Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain

"Many people fail to recognize the severity of psychological problems because they're too busy looking at superficial measures of well being: a person's career, his or her physical appearance, etc. But depression has made some of us feel as if we're in a deep fog or a war zone, even if, on the surface, we live in nice neighborhoods and succeed in the workplace."

THIS.

Being vocal about the struggle is so crucial. My family had no clue what to even look for when these issues started cropping up much less how to get him help. By the time we got him the level of help he needed he had already been in the throes of deep depression and anxiety. Thanks for your kind words.

[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.

I wanted to take a minute to just say that this thread has moved me to tears.

Firstly, people sharing their story. This is exactly what Steve wanted, to share his story, his ideas. Sharing the story is so important to removing the stigma around mental health. It warms my heart to see people with the courage to tell others about their struggles (and then it double-warms my heart to see other people supporting them!!)

Secondly, the sheer support for him. He was a quiet person but a mental giant. Just to have so many people acknowledge him is truly beautiful for me and my family.

At the same time, I think it is inescapable, when studying how different cultures look at mental health and mental illness to see this as something which culturally constructed. Personality disorders for example, or ODD, or the like can only be thought of as disorders of inconvenient personality traits and therefore the way mental illness has always been used, and in the historical context, there is a very dark side to coerced therapy (which btw is no less dark when we convince parents to give their kids antipsychotic drugs because their kids are defiant).

my problem with Szasz though is different. He seems to accept the basic assumptions of mental illness that our society does, and therefore never frees himself from the problems of those assumptions. There is no scientific basis for these assumptions, as they form, effectively, the threshold questions under which one can try to make neurochemical inquiry into mental health. These assumptions are:

1. Mental illness, to the extent it exists, is objective and quantifiable.

2. Social context is irrelevant to mental health.

3. Therefore mental health is an individual issue.

Of course a libertarian will accept these assumptions because they are based on the assumptions of personhood behind that movement. But what if both of the first two are wrong? What if mental health is very much subjective and what if social context is an important factor in mental health? If so, then, not only is the science based on bad assumptions but so is Szasz's rebuttal to it, and mental health becomes more an art than a science.

None of this reaches the question of coercive therapy. The fundamental questions are who, when, and how (both regarding the coercion and the therapy). Obviously there are times when this is needed. But we should not ignore the dark side this has had throughout history.

Man, the mood swing part rings true for me. In my case they're usually 1-2 weeks. There's some anxiety/depression on my mother's side of the family but I wouldn't say that I've got any issues with it.

Now I'm curious as to whether the mood swings are more common, or whether that's actually something I should look into. If there is an underlying issue I need to resolve then it might have been masked by my relatively good run of things.