I was depressed for a good three years before I realized that gratitude lists were making me sick.

After more than 15 years in remission, my depression reared its ugly head after a brutal artistic rejection and the loss of a creative outlet that was really important to me. Rejection wasn't new to me, but this one took me down so hard I just couldn't get back up off the floor again. I started every morning with an ugly cry and ended every night with a gin-and-tonic binge.

Then I lost my job. Then my cat died. Then my OTHER cat died. Then the student loan bill I'd been putting off paying for six years came due — with a six years' worth of interest. Then, my last remaining cat lost the use of the lower half of her body and dragged herself around our apartment on her two front legs, squirting pee everywhere for eight months, until she died. Then my father-in-law died. Then my dog got cancer.

Almost everyone I told about my depression had the exact same advice for me: Make a gratitude list!

Depression has been steadily on the rise in the U.S. In recent years, the "cult of positivity" mindset has touted expressing an "attitude of gratitude" as the greatest innovation in the fight against depression since Prozac.

I started making gratitude lists every day — following the directions carefully and making sure to be specific about the reasons I was grateful: I had a loving husband who laughed at the same obscure Saturday Night Live sketches as me. I had a dirt cheap apartment in the hippest neighborhood in Los Angeles. I had a commercial acting agent and got to go on big Hollywood auditions for high paying gigs. I'd just scored a new work-from-home job that would allow me more time to write and focus on my own creative projects. My dog had cancer, but he was still alive for now.

I scoured my psyche for signs of change, and I saw one pretty quickly. I felt worse. I felt rage. I felt angrier and sadder and deeply ashamed. The choking feelings in my throat and the constant pressure in my chest got worse. Every time I looked at my lists, I said to myself: My life isn't so bad. What's wrong with me? Why do I still feel so awful? I sure am a spoiled brat and a selfish self-pitying a**hole. Yuck. I suck.

After 100 days of gratitude lists, I gave up all hope of ever feeling better.

After about 100 days of making gratitude lists, tens of thousands of dollars of psychotherapy, five different antidepressants, four months in an outpatient psychiatric hospital (where they strongly recommended we make gratitude lists) and myriad of high-priced alternative treatments, I had pretty much given up all hope of ever feeling better. Then my psychiatrist suggested I speak with a therapist in his office who worked with people with a history of trauma. Great, I thought, another opportunity to shell out more money to someone who can't help me. I shushed myself, told myself to be grateful for his offer — and to add it tomorrow's gratitude list.

My new therapist told me to write down everything I did and thought and said to myself throughout the day and send him the record each night so he could try to get some insight into what was really going on. I did, being sure to highlight the positives in my day to show him that I did recognize that there were some good things in my life. When I got to my next session, he told me the words I'd been so desperately longing to hear for years:

"Man, your life just SUCKS right now."

"It's not that bad," I said nervously, assuming he was either grossly incompetent or trying to trick me. "I have a lot to be grateful for."

"Really?" he replied, then proceeded to list off what he'd observed in my daily records: that I'd worked the overnight shift at jobs for years, which meant I barely slept; that the apartment I lived in was only so cheap because it was dark, cramped, ant-infested and falling apart; that my husband and I were raising a baby in one of the most expensive cities in the country, where decaying two-bedroom bungalows with no yards or parking spaces started at $800,000; that I had no family support system, since my closest relative lived 3,000 miles away; that years of working from home left me completely isolated with very few friends; that I was under extreme financial stress due to massive student loan debt; that I was a writer who had no time or energy to write because I was so busy trying to put out the fires in the rest of my life; that the few things I did have time to write got rejected over and over again; that I'd auditioned for over 150 commercials and had never booked one; that I'd blown my meager life savings on years of out-of-network psychotherapy treatment that hadn't worked; that I woke up in excruciating back pain every day; that I'd grown up in an emotionally abusive household where my mother encouraged me to watch "Pollyanna" on a regular basis while my father, who had combat PTSD and a traumatic brain injury, exploded in rages without warning; that I had to literally carry my baby over the passed out bodies of the homeless drug addicts who slept in front of our house; that my transmission had gone up in smoke four months after I'd paid my car; that all three of my cats had died over the past three years, and that my dog now had cancer — the most severe and fast moving case my vet said she'd seen in her 20 years of practice.

