I’ve mentioned in a previous post (perhaps rather flippantly) that I have depression, but since today is a day of awareness and exposure to various mental health conditions, I thought I’d give you an indication about what my depression actually feels like.
To alleviate any immediate concerns for my wellbeing, I’ve never contemplated suicide – I bring this up here, as this is often the big, and quite frankly, the most scary part of any stories you hear of depression. The reality is that Depression can exhibit any number of a large collection of symptoms that don’t always follow a strict sliding-scale of severity.
I should say, none of the ‘analysis’ that follows is scientific in any way shape or form, but is perhaps my muddled way of translating the crazy complexities of my brain into some form of words and pictures. So take what I say with a pinch of salt, in this regard.
My depression seems to affect multiple parts of my life and seems to be centred around three distinct categories: productivity, emotional receptivity, and social exclusion.
Productivity
Most often this exhibits itself as a basic inability to focus on any given task, and as so it is a constant battle and has the most potential to impact my career and home life.
What it boils down to is almost ADHD-like symptoms where I have so much going on in my mind that I find it difficult to centre on a single task, this usually leaves me exhausted and unproductive. I’ll regularly jump from the task at hand to my phone, to the news, back to the task, to twitter, back to the task, to Slack, to Spotify, to YouTube, back to the task.
I often feel as though these distractions are not as a result of a ‘want’ to read the news (for example) but more of a way of dealing with my lack of ability to maintain focus on a task. In short, my mind gets distracted but without a clear subject of distraction, and then I feel like I’ve got to rush to fill the empty void of focus with something.
It feels less as if something has taken my attention, but more closely perhaps is an ‘aversion’ to what I’m currently doing. This ‘aversion’ is not related to any type of task, it’s almost always something I’m excited about doing, is fun, or is otherwise intellectually engaging.
As anyone else in the software development industry can attest to, context switching has a dramatic impact on productivity, and now picture this at about 20 times per hour and you have an idea for what it’s like living inside this mess of a head.
The result of this lack of ability to focus is intensely frustrating when I can’t pay attention to my favourite game, favourite television show, or a favourite book, and becomes worrying when I can’t pay attention to my work, the very source of my income and my family’s wellbeing.
It’s not all bad news though. I am very much capable of keeping this particular symptom ‘under control’. Outside of anti-depressant medication, there are a number of things I do to help me focus. For one, I keep a Bullet Journal; which is a particular method of journaling designed to help you be productive. I also use RescueTime to track my ‘mind-wanderings’ and bring them back under control, or better yet, outright blocking some distractions. For tasks that require my full attention, I’ll either listen to instrumental music or use MyNoise to block out distractions. It does still affect me, but I won’t let this affect leave my mind, I can still do my work, still read a book, still play games, it just feels much harder to do any of that.
Emotional Receptivity
The best way to describe this is that I feel I have an inability to experience peak emotions; like someone turned the volume down on my emotional spectrum. I perceive all emotions but they’re muted.
The best representation of how I feel is by this sine-wave graph:
Picture the thick black line being the highs and lows of a ‘normal’ person. They’re capable of reaching peak emotion both positively, and negatively. Whereas I feel more like the dashed-line, where I’m still capable of reacting positively and negatively to events, but not as intensely.
In looking at the negative portion of that graph:
I have this persistent worry that if something catastrophic happened in my life, the death of a loved-one for example, I wouldn’t be all that bothered, I’d easily move on. This gives me a sense of dread that is difficult to put into words and is far more taxing than any worries about the catastrophe itself. Almost that if the worst did happen, I’d be incapable of dealing with properly; I’d just move on and be done with it. It makes me feel as though the love I feel for my loved ones wouldn’t be enough to make me care about their death.
And the positive part of the graph:
I sometimes feel as though I’m incapable of reciprocating the love that my loved-ones bestow upon me. Love has historically been such an intense emotion for me, one that I have felt so strongly, that it’s terrifying that my internal capability for the highs of an emotion such as love can be so muted. I feel undeserving of the love I receive for this reason.
Along these same lines is my inability to enjoy and properly engage with my hobbies. Things that I know I should enjoy, I don’t. With the eternal clarity of hindsight, what I think has happened, is that I’m perceiving the contrast between what I actually feel and what I think I should feel. My mind seems to confuse this differential with a negative bias, giving me the impression that what I’m doing is not enjoyable. It comes across as a negative emotion, even though it’s positive – just not as positive as it should be.
Not Sad, Just Bad at Feeling Emotion
Often depression is perceived to be a disease of sadness, but as I said upfront, depression encompasses many different symptoms and not all of them are present. In my case, I don’t feel persistent sadness more than the norm, what I do feel, is that I’m incapable of properly feeling emotions in general.
Social Exclusion
Go back 10 years ago. I had just finished university, I had lots of friends, a core group I enjoyed the company of, I was in regular attendance at social events – hell, you could even describe me as ‘normal’ in this regard.
Fast forward to now, I have perhaps two people I really call friends outside of my immediate family, and I have no idea why these friends have stuck by me.
Over the past 10 or so years, I’ve slowly but surely isolated myself from many friend groups, left group chats, no longer speak to entire swathes of people. Internally I beat myself up about that, but I also feel incapable of reaching out to ‘mend’ the relationship. In some cases, I can’t point to a single reason I stopped hanging out with someone, I just did, at the flip of a switch. I don’t hate them, or feel any sort of negativity to them, but I don’t speak to them any more. This is of my own doing.
My ability to be social has undoubtely had an impact on the impression I have left on these people. I regularly envisage them speaking with one another saying things like “Does anyone remember that Dan guy? Whatever happened to him? It’s like he just disappeared off the face of the Earth!” This leaves me feeling empty, but unfortunately doesn’t have the necessary power to spur me into action to give them a call. There’d be too much to explain, too much I wouldn’t want to say, so I feel it’s best to just maintain my current status-quo, as harmful as that may be.
In front of people I’m as extroverted as I have ever been, but left to my own devices out of the eyes of others, and I will retract, become an introvert and want to spend as much time at home away from social situations as possible.
Where’s the Light?
So, around four or five months ago, my symptoms became bad enough (in all three areas) that warranted me visiting my GP. The happy news is that my depression is being controlled by SSRI medication – Sertraline to be exact. Within days of taking my first dose, I started to get comments from my family that I was acting like a different person (in a good way… I think). Positive change was affected immediately in me. This, combined with my other methods of staying on top of my symptoms (detailed above) has left me with little to no affect on my day-to-day health. I still struggle, but I understand how to recognise certain behaviours, and am able to find my way through them.
In the time I’ve been affected by depression, I’ve thrived in my career, moved from job to job, from Backend Developer to Team Lead to Head of Development. I’ve had two children (nearly, number 2 is imminent), made innumerable other positive changes in my life, and am generally healthy (if a little overweight). There is no clear outward reason why I’m depressed. I shouldn’t be depressed. But I am. It’s something that’s happened, something I now have to live with, but the light at the end of the tunnel is that it’s ultimately something that I won’t let hold me back in life.
writer • coder • father • husband 