Some people call it a depression if they feel sad after failing a test or they had a break-up for example.
To me, that's not a depression. A depression to me is something that has no apparent reason (because that's how it seems to have started for me) and that's what makes it so difficult to fix or fight. How do you fix something if you don't know what or how it is broken?
I probably was born with this condition. I always remember that my grandmother told me that when I was only five, I asked her why I am alive and why I can't be dead. That's obviously not a good thing for a child of just 5 years.
It is possible that I was actually feeling depressed because my parents had divorced when I was 4,5 years old. But it's also possible that I felt this way because depression seems to run in my family (my grandfather's father and grandfather both committed suicide by hanging themselves, my grandpa often said he wants to die and kill himself too and my grandma, mom and aunt all have depressions).
Still, aside from the occasional Sunday Blues and once in a while a few sad and depressed and joyless days, I seemed to be ok. If I did feel depressed, I could usually overcome this sadness by trying to be positive and reminding me of the good things in my life.
That all changed one day in, I think 2003. From one day to the next and without ANY change in my life, suddenly I felt complete anhedonia (anhedonia is when you basically can't feel ANY joy whatsoever, no matter what you do) and being positive or "strong" didn't matter in the least. The situation simply wouldn't improve. I woke up every day, sensing that the cloud of depression still hung above my head. I started to suffer from insomnia, because I was terrified to go to sleep before I was so exhausted that I would pass out. If I wasn't exhausted, I would keep thinking and pondering and soon come to the conclusion that life is pointless and I'd embrace pure nihilism and basically come to the conclusion that I should kill myself. Obviously, I didn't actually want to die, but I dare anyone to live 1 year without ANY joy. Eventually, no matter how strong you are, you'll give up.
This is what happened to me as well. I tried to stay hopeful and positive. But day after day, week after week, month after month, the situation didn't improve or change. I had no idea why. Up until then, I had been an avid reader for example and would read thousands of pages each month. Yet thanks to this depression, I couldn't concentrate anymore and thus couldn't really read. In the turn of a hand, I had lost 50% of what I loved to do (reading).
Finally, and again for no apparent reason, the depression seemed to disappear, just like it had come out of nowhere. Again, nothing had really improved or changed in life. So what the heck was the reason behind it?
A therapist suggested that it may have been my mother who "caused" it. I was living with her and my brother at that time. I still went to school and so did my brother.
My mom worked and I was responsible for some household chores, but also my brother. If he didn't do his homework, if he broke a vase or didn't clean his room, it was me who got blamed. If I dared to speak up, my mom threatened to kick me out. So I basically learned to surpress all my anger and emotions (thus maybe creating the depression, according to the therapist).
Rationally, this seems to make sense. I did feel unhappier every week with this situation, because if you can never vent and are always "responsible", even if you didn't do anything, that's not exactly nice or fun. But it doesn't explain why this depression would basically come out of nowhere. It should have already shown signs or harbingers and there weren't any.
Finally, after travelling on my own to Indonesia in 2006 and after working my first real job in 2005, I had decided that maybe it's best to be "kicked out" and I moved to my father.
I didn't seem to be depressed then and the next few years were more about my job training and starting work.
Still, the shadow of depression kept lurking and it had never fully dissipated. Again for no reason, the depression kept coming back at the oddest times. Everytime I thought I had found out what might cause it (my mom, loneliness, other things), it seemed to prove me wrong by being completely arbitrary!
One study from the 50s claims that anhedonia and depression are caused by a chemical imbalance in our brain.
Basically, every human needs neurotransmitter such as dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline and seraltin. Noradrenaline or seraltin for example are needed for us to get out of bad or feel motivation. If you remove all of those hormones in a humans brain, this human CAN'T do anything because it's as if you ripped out a bugs legs. You basically immobilized him or her.
It's similar with the other hormones. Serotonin and Dopamine are actually similar. Without them, you are completely incapable of feeling any joy. But while serotonin can make u feel happy, it will "stop" when you felt enough joy. Dopamine is much more dangerous, because you can easily overdose.
Any drug is based on dopamine. Shopping, gambling, drinking or any addiction are all related to dopamine! The problem is that our brain has receptors for this hormone. But if you overdo it (like when you take drugs, gamble, have too much sex, etc), they grow. Now you need more and more dopamine. That's why people overdose and that's also why we feel less and less joy, although we do more and more things that should make us happy.
Basically, you have to imagine you pour water in a glass. If the glass is small, you fill it fast. But if the glass is the size of a bucket, the same amount of water won't fill it. You need more and more for less and less results.
I explain all this because I am still confused if my depression actually has a cause and reason (in which case I could solve the reason and should heal) or if my depression is completely hormonal. If it's hormonal, I couldn't do a thing, other than taking medicine!
If you have diabetes, your period or cancer, being positive also doesn't mean jack shit! It won't change your physical status.
And this is what scares me and drives me crazy. I simply don't know.
Either I have a depression that is utterly out of my hand. A sucky perspective, especially because I believe we can be the masters of our own fate. If we can't, life seems pointless.
Or it's possible that I am just too weak/strong. That maybe person B or C could easily get over "my" depression, but I can't, because I am either too weak. Or because I am paradoxically too strong and overshoot. That I basically already solved it, but fool my own mind into thinking I didn't.
Even as I write this, my head hurts because I can't know the answer. Both are possible and impossible at the same time, like Schroedingers cat!
The reason I bring it up at all is that since that time, whether I took meds or didn't, I never seemed in "control". I tried to ditch the meds a couple of times. Sometimes, I could live for months or even years without it. Then again, I needed them to have even a resemblance of a life.
As of recent, I stopped taking them for a couple of days during my trip to Indonesia because I felt content and fine. And yet the result seemed to be that on my birthday, I had an utterly nihilistic outlook on life (basically, nihilism is when you believe in nothing and consider everything in life utterly pointless) and when I started to take them again, that outlook changed again.
This week, I ran out of my meds on Monday and by Thursday, I fell into pieces. The same comedy show I enjoyed for weeks suddenly seemed stupid and boring to me, the characters annoying and dumb. And yet after a good (?) cry, only hours later, watching the same show, I suddenly enjoyed everything and genuinely laughed.
This simply doesn't make any sense. Emotions can't change on such a whim! You can't hate something with a passion one moment and without any momentum love or like it the next, only to hate it again yet one more moment later!
What really makes this illness such a curse to me is that it basically makes our entire life an exercise in futility! What possible point can a life have in which you don't actually control how you feel? Where for example you have kids and win the lottery, but your brain tells you "nope, you don't feel happy, we don't care that logically, you should!"?
If I can't live my life without medication and control what I feel, I am basically a slave to very arbitrary twists of fate. And I think nobody can or wants to live life that way, simply because you no longer have any reason to make plans or goals.
Why should we for example dream of having a house if a disease like depression can rob us from any joy or feeling of fulfilment we could feel if we achieve that goal?
Why should we have children or marry or work and have a career if we won't get a positive feeling out of it?
I really think nobody can live this way.
Schopenhauer is probably right when he says that life is nothing but a series of suffering. But IF life was nothing but suffering, certainly humans would just keep killing themselves? There must also be another side to it, a side where we actually CAN control some of it.
I just can't decide or be sure how...
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