Leaving this here in case it helps anyone: Thinking depression means being sad is inaccurate. When you are depressed you feel empty, life lacks meaning and apathy sets in. And it is very easy to ignore initially.
As it gets more difficult, motivation starts to diminish dramatically, it may lead to anger because of your inability to remediate it or sadness because you feel helpless and lost as you face something invisible.
It’s a pretty slippery slope and suicide often becomes the first thing you think of as life becomes more and more painful with all of it’s obligations. Death does not seem as scary anymore because if becomes perceived as a way out of all this pain. Happiness dissapears out of your sight and all you see in life is this daily incessant pain. It’s especially hard for men often because we are not raised to deal with emotions or talk about them. Ironically the more sane you perceive yourself to be or the more you think of yourself as privileged if you had loving parents and a good home, the more it becomes alienating to accept that your suffering is valid and that you should not judge it.
** It is completely okay as a grown man to cry.**
I nearly made that mistake, more than once and I am happy to have failed in both of my suicide attempts. And I am especially so thankful to have gotten enough courage to seek help from a psychologist, someone that has spent more than 10 years and gotten true expertise at dealing with mental problems.
Things are far better now, but my heart remains with others during their lonesome times, you’re not broken, it happens to the best of us. Seek help, at least for your loved ones whose lives would never be the same once you leave.
I genuinely wish to thank you for your input, I did miss that. I will take the time to say that my intention was mostly to relate my lived experience since I share a lot of empathyfor the socially marginalized having lived the mental helplessness that happens in those zones of the psyche, and what lead to my attempts at ending my life, which was the common and false assumption that depression is akin to the normal transient response to grief or dissapointment. False assumptions on depression being sadness, plus the fact that I experienced it as an alienation of the validity of my own suffering and jumped straight into “I am broken, let’s end this shit because it hurts all the damn time”.
This led in my false assumption that I was not depressed, well what the hell is then wrong with me? But yes there are a lot of other symptoms that I have felt and can be good basis to assume a depressive episode such as cognitive impairment, fatigue and the feeling of heavyness, negative outlook on prior subjective experiences (reviewing subjective events and constantly blaming yourself for all that happened), even physical issues like problems with digestion and the last one my memory is able to serve back to me would be the experience of being far away from your lived experience and physically regressing into your own cranium, like a sense of physical distance from your physical bodily agency. All were things I took years to go through thanks to my psychologist (an academic doctor with some damn good expertise) and I agree that my lived experience should not either be taken as an invitation to gatekeep and label what is and is not valid suffering since all suffering is valid and should never be judged.
Leaving this here in case it helps anyone: Thinking depression means being sad is inaccurate. When you are depressed you feel empty, life lacks meaning and apathy sets in. And it is very easy to ignore initially.
As it gets more difficult, motivation starts to diminish dramatically, it may lead to anger because of your inability to remediate it or sadness because you feel helpless and lost as you face something invisible.
It’s a pretty slippery slope and suicide often becomes the first thing you think of as life becomes more and more painful with all of it’s obligations. Death does not seem as scary anymore because if becomes perceived as a way out of all this pain. Happiness dissapears out of your sight and all you see in life is this daily incessant pain. It’s especially hard for men often because we are not raised to deal with emotions or talk about them. Ironically the more sane you perceive yourself to be or the more you think of yourself as privileged if you had loving parents and a good home, the more it becomes alienating to accept that your suffering is valid and that you should not judge it.
** It is completely okay as a grown man to cry.**
I nearly made that mistake, more than once and I am happy to have failed in both of my suicide attempts. And I am especially so thankful to have gotten enough courage to seek help from a psychologist, someone that has spent more than 10 years and gotten true expertise at dealing with mental problems.
Things are far better now, but my heart remains with others during their lonesome times, you’re not broken, it happens to the best of us. Seek help, at least for your loved ones whose lives would never be the same once you leave.
Depression comes in many flavours. Very often it’s not emptying, but the active feeling of desperation and or painful grief.
I genuinely wish to thank you for your input, I did miss that. I will take the time to say that my intention was mostly to relate my lived experience since I share a lot of empathyfor the socially marginalized having lived the mental helplessness that happens in those zones of the psyche, and what lead to my attempts at ending my life, which was the common and false assumption that depression is akin to the normal transient response to grief or dissapointment. False assumptions on depression being sadness, plus the fact that I experienced it as an alienation of the validity of my own suffering and jumped straight into “I am broken, let’s end this shit because it hurts all the damn time”.
This led in my false assumption that I was not depressed, well what the hell is then wrong with me? But yes there are a lot of other symptoms that I have felt and can be good basis to assume a depressive episode such as cognitive impairment, fatigue and the feeling of heavyness, negative outlook on prior subjective experiences (reviewing subjective events and constantly blaming yourself for all that happened), even physical issues like problems with digestion and the last one my memory is able to serve back to me would be the experience of being far away from your lived experience and physically regressing into your own cranium, like a sense of physical distance from your physical bodily agency. All were things I took years to go through thanks to my psychologist (an academic doctor with some damn good expertise) and I agree that my lived experience should not either be taken as an invitation to gatekeep and label what is and is not valid suffering since all suffering is valid and should never be judged.