To think a lot of people don't understand what a depression or anxiety disorder are?

[darkuncertainplace]

I'm writing this out of both frustration and despair. I have felt for a while that a lot of people don't actually understand what it means to have major depressive disorder, or an anxiety disorder.

I have heard so many people say the following in the last few years:

"Everyone gets anxiety/depression"
"You've just got to snap yourself out of it/get on with things"
"Just do things that make you happy and you'll feel better"
"It's normal to be anxious, we all just have to get on with it"

Etc etc. It makes me feel so frustrated. As someone who was diagnosed with major depressive disorder at 18, you cannot just pull yourself out of it. You are in a dark, dark hole and you can't see the beauty or joy in anything. You feel nothing except emptiness and darkness. It's an medical illness, not a mood.

Same for anxiety disorder. My triggers cause me physical symptoms such as panic attacks, consuming feelings of dread and fear, dizziness etc. It is paralysing and has made my life a misery.

They are both disabilities that seriously affect people's lives. I wish there was a different name for these disorders that separate them more clearly from just depression and anxiety.

I agree completely any form of toxic environment is going to negatively impact on a person’s wellbeing and what constitutes toxic is very individual. If you have sensory difficulties then any number of things could trigger that, social difficulties the same. There is no one size fits all.

@Morriba

Who said it was easy? No one found it easy. The older generations in my family were hopeless for a long time due to the medical model surrounding them at the time. The following generations (myself, my cousins etc) we all know we have agency and a certain element of control. In terms of genetics…. we were screwed, except we weren’t.

Lots of us trained in mental health and social work. I did my dissertation on the recovery process and how the broken leg rhetoric made people stuck. Made people believe there was no way out, that they had a “disorder” for life. That’s not to say I’m completely right, no one is. But, no I don’t believe in disorders for life. I believe in recovery, mental hygiene which comes from education and internal awareness. This is uncomfortable work for humans and involves working through layers of defenses and coping mechanisms. Most of all I believe in hope. It’s served me very well indeed.

Like I said, it’s never a popular opinion.

I think they are just both really broad terms. It's like someone with a grazed knee talking to someone with their leg being crushed in a car accident and saying "yeah, my leg hurts too".

The ignorance around mental ill health is complex. Conditioning starts from a very early age. History and perceptions used to label British People as having a 'stiff upper lip' or 'just get on it with it' attitude. In some people, this is just as ingrained as something like internalised misogyny.

I used to have a very successful career and life, until I 'broke'. I have since been diagnosed with treatment resistant depression, CPTSD and DID (which is why my posts can sometimes jump around a bit).

I have been in therapy for years, spent HUNDREDS of thousands of my own money on treatments and private hospital admissions to keep myself safe (because the NHS couldn't always facilitate a bed quick enough or didn't have the necessary skillset / psychologists available). I wish I could just think myself well, or reconsider my mindset or how I phrase something. But I can't as my childhood trauma has left me so fragmented. I've now run out of savings, so the welfare state is going to have to step in now.

I have flashbacks of being abused - I physically feel like I'm being penetrated and crawl into a ball trying to protect myself. My mind just can't reconcile that it's not happening anymore. Not sure that would be a good look at work, as my presentation has seriously upset others who have witnessed it in the past.

Treatment needs to be individualised, but it's an absolute postcode lottery to what funding and treatment is available. My NHS trust don't have a trauma pathway, but the NHS trust in the neighbouring county has a specialised trauma team. I can't get referred to the national specialist trauma centre because I'm 'too high risk' - but I can't reduce my risk without treatment, so I've had to pay for it myself (not for much longer as I have no money left). It's a vicious loop and complicated system that can be very hard to navigate - even more so when you suffer from mental ill health.

Even if you're not educated on the ins and outs of certain disorders - simply being compassionate towards another human being can make a real difference.

@TheHouse you say you believe in recovery and that disorders aren't for life. This isn't a bad way to look at things, but I do wonder which disorders your dissertation around recovery actually focused on? It certainly wasn't the mental health disorders that are with you for life.