It all kind of sucked pretty effing hard, my new therapist said.

"I've been making gratitude lists," I said. "I'm really trying to look on the bright side."

"Screw that," he said. "Stop doing that immediately. It's last thing you need. You need to make an Ingratitude List. You should be PISSED. Your life's honestly kind of sh*tty right now. I'm not saying there's no bright spots, but you need to stop trying to pretend you're not in pain. You need to make a "This Sucks Ass" list.

I burst out laughing for the first time in ages. I walked out of his office with a huge smile on my face, swimming in a sea of relief. When I woke up the next morning, I felt crappy. But I didn't feel crappy about feeling crappy. And I didn't feel like I was crazy or selfish or self-pitying or UNGRATEFUL. I felt sad and stressed because my life was kind of sad and stressful. And that was a huge relief.

For years I'd been listening to well-intentioned people who told me to be grateful for how lucky I was — to count my blessings, to make gratitude lists, to think of all of the people who had it so much worse than me, to smile though my heart was breaking, to have a better attitude. What they didn't realize was that while these practices were helpful for many people, in my case they made me ashamed to be honest about how bad I was feeling and work through that pain. Every time I felt angry about my situation, I heard "focus on the positive," "look on the bright side," and, grossest of all "smile — it's clinically proven to help lift your mood!" All of this advice just inspired me to shove my sincere, legitimate feelings of frustration, sadness and fear deeper and deeper down my throat. That probably had something to do with the constant choking feeling in my throat and the squeezing in my chest. My new therapist was right. I was sad and furious and heartbroken and hurt and exhausted and terrified and overwhelmed and hopeless.

I started writing my first Ingratitude List and my pen was flying across the page like an artist suddenly touched with divine inspiration. I festooned my list with every obscene curse word describing every misfortune that had fallen in my path, big and small: deaths, illnesses, disappointments, repressions, oppressions, taxes, loans, insensitive comments, missed opportunities, betrayals from assholes I had misjudged as friends who were now millionaires, empty promises from people to whom I'd given my trust and confidence, aches, pains, worries, panics, and one unshrinkable hemorrhoid. I drew a picture of the construction site that had been going on across the street from my bedroom for two years, burning to the ground in flames. I told the next person on the street who told me to smile: "Go f**k yourself, you don't know my life dickhead."

Depression isn't a sign of selfishness or ingratitude. Smiling doesn't help. Thinking of how much worse others have it than you certainly doesn't help. I honestly can't imagine how it ever would. Why would thinking of someone else's more horrific suffering ease my own? It's like telling someone they have nothing to cry about because they're not dying of dysentery while working 14 hours a day in a third world sweatshop. You can still be depressed without being a subjected to constant torture in a POW camp.

Gratitude lists imply that those of us who are in pain are choosing misery.

Gratitude lists didn't help me one bit. Writing them was a practice that drove me deeper into shame and self-loathing when I was already in a very dark place. Gratitude lists imply that those of us who are in pain are choosing misery and just aren't working hard enough and that if we just think happy thoughts we'll float up above our problems like the kids in Peter Pan.

My ingratitude lists helped me grieve the things that I'd lost, missed out on, been cheated out of and all the times life had kicked me straight in the heart. I learned that stuffing down anger and sadness with a stack of gratitude lists doesn't make them go away. Writing down the things that made me miserable and furious didn't make them go away either, but it helped me focus on the things in life that I wanted to change because they caused me suffering over and over again. My ingratitude lists gave me direction, focus and helped me move away from shame and toward acceptance and action. My heart still hurts, but I don't scream at myself for being selfish for being sad anymore.

I chucked my gratitude lists in the trash and cheered when I watched the garbage truck lift up the can and watch the stacks of legal pads go flying into the fetid hopper along with the rest of the rot.

The next time someone tells me to look on the bright side, I'm going to tell them that I am. I'm letting my beautiful, real and sincere negativity have her day in the sun. She'd been locked in the attic for far too long.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io