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How Do You Describe Depression?

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AmyC

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My question to you: How do you describe depression to someone who has never experienced it?

I mean... seriously? How?

I've been trying to find a way to describe depression to people who are like 'get over it' and what not. How do you describe depression to someone who has never been in that state?

I thought this would be a good topic... maybe not? Maybe if someone here doesn't know how to describe it to someone in their life, you can find something here to help explain? I'm sure everyone on the forum can relate to depression either directly or indirectly. If you're a supporter and have never been depressed, but have seen it in your friend/family/spouse, maybe this will help you understand what they're going through? If you're a survivor, how do you try to explain depression to someone who doesn't quite know or hasn't been through it before?

As for me:
1) Depression is like trying to describe anything but the color black to a person born blind.
2) Depression is being in a room filled with people and things you love and feeling as though the room is cold, gray, and damp.
3) Depression is like a broken record stuck on repeat, screaming 'I surrender' over and over.
 
I sometimes explain my depression as feeling like I am drowning in a black void of nothingness. It is very difficult to explain depression from someone who has never suffered, and I guess even harder for them to understand. I do believe the saying "depression hurts", in so many ways.
 
The only way I could actually describe it for myself would be to say that it's like feeling completely hopeless and powerless and trapped all the time in all things in all ways. It's consuming.

But people who have never had to deal with depression either directly or indirectly just aren't going to be able to really get it. It's going to be foreign to them. And that's ok. I just try not to get into conversations where I'm trying to describe it. People in my life just have to accept me with it and understand that this is my reality whether they can understand it or not.
 
It is a very tricky thing to describe... I do think it is one of those things that cannot be fully understood until it's been experienced. Nevertheless,

Depression strips me down: I feel like I am slowly being dropped to my death – I can see it coming but cannot do anything about it. It leaves me paralyzed and ill-equipped. It is an unfair battle, with the odds stacked against me. I feel defeated and exhausted before I even begin.

What's been hardest to explain to others is that, while I am physically present, depression consumed a really important piece of me. The part that reminds me to care and keep the rest of myself alive. ...doesn't mean I can't get it back, it just takes time, patience and a lot of support.
 
Depression is like being buried alive with barely a square inch in front of your face in which to breathe. It is dark, cold, stifling, oppressed. Weighed down with the dirt on top of you, you are paralysed, held firmly in the rock hard embrace of your nemesis. Helpless and unable to move, all you can hear is your own heart beating frantically in your chest as your mind and your soul turn viciously on themselves.

Depression is a kind of evil inertia, an involuntary emotional paralysis, a black hole from which you feel you can never escape. It gets deeper and deeper each time as if you are digging your own grave. Depression is a kind of grainy monochrome, like you see in Hitchcock movies, where things are rarely what they seem but always look the same.

It is fear and self-loathing and crying when the alarm goes off. It is anger and retribution and smashing your coffee cup against the wall. It is being utterly convinced that things will never change for the better, that you are doomed, that the world is full of mean and shady people, humankind beyond redemption

It is a different place to where others come from, a different planet where everything tastes like water. We speak a silent, coded language others simply do not understand.

And no matter how well you describe it, how much you explain, they never will.
 
To me depression is a black state. My mind is filled with a veil of gray and black imagines. I make pleads with God to please let it end. I make deals with God to somehow make it okay for me to end my life and have even tried to find loopholes to 'suicide is a sin' in religious books despite not being religious. I think to somehow let me die. And also, if it's not to much can we make it quick?

Everything is dark. Your world, your life. Your mind is empty and black. To me that part hurts the most because your own mind is so core to you and your life. You are always in your mind and you can't leave it so when your mind is sick...hopefully death will end it, end the terrible blackness.

That's all I got for now.
 
It's dark, heavy, foggy, thick, all-consuming. It's ridiculously tiring and means making a simple decision like what to cook for dinner, virtually impossible because it feels like that decision will absolutely break you. It's unspeakable sadness, a feeling of being trapped with no escape, with nowhere to turn. It means interacting with other people is deeply upsetting, and you want to lock yourself away from the world. You feel like you just want to sleep, forever, and when you wake, you think "no, not another day".
 
To me depression is being trapped in a deep black hole. I can't think of anything except the pain and sadness I feel.

Depression makes me forget all the work I've done in therapy, and it convinces me that there's no tomorrow and that I'll never feel well again.
 
Depression makes me forget all the work I've done in therapy, and it convinces me that there's no tomorrow and that I'll never feel well again.

Amen.

I agree with an earlier poster who said something like "why are you trying to explain it to someone"? Honestly, if they've never been there I don't want them to understand, I'll leave them in their ignorant bliss and get on my not-so-merry way until my moods improves. That last bit is important, your mood will improve eventually, all things are constantly changing.
 
To me depression is like being in an deep pit with walls that are slowly moving in toward you. The longer you stay in there the harder it is to get out. With absolute despair coming when one has no more room to move.
 
TO me, depression is a hand reaching up from my abdomen to my heart, the fingers slowly grip my heart and then squeeze, on bad days the pain is so much I just don't want to continue on. It feels like an inescapable pain that follows me and waits until I get triggered to really strike. It also can feel like you're moving through a deep muck, with no hope of escape. But after 10 years of dealing with it it becomes routine and now it's the only life I know. Trying to learn how to live a new and more happy life, but it is very difficult.
 
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