I totally agree and the "disorder for life" trend which in my opinion comes from the American private health care system that can make an incredible amount of money from mental health.

The idea usually rolled out that folk in the past just "got on with it" is laughable. Plenty ended up dead, or in extreme poverty.

Current MH services unfortunately don't have the funds or time to work through things like you suggested and often rely on very basic "worksheet" style solutions that are particularly bad at treating those with very severe MH issues.

Even if you're not educated on the ins and outs of certain disorders - simply being compassionate towards another human being can make a real difference.

Amen to that. I think all of society, especially employers and public services, and very much mental health services, could do with training in just looking at the person in front of them and listening to them. What can they do, what do they need/want to do but find difficult, what will assist them in their goals? And so on.

I also disagree with the disorder for life/chemical imbalance notion. Psychiatric treatment has a lot of bullshit and is largely about social control but they use medical language. It's dishonest. As though there's a pill you can take that will stop you thinking you're the dalai lama, when you're not him.

A lot of the mindfulness therapeutic solutions are also laughable. I remember being recently out of hospital for my MH and being sent to a session where as part of "mindfulness" I was told that doing something I enjoy like watching a film or taking part in a hobby would make me feel better.

Seriously who the heck doesn't know that regardless of their mental state and the suggestion felt so patronizing it ended up making my recovery harder.

Sounds awful and not mindful at all. Being mental doesn't mean we're stupid.

There are a couple of programmes I know of attached to universities that do proper community engagement work encouraging and developing creativity. They're run by people who know what they're doing eg are writers, musicians themselves. That kind of thing is genuinely useful for taking people out of themselves, challenging them in a structured way.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine

Russia has lost 1.2 million men in the last 2 years. Plus Many hundreds of thousands injured permanently. I wonder what recent studies show.

Are you suggesting anxiety and depression don’t exist in these countries, or to a lesser extent? That bombs flying overhead would cure us all of our anxiety and depression??

Soldiers coming back from war have increased rates of PTSD compared to the civilian population. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Russia has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world. It also is ranked third in the world by suicide rate in 2022. I can only imagine that’s gone up.

The sad truth is that depressed people do kill themselves or drink or find drugs to cope when therapy and medication are not available. Your comment is one of the most inhumane disgusting comments I’ve seen on MN for a long time.

Realize my post may come across as anti mindfulness but it's not the core of the idea I dislike as it has helpful aspects it's more the one size fits all and often patronizing way it's used in clinical environments.

I got more out of mindfulness reading books about it myself than I did from the NHS mental health services

My mum has been ill all my adult life (I’m now 50yrs)

Her mental ill health really manifested late 30’s early 40’s. I blame myself a lot as I ‘went off the rails’ a bit in my mid teens. The first diagnosis was ‘ manic depression’ and my mum was in a mental health ward on and off for a good 4 years ish. Apart from my dad and I no-one else really understood or were in anyway supportive (I think most of the family blamed me too in the early days). While receiving treatment my mum had ECT as well as various other medication.

When my mum was back out in ‘the community’ there followed a series of different medications tried for 6 months or so, then another, then another. Intercepted by suicide tries, more in patient stays, more ECT etc etc..

My mum has just never improved really, there was a brief period in the 90’s where she felt able to go out and socialise and things were a bit better, she even held down a job for a bit. The depression always took over though, sadly.

The startling thing for me though is the lack of support that is available now for mental health disorders than what my mum had access to in the 90’s. My mum was able then to voluntarily take herself to the mental health hospital in-patient for treatment. Imagine that now! She had a CPN that visited 2 times a week. At one stage they even allocated a home help (why was that needed when she had my dad?), seems crazy now.

In latter years the diagnosis of ‘manic depressive’ was dropped in favour of ‘bipolar disorder’ and then to ‘borderline personality disorder’ different label, same horrible illness.

My Mum, sadly, started to suffer from physical health issues from her late 50’s and was a wheelchair user and then quickly bed bound by the time she was 60 yrs. From her early 60’s we noticed a decline in her cognitive abilities and she was diagnosed with dementia not long after. She’s now 72 yrs.

