| [I'm not the grandparent poster, but in case it's useful:] Allie Brosh in Hyperbole and a Half puts it as well as I've seen http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-par... One aspect is the anhedonia (joylessness); another is the pain. I suppose you might call some of this “disillusionment”, but that makes it sound cognitive, and intellectual, and amenable to argument and reasoning. Whereas it's more an affective and emotional state, not a set of propositions or an intellectual theory about the world. When I'm not depressed, it's not that I believe intellectually in a god or a purpose to life any more than when I am depressed. It's just that my non-depressed self generally enjoys being alive; or that when he doesn't, he knows that he can wait out a period of blah or even normal-grade sadness or grief to reach a point where he'll again experience moments of joy. When I am depressed, the subjective experience of being alive is at best deadened and deadening (although my depressed self knows intellectually, from experience, that he'll reach the other side), and at worst so actively painful that it doesn't seem like any period of happiness at the other end could be worth suffering through the bad stretch. As though someone said we're going to torture you on the rack now, but after a month or two you can have a lollipop, so just hang in there. Anyway, read the Hyperbole and a Half comic. I don't know how many people who have been depressed are depressed in the way that Allie Brosh was, but she nailed it for me. |