Saying you’re going through a divorce is already hard for most people (especially folks who haven’t gone through it) to process let alone deal with. \u00a0You compound that with saying that you’ve been fighting clinical depression and the deer in headlights things becomes self evident. It’s a one-two punch to the face that for most folks how to give empathy in that situation is alien.<\/p>\n
I won’t try to pussy foot around it, when everything first happen to me I felt like a powder keg. I know I pushed away friends, partly because I never felt like I could just say what was on my mind, partly out of fear that the most negative sides of my personality were just going to nuke any friendships I had left. \u00a0There’s an even worse side that people interacting with someone with depression don’t really quite make the connection to though. Outward stigmatism towards depression starts to show up in small phrases and reactions. The usual platitudes and the ‘I’m so sorry’ are typical but for a lot of folks, I’d get a “Don’t be sad” and they’ll proceed to veer off the conversation.<\/p>\n
For me it wasn’t until therapy and mental health groups that I realized the only real thing someone with depression wants to hear is that someone understands you’re in pain. Depression isn’t rational, so the usual platitudes while well meaning often just fall flat. For me the topical shifts were simply a reminder that no one wanted to talk about the elephant in the room, no one felt they could say anything. In some ways I realize looking back that’s not fair to them, they weren’t involved in the process of the divorce, they can’t perceive my depression.<\/p>\n
The paradox about seeking out your friends during depression is that you almost have to pre-train your friends to understand how to react to you when you are in a depressive episode. If there was one thing I could get folks to understand it’s that there’s a distinction between being sad, being depressed and clinical depression. Being sad, we all go through those moments. \u00a0Being depressed is a normal response to loss\/grief etc. \u00a0Clinical depression is a span of time in which your emotions are almost always negative (I won’t delve into bi polar in this case). If you’ve read through this post as someone who knows someone suffering from depression, please understand that your friend or loved one may be experiencing a sense of joylessness that isn’t just recently triggered, it may have been going on for the last year or more. They’ll have heard all the usual “be happy” advice and it hasn’t worked them. 90% of the time they just want you to be ok with hearing them out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Saying you’re going through a divorce is already hard for most people (especially folks who haven’t gone through it) to process let alone deal with. \u00a0You compound that with saying that you’ve been fighting clinical depression and the deer in headlights things becomes self evident. It’s a one-two punch to the face that for most … Continue reading “Stigma and the “What to do now problem””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,10],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-depression","tag-depression","tag-social"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7PG4O-w","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}