My dad really regrets agreeing to my mum having the ECT treatment as he thinks that has brought on the onset of the dementia.
I really regret being a troublesome teen as that’s what really seems to have pushed my mum into her mental ill health.

Ultimately though, what can be done? Mental ill health is an illness, sometimes with treatment people can recover, sometimes not.

I’m awake with anxiety now and came on MN as a distraction. I’ve suffered with it since my teens, the debilitating effect for me is that it is never resolved. Sometimes I just feel an incredible sense of doom for no tangible reason. Sometimes I can pinpoint an event that is making me anxious, but once that event has happened the anxiety just transfers to something else rather than goes away. Sometimes it manifests as intrusive images or thoughts about my loved ones being hurt or killed. It’s so noisy and disruptive in my mind that it is so hard to concentrate. And it doesn’t care that I have young DC who will be awake and needing me in the morning.

When people say unsympathetic things about suicide I do think perhaps they are fortunate enough to have never suffered a depression.

Agreed. After years of battling depression I was diagnosed with MDD, alongside CPTSD and it's something I wouldn't wish on anyone.

When I told my Mum, she told me I just needed to drink more tea and maybe start keeping houseplants.

I also have insomnia and can be awake for days until I end up in hospital - nothing works, not even sleeping tablets from my GP.
I have people send me links to sleep videos on YouTube and calming herbal gummies because they have "severe insomnia and this works." I can't help but think to myself that if they really did have severe insomnia, a video wouldn't do a thing to change it.

I have severe anxiety caused by PTSD and OCD, and the symptoms are actually worse when everything is externally ok. This is part of the misconception of these disorders

It's also the reason I am awake. I relate to everything you've written. It's so exhausting and the theme constantly changes. Hope you're ok 💐

The trouble is that claiming to have a disability or neurodiversity has become the new way to claim extra money, and to get out of doing things. Therefore, everyone and his dog now claims to have some form of mental illness or neurodiversity. We’ve reached the stage where 1 in 8 parents are claiming that their child is disabled. Peoples patience is understandably wearing thin. There’s no way for the average person to tell who is genuine and who is exaggerating and bullshitting to get out of doing things.

It's incredibly difficult to get that without the official diagnosis which isn't easy to acquire and you won't be fooling a ASD/ND assessor and that's before you interact with the benefits system.

It's worth noting ND doesn't equal mental health issues either.

If you want to blame anyone blame the system itself and employers/employees for lacking any compassion for those issues pushing them into a life of claiming for survival. I was hounded out of my last job when I ended up in hospital for MH issues and fellow co-workers who held similar beliefs to you were constantly testing me to see if they could prove I wasn't genuine despite an actual hospital stay.

I was out of work for 2 years and getting those magical benefits was incredibly difficult and exhausting. I eventually got back to somewhere close to normality and got working again but I had to do 99% of that myself because MH services are absolutely dire and overstretched.

I fully believe we are failing a lot of folk with MH issues due to the attitude of wanting to try and "catch them out" which is extremely destructive to people with MH issues and actually drives more of them into the permanent benefits trap you want them to avoid

So if everyone just worked when they wanted too how on earth would we all get what we have in society as it is now?

@PollyBell

If that was aimed at my post I'm a little confused as that's not what I was saying...

Why would it be aimed at your post I didnt quote you?

No problem.. hence my confusion feel free to ignore it...

"Everyone gets anxiety/depression"

"It's normal to be anxious, we all just have to get on with it"

This was my view on anxiety/depression before I went through an extremely serious health issue that left me with crippling anxiety for some time.

Education is key, but i think there will always be people out there who - like me - simply won't get it until it happens to them.

"You've just got to snap yourself out of it/get on with things"

"Just do things that make you happy and you'll feel better"

Hearing stuff like this used to drive me loopy...angry, upset, frustrated and everything in between.

