Doodle of the week: Depression is not sadness
Though it can feel like it sometimes.
"Depression is not sadness. During the most intense part of a major-depressive episode, what I've felt is nothing at all like sadness. Mostly, it's a kind of numbness, and utter lack of desire and will. Underneath that numbness, there's the sense that something awful is happening - there's a very small voice screaming in the back of your mind, but you hear it only faintly. There's an uncomfortable wrongness to everything, like the world is twisted and broken in some terrible but unidentifiable way. You feel numb, but it's an incredibly bad sort of numbness. This is accompanied by a strange lack of volition - if a genie popped out and offered me three wishes at the depth of my depression, my first wish would be for him to go away and not bother me about the other two. Looking back on this experience, I've conjectured that part of depression might be like some kind of mental 'fire sprinkler system' - the brain just floods the building completely to keep it from burning down." -
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Until next time,
Gaurav
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