[mds_]

I don't know. I've been coping with chronic depression for over a decade and I'm absolutely sick of hearing "oh, you're still young. It will get better". Reading that just pushes me towards the edge.

Even if I was to be "cured" somehow—is living half a life of misery worth living half an enjoyable life? Not to me. No amount of "happiness" can offset the misery.

I know everyone means well but it might not have the intended effect. At least not for me.

[javajosh]

You don't know what will happen. That said, you're getting angry because those words are dismissive of your current situation. You are being invalidated.

Personally, the thing that gets me is when people say stuff like "God doesn't give you a burden you can't bear." That's survivor bias if I've ever heard one - the people who didn't survive the burden aren't really around to quibble, are they!

Instead of telling you it'll get better, I'd tell you this: learn to stop thinking. It sounds weird, but it's possible. It doesn't mean go catatonic, it just means learning to recognize the thoughts that resonate with your negativity, and moving your focus away from those. Technical detail: there are actually two layers of thoughts, those that resonate, and then a deeper layer that seeks that negative resonance. The default state of the human brain is no-thought. If you can experience that for even a moment, you will feel relief. Then you can see the old thoughts return, like an incoming tide, and you can choose to not focus on them. That's the key: those thoughts that resonate so negatively, so strongly, require your focus to have power. If you acquire control over your focus, then you have denied those thoughts power, and you are free.

What you do with that freedom is a whole 'nother ball of wax. :)

Check out http://dhamma.org for some donation-based intensive meditation training (called vippassana). It requires a tremendous amount of will. The fact that you're still alive probably means that you have that will.

[mds_]

> You don't know what will happen.

You're right. But I do know life in general will always be difficult for me. Say I knew for certain things would get better in 10 years. I don't if I could wait that long.

> Instead of telling you it'll get better, I'd tell you this: learn to stop thinking. It sounds weird, but it's possible. It doesn't mean go catatonic, it just means learning to recognize the thoughts that resonate with your negativity, and moving your focus away from those. Technical detail: there are actually two layers of thoughts, those that resonate, and then a deeper layer that seeks that negative resonance. The default state of the human brain is no-thought. If you can experience that for even a moment, you will feel relief. Then you can see the old thoughts return, like an incoming tide, and you can choose to not focus on them. That's the key: those thoughts that resonate so negatively, so strongly, require your focus to have power. If you acquire control over your focus, then you have denied those thoughts power, and you are free.

Huh. So, I can choose my thoughts and get out of this mess? Not sure if you really believe that or trolling.

[Pitarou]

> I do know life in general will always be difficult for me.

Life is always difficult for everyone. The thing about depression isn't that it makes life easier or harder. (Lots of illnesses do that.) It's that it robs you of your perspective -- you only see the bad things.

> Huh. So, I can choose my thoughts and get out of this mess?

Not easily, no. If you could, you'd have fixed yourself long ago. But there are techniques you can learn. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mindfulness meditation, and so on. They really work.

Here's a simple trick that's as old as the hills. When you're facing a psychological obstacle (e.g. "Why can't I write this letter? Why is it distressing me so much?") write down what you're thinking and feeling. The act of putting it in words allows your conscious critical faculties to enter the loop, spot some of the erroneous subconscious beliefs that are screwing you up, and shoot them down.

[javajosh]

>Huh. So, I can choose my thoughts and get out of this mess? Not sure if you really believe that or trolling.

Well, not trying to troll anyway. The best metaphor I can think of is this. You have a desktop, and a bunch of malware keeps popping up, blocking the screen, steeling, well, focus from keyboard and mouse. The work that you want to be doing is obscured. It's frustrating, angering, even depressing, because even your terminal session is obscured, preventing you from finding and deleting the malware. Note that within this metaphor, you cannot turn off the machine, or ssh in from a known good computer (that would be telepathy, heh). What do you do? You have to be patient. An vigilant. And not get mad. You have to close each window as it comes up. New ones keep coming. It seems never ending. But as long as the rate of closure > rate of new windows, eventually you catch a glimpse of your terminal window! Eventually you get to type a character in there. Still they pop up, but you handle them. They steal focus for an instant, but by now you've grown adept at closing them.

Another remarkable thing is that as you get better at closing the malware windows (the negative thoughts) the rate of intrusion decreases, which actually makes your job easier. Eventually you may go for long periods without a single unwanted popup.

Of course, the actual experience of a thought is far more organic. It's more like the popups fade (or ooze) in from the edges. You may not notice it. But when you do, you close it, and carry on.

