i think it’s important to know that if your depression is just shitty and you wouldn’t necessarily describe it as a “nightmare” or “hell”, it’s still real
i know that some descriptions can make it sound like depression is always only misery or emptiness and if you can get out of bed or laugh at a joke then you aren’t really depressed (or, more like, we infer that by the lack of alternate representations)
if you are still functioning in some ways, that doesn’t mean your depression isn’t real
if some days aren’t so bad, that doesn’t mean your depression isn’t real
if you can eat and sleep, or can wake up or keep control over your eating, that doesn’t mean your depression isn’t real
if you feel like you aren’t really depressed, that really it’s your own fault because you just aren’t trying hard enough, your depression is definitely still real
remember that there is more than one way of experiencing depression. the way you feel (or lack feelings) may not be the stuff people tend to write about, and maybe sometimes that’s because it lacks the particular kind of sensation or drama that people make stories out of
but that doesn’t mean your story isn’t real or that it matters less or that you are less deserving of attention
one thing I found out a while ago is that there are two types of depression, melancholic and atypical
(I mean, take all this with a grain of salt, this is formal medical establishment stuff based at least partially on reactions to older medication types but it interests me)
melancholic is the kind we hear the most about where you don’t enjoy anything and nothing makes you feel good and you can’t sleep or eat
atypical tends to make you sleep and eat more, and you can find enjoyment in things but the tradeoff is you tend to be hypersensitive to what people say about you or how you’re treated
(raise your hand if that sounds familiar as hell because it sure does to me)
now one thing I find interesting is that “atypical” is named that not because it’s rare but because they identified it after they described the melancholic type, and statistics say that atypical is more common in [presumably cis] women, which basically means they used cis men as the default baseline like they always do and then they found a lot of people (esp non-cis-dudes) had different symptoms so they needed to make a whole new definition for all the stuff they missed
like people with this subtype could actually be the majority of depression sufferers but we’re “atypical” because we’re not reacting the way some doctors’ cis dude study population did back in the day
so um hooray medicine? but I was glad to discover this business because it explains why my depressive symptoms aren’t the same as laypeople’s general idea of depression. I’m not, like, some loser who’s doing depression wrong. and yeah it’s weird that I feel better with the medical establishment to back me up but a) that’s life in the West and b) it does mean they’ve run into a whole lot of people like me so that’s cool
as someone who spent ten years getting misdiagnosed until running into someone who had ACTUALLY HEARD OF atypical depression, reblogging because this sort of thing is greatly helpful to know about
like, it was one of those moments where i went, wow, this is the thing i have, this truly is it. i finally am not alone or the weird one.
(via cumaeansibyl)
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