of physical symptoms, unable to cope at the minute and so on.
I became disillusioned last week whenever it seemed that the advice I was giving was less tailored to the individual and more "copy and paste from Word" - in other words, the mistake a lot of therapists make in assuming one size fits all. The feedback I received from people was positive and I'm glad that whatever advice I gave to help you cope with anxiety and/or depression was helpful but coming here every day, seeing new people, to give the same advice to, is just too time consuming for me when I have a life away from this website. I ask why I care when I gain no sense of reward from of it other than self-satisfaction, and I resent giving people the same advice time and time again when people and their problems deserve so much more - from me, from society, from the services.
I think, ultimately, when it comes to the depression aspect - everybody's problems are different and exceptional but what links those people is the fact that they come here, and because they come here, they aren't completely 'at the end'. They think they are but they aren't self aware that every second they spend talking on here, the less time they spend alone contemplating suicide, and if they were serious about their depression, they simply wouldn't be here talking. They would make no attempt to engage with anybody. They would do, as most animals do in the last throes of their lives, quietly shift somewhere else and perform whatever selfish act they wish on their own in their own company.
I think the fact people are here talking means their depression isn't really as severe as they might think, and that whatever force of inner strength brought them here to talk, is what those people who 'think' they're depressed should cling to as a means of getting out there and creating something for themselves.
Depression, fundamentally, is a form of grief related to the loss of self – we're confronted by a lot of sociological and cultural shifts that we've been forced to conform to but aren't what we've naturally evolved to accept.
Proof of that is in the fact that more people now than ever are diagnosed with depression; it's not about 'increased awareness' or the fact that 'depression didn't exist before; we just got on with it' – it's about the fact that we are simply reacting, naturally, to a cultural shift that is opposite to our being in a hunter gatherer sense/the need to build/to 'create'.
In this day and age, in our culture, most people are either worker ants or not, consumers working for whatever reason until we reach the age of retirement, and then just die, and if you start becoming self-aware of this, it can be immensely depressing to look at yourself, years before your planned retirement and say, “who am I?” and not be able to provide an answer.
Lifestyle changes, investing time in hobbies, doing things, being creative – that's what humans are good at. That's what we 'do'. When we lack that, we have nothing. When we sense we have nothing, we become depressed.
Create something for yourself to prevent the depression. Look inwards at what sense of fulfilment you lack. DO something about it.
