[Viliam1234]

> some of you are just so far removed from actually understanding your own feelings and emotions that you can't even recognize that you're depressed

For example, I am quite aware that I have some feeling X. I am just not sure whether other people use the word "depression" to refer to X, or something else. Maybe "depression" actually refers to 10 times X, how am I supposed to know?

Sometimes people use the same words to describe different things (or different degrees of the same thing), sometimes people use different words to describe the same thing. I don't have a direct access to your feelings, so how am I supposed to tell whether my feelings are the same?

[cutemonster]

I've been wondering about that me too

I wonder what could be good ways to "calibrate" one's words against each other

So thereafter two people who say "depression" mean the same thing and X strength

[Viliam1234]

A similar problem is when one person says "I am unable to do X" and another person says "I find it extremely difficult to do X, but with lot of suffering I somehow manage to do it anyway", you never know whether the second person had more willpower or better strategy or maybe more supportive environment, or simply their symptoms were less strong.

No matter how you decide to see it, it ends up blaming someone. If you decide the problem was the same, then you can blame the first person for not trying hard enough: "see, the second person had the same problem, but they didn't give up, they thought positively, tried harder and overcame the problem, why can't you do the same?" But if you decide that the problem was not the same, then you can blame the second person: "see, you were able to do it after all, which shows that you were only pretending to have the problem, unlike the people who actually suffer from it and cannot do anything about it!"

Of course in real life many problems are on a scale; for different people doing X may be "easy", "difficult but possible", or "impossible". But many people want to round this to "yes" or "no". -- "Either you have depression or you don't. Either it is possible to do X when you are depressed, or it is not. If it is possible, then people who claim they are too depressed to do X are just lying. If it is not possible, then people who manage to do X with great effort were lying about being depressed." -- It works similarly for topics other than depression, too.

[cutemonster]

What about this way of looking at the it's-possible scenario:

That means there's a way for the cannot-do person to actually do it, s/he just needs to figure out how, maybe with help from others

Good news?

And there's no need to blame him/her -- not any more than someone who got a cold which can happen to everyone

I wonder what caused you to thinking in terms of blame and lying

(The other scenario -- when the can-do person in fact did sth else and says it's simple -- can be annoying indeed)