Maybe not exactly relevant but I’m early 30s and Ive had breakout schizoaffective disorder for a year. It’s bipolar disorder and schizophrenia at the same time. And I have almost come to the point where I can’t live with it anymore in the past few weeks because the symptoms evolve over time. I just wanted to leave this here in case I do die soon. The hardest symptoms to deal with are the depression and anxiety. But the depression I have experienced is absolutely black. I thought I knew what depression was before but I didn’t know and I think very few people do know. It is difficult just to look at an object because there’s nothing in the object. Usually there are emotions and implications and ideas but you don’t know there can be nothing until you experience nothing. And that is such a huge lesson is that you are experiencing intense emotions all the time but you just don’t realize it until they are gone. When you sit back on the couch and have a feeling like you want to continue to exist, this is actually an intense form of contentment because it’s absence is an intense form of depression/anxiety. I am now to see these things clearly now because due to the nature of my disease the depression/anxiety come and go full force many times per day. And this is the ultimate lesson that I want to spread: nothing is depressing or sad. There is a dial in the brain that makes you content or depressed and the position of this dial is purely and completely independent of everything else including the circumstances of your life. There is a correlation between your circumstances and your mood but my point is that I know this absolutely to be true: if you could just stick that dial to contentment then everything would be awesome and it wouldn’t impair your ability to live your life fully or grieve properly or whatever. People think that depression is a necessary part of life. This is completely wrong and you could never know it unless you have experienced the literal insanity that I have experienced