My Depression
Nothing anyone says about depression ever feels relevant to me
There's a lot of dangerous nonsense talked about depression, so let's get one thing clear up front. Depression is absolutely horrible on a personal level and making it more survivable is a completely valid priority. If your depression responds well to medication, I'm happy for you, and you should definitely keep taking it. If you haven't tried medication, it's worth exploring, because the payoff if it works is so great.
That being said, I feel alienated by a lot of conversations about depression. The prevailing narrative that it's purely a matter of misbehaving brain chemicals doesn't match my experience. I've tried several different medications through my adult life without finding one that really helps, and although I might just have been unlucky, I wonder more and more whether my depression is just not the kind that really responds to medication.
I say "my depression" because everyone's experience is different. Rather than being a single disease, with a well understood cause and treatment, depression is more of a set of symptoms, grouped together for convenience because they occur together so often. The causes are most likely a complex interaction between brain chemistry and life experiences, and the most effective treatment varies wildly from one person to the next.
I also don't find the neurotransmitter explanations helpful. Everything that happens in the brain is caused by various neurotransmitters, so to say I'm depressed because I don't have enough serotonin is the same as saying I'm depressed because my brain is depressed. It's not an explanation, just a restatement of the problem.
I feel that my low mood is a very reasonable response to experiences that have been very difficult to take. I've had more than one person glibly recommend antidepressants as a cure-all, and I always wonder whether they imagine they will erase my history and the present problems, or just stop me caring. I'd find the latter a more plausible suggestion, except that in the next breath they insist that medication won't change who I really am, and I can't make any sort of sense of that.
I feel things very deeply, and I'm sure that this is part of who I am. It drives my writing every bit as much as it drives my depression, but even if it had no positive side at all, I'm not sure there's any way to change it without eradicating my whole personality. So we're left with little alterations around the margins, softening the worst pain here, adding a little more motivation there, but the scale of the problem means that isn't enough.
The hard truth is that I don't think my depression will ever lift unless my circumstances change. I don't have enough support, and I live in a country that seems determined to remove what support I do have. If I turn on the news or look at social media, I see vulnerable people being attacked and demonised to satisfy the whims of the powerful. Anything I want to buy, whether out of need or as a small pleasure, will be too expensive for me while also being poor quality. Even my football team, despite three relegation in five years, can't seem to perform consistently.
These problems certainly affect me on the individual level, but they're not things I can solve with individual effort. And, with the possible exception of the football, I don't see much interest in fixing things on a society wide level. In fact, I see a lot of mockery for the idea of society rethinking the things that marginalise me and people like me. Once again, it feels like depression is a completely rational response.
I've tried to explain this to fans of the simple serotonin explanation. They tell me that the only reason I can't imagine solutions is my brain's distortions and that the right dose of medication would straighten my brain out so that the problems seem more manageable. That's one way of looking at it, of course. But from where I stand it feels like I can't imagine solutions because none exist that are accessible to me, and the right dose of medication could at best make me apathetic. I don't think learning to ignore my problems would be a step in the right direction.
This is where I have to tread carefully because of what I said in the first paragraph. I don't want to suggest that everyone who has good experiences with antidepressants is just ignoring their problems, or that more people should go unmedicated to bring the revolution closer. If it works for you, that's less misery in the world; I just want to explain why it doesn't work for me.
I often feel trapped between two simplistic views of depression. One insists that it's overmedicated, that all we "really" need is to go out in nature or connect with meaningful work or whatever today's panacea is. The other insists that medication will save us all and anyone who disagrees just hates disabled people. Ironically, from where I stand, they're both making the same mistake of assuming that antidepressants are a quick and easy solution.
There isn't a quick and easy solution; I distrust anyone who claims there is. There is only the slow and difficult solution of taking each day, each new challenge, of trying things that might make things a little easier and sticking with the ones that work. Of keeping going however you can. Some days that does feel hopeless and depressing, and I'm still not entirely convinced there will be a day when I don't struggle, but it's all I've got.