Comment by jmts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmts | Hacker News Reader

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The biggest hurdle to conversation I find in my experience is that people who have never been there find it difficult to comprehend the mental state you're in when you're depressed. At least in my experience, social media would have been just a drop in the sea. In a way, suggesting social media is a problem just reflects how little understanding people have over what is going on inside a depressed person's mind.

The moment you wake up in the morning, you have some idea whether you're going to have an 'easy day' or a 'difficult day'. From that point on, it's a constant battle against your own mind, trying to avoid letting things become a 'bad day'. If you stub your toe on the door frame leaving your bedroom, your day is now a 'bad day' and you have 12 hours of mental struggle to look forward to. You haven't even had the opportunity to find out the clothes you wanted to wear aren't clean, that you're out of milk so you have to have toast for breakfast. You haven't had a chance to drop your spoon on the floor, or accidentally slam the cupboard too loudly. You haven't made it to work or school yet where you'll have to deal with all your least favourite people. And every one of these things makes your day harder, and harder, until you can't hold it back, and all of a sudden you're being held hostage by your own mind. Shit is already hard before you get to social media. Sure, social media probably contributes, but so many things contribute, you cannot eliminate them all.

To my mind, the bigger problem is that when people talk about big feelings, especially in any strongly expressive fashion, people get sucked into talking about feelings as if feelings are the end all and be all.

Feelings come from somewhere. When I try to engage people, I try to address root causes of feelings. I don't try to massage their feelings or something like that.

Most people either try to somehow stop the outpouring of negative feelings or respond by countering it with an outpouring of positives because their entire focus is the feelings. This tends to go bad places for everyone involved and one danger is that if everyone is nice to you when you are openly whining about being suicidal, that may actively "reward" you for being suicidal.

People who are suicidal are often people who are being generally treated like shit on a routine basis by a lot of the people around them. So being nice to them only when they are openly suicidal actively encourages suicidal ideation. Most people are too clueless to make an effort to find opportunities to engage them positively that don't promote suicidal feelings.

The difficulty people have with treating the source of a feeling is probably because a lot of the time it's difficult to identify the source. I think many people often go with what their body tells them about what might resolve a symptom that they're feeling in the short term (get drunk and party), but in the long run the root cause may be something entirely different (develop relationships that are more intellectually stimulating).

In addition to positives acting in a way that can prolong a mental illness, often they can also deepen it as well. Generally you're aware of what you could be, or should be, or want to be, but can't be and don't understand why. This in itself can trigger negative thoughts and reinforce the cycle.

Oh, I spent about 3.5 in therapy. It's somewhat second nature at this point for me to wonder at root causes in myself.

But I feel like I failed to communicate something. Let me give a few examples from actual conversations I've had:

Someone was talking about having recently self harmed again after x amount of time refraining. They were saying they felt so ashamed and like such a failure, that refraining for so long had been a big accomplishment.

I told them it was still a big accomplishment. That fact remained true and was in no way diminished by their recent self harm.

Someone who is incredibly sweet and interesting and knowledgeable has a lot of baggage. When their baggage trips them up, they don't know how to stop and the kind, supportive replies they get keep the drama rolling. It is complicated by an "either/or" framing of certain things.

A couple of times, I've managed to say a thing that largely stopped the drama. They then took a break and did me time activities. When they "came back," they were much more able to focus on things other than their own baggage and emotional drama.

In short, I've put down a lot of baggage. I sometimes can help other people put down the baggage.

That's my focus. If they drop the baggage, their emotional landscape changes.

Because feelings come from somewhere.

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