But annoyingly...it's sort of right. Not in the sense that you can just decide to be well or that going to the gym or whatever your hobby is will 'cure' you. But that you'll only get well by taking charge and pushing yourself back towards normalcy.

It's not helpful hearing it from people who don't understand, but hearing it from professionals and people who love and care about me made a huge difference. It took time to separate the two and understand that they could see easy wins where I couldn't, a lot of time to find the right medication, and a huge effort developing the tools to fight back when my mind and body said no.

But I'd never have gotten better without 'getting on with things' and getting back to the things that made me happy. I don't think anyone can.

"Get on with it" doesn't mean fix yourself, it means learn to live with it, find some way of achieving basic functioning in life in spite of your suffering. And yes, it's exactly what people with physical disabilities have to do too.

That looks different for everyone. It might mean medication, physical therapy of some kind either prescribed or private, "alternative therapies" as they're called, self-help measures, professional home carers or cleaners or meal services, psychotherapy/counselling, adaptations to both life/home/mindset. Basically whatever combination of things makes life liveable for the person.

I think there's a level of compassion fatigue in the world in general. IMO it's a combination of things. Firstly, being bombarded with bad news in the media all the time. I mean, can anyone remember the last time there wasn't some war somewhere that our country was getting involved in or a natural disaster occured that we were expected to feel sorry for? I honestly can't, because it never stops as far as I can see. And also because ordinary people have become unbearable needy, on the whole. I'm not sure why that is.

So many people's first go-to is to complain to friends and family about whatever is going on. And I do mean complain, they're not just mentioning it as part of conversation and a life update. They're leaning heavily on others, offloading all the time, wanting sympathy or needing jollying along, wanting practical help because they feel better not doing "it" alone, whatever "it" may be.

That's fine when it's ONE person in your life, doing it occasionally. It just doesn't work when it's everyone, seemingly all the time because there's always someone going through something. The people they're complaining to, those people have their own stuff going on.

If they're like me and don't talk about their health or any negative life circumstances (because it doesn't help, unless I'm talking to a medical professional/adjacent-person who can actually do something), people have no bloody idea what I'm already dealing with, before they start using me as an emotional dustbin for their frustrations with their own health or circumstances etc.

It's an unsustainable situation in the population in general. Exacerbated by a lack of decent, available and speedy interventions in healthcare of all kinds.

Personally I see -

"Everyone gets anxiety/depression"
"You've just got to snap yourself out of it/get on with things"
"Just do things that make you happy and you'll feel better"
"It's normal to be anxious, we all just have to get on with it"

as code for: "I have no further capacity to support you, so please stop going on about your problems".

Regardless of whether people understand or not (and a lot don't. They've had/known someone who's had eg mild depression and think all depression is like that). Regardless of whether they're being unreasonable or not. Regardless that we've all been told "sharing is caring ", "it's good to talk" and "it's ok not to be ok" - that all only applies up to a point. Whilst these are all true, it doesn't mean others have endless capacity to listen to someone's unhappiness or problems or anger or worries etc.

People are protecting their own energy. They don't want their own lives and mood dragged down by others misery. They don't want their own lives curtailed by people who can't keep up (which is why lots of disabled people have few/no friends IMO, ordinary people simply aren't willing to make the compromises to include them). There is a perception, true or otherwise, that people don't have enough downtime. And they're being choosy how they spend it.

Expecting a medical-level of understanding and support from friends/family/colleagues etc just isn't realistic. It's one of those things I believe the state has sneakily brainwashed us into thinking is true to attempt to relieve the burden on healthcare and the state. A kind of mentality of "talk to your friends, ask them for favours, you don't need us. See? You're still alive, so it must be adequate". When it isn't adequate and never will be.

So as much as it sucks, there really is no option other than to "get on with it" and find a way through.

I completely agree with you. Very often I read things like: have a shower, go for a walk, see your g.p., phone this helpline or treat yourself. I realise that it's with good intentions.

My brother committed suicide and I've spent days in bed thinking about suicide and unable to do anything. The feeling can't be explained or understood unless you've been to the very bottom.