The Buddhists have all kinds of explanations for what the malware actually is - they all mind malware is written in a scripting language called "karma". I'm not sure about that, but it doesn't matter, really. Your job is to keep clicking close, hitting CMD+W, until you've got a clear desktop.

Oh, what is the desktop in this metaphor? Actual, physical reality. The experience of breath, for example. Or sitting in a chair, or walking, or typing. All experiences which, devoid of unwanted popups, are actually intrinsically pleasant.

It's hard to get started, though, because you've probably lived for many years with nothing but popups, and the desktop seems like a fiction. I suppose that's where a little bit of faith (and not a little bit of moxy) comes in handy. Good luck, my friend.

[scheme23]

I know hardly anything about formal meditation, or any formal theories on managing depression for that matter, but I would submit that there is truth to javajoshs' larger point, at least as I read it.

A big part of managing my mood is to do something like what he says. I don't know if you can, with enough work, literally choose your thoughts---I certainly still can't. But you do have some amount of control over your attention, and you can train yourself to have more. You can learn to recognize your negative thought patterns, to pick out when your thoughts are trash, and to let those thoughts float away, rather than latching on to them. You can learn not to focus on them and not to wallow in them for hours, days, or weeks. Once you are more adept at letting these thoughts come in and out of your conscious attention, you will find that there is again space for happier, more constructive thoughts---latch on to these and they will multiply.

I still can't avoid the occasional storm, nor can I be sure that the full-fledged, incapacitating, depression won't come back sometime, but I feel that I have made great progress. I'm much happier than I was a year ago, or two years ago. I think such a strategy could help a lot of people, and maybe you too. It is, however, hardest to learn how to do this when you are in the midst of a depression. Progress is slow, and requires the sort of effort that is painfully difficult to muster, when you often can't even summon the concentration to bathe or eat. You have to go one step at a time. You can't put too many expectations on yourself, as painful as it is to accept that you will lose even more time to your depression. You can't rush it. But, after a bit, you will (I think---take all this with a IMO at the top) start to feel like you are building up a resistance to your depressive thoughts, and the momentum will pick up. One day you have a feeling, say of really-moving-empathy, for the first time since you can remember. After a little more time, you look back and realize you were more or less happy all week. Then maybe a week turns into 6 months.

I understand your skepticism, but I urge you not to be so dismissive. Other people have been through what you are going through, even though it doesn't feel like it is possible. Those who have recovered probably don't fully understand what led to their recovery (I don't), but they do bring back some insights. Everyone on this thread is just trying to express those insights. We can't say exactly what would work for you, or even fully express what we experienced, but if you dig deeply enough, I think you will find a lot of truth in much of the advice offered. I think there is a lot of truth in what javajosh said. I guess your response just struck a chord with me, because it sounds so much like me. I remember being dismissive of everything, because I felt like I had tried everything, and I felt like no one really understood. When people said anything like "You just need to choose to be happy", I decided that they were just callous or obtuse. While some of them probably were, I'm pretty sure some of them understood. It’s just that there is this barrier--- in the same way it is hard, while you are depressed, to remember being happy, it can be very hard, while you are happy, to remember how painful it was to be depressed. Perhaps this barrier can be a goal?

Anyway, something in you does have to "decide" to get better, to learn to manage the depression. I'm not sure "choice" or "decide" is the right way to say it, but sometimes language is a blunt instrument. It's more like slowly learning to commit yourself, in each moment, to attending to your thoughts. It's like learning to guide or steer your mind, as well as you can with the handles you can find, to a better place, all the while searching for more and more handles. I hesitate to use words with negative connotations, but language is a blunt instrument, so I'll say sometimes it even feels like manipulating yourself, or conspiring against certain parts of yourself. In this process, you have to accept that there will be many failures, and you have to practice tenacity---learn to keep getting up (and then getting up gets easier!).

In the end, I don't know your personal struggles. Perhaps they really are far more intense than mine. And I tried really hard not to sound dismissive of you, myself. But, I really want to urge you, and anyone else who is really down, to try to glean from what I, and others, have written. Try to tease out what it is that we are trying to say. Please just give it a shot for a week or two, instead of reflexively lashing out. I'm not trolling you, and I don't think javajosh was either.

I wish you the best of luck with all I've got.

[Pitarou]

> is living half a life of misery worth living half an enjoyable life?

Yes, it is. Like I said in the original post: I swear that life is worth more than you can possibly understand when you're depressed.