“Shut off the damn tv, the voices make me stressed”

Alright said, Anya,

“I feel like you, my own family, is playing trickery against me”

Maa, Why would I, I’m your daughter

“You are just like the others, you only want bad things for me”

Apparently, October has a National mental health awareness day! It went almost unnoticed so I thought why not put out some experiences, that makes it okay to talk about it, even though it’s a month late.

The society still has a stigma, they make a big deal out of everything. You name the disorder, the blame and shame will come too.

Telly has raised considerable awareness about Depression and about reaching out to your loved ones and friends. But then how does anyone reach out when the person on the other end does not get anything about the illness.

It’s like having a fever when you’re running a temperature only you know what you feel, you feel cold, you are tired and need rest while the others can only sympathize with you for not keeping well because they’ve had the case of fever at some point in their life.

Apply the same case in depression, the symptoms may be felt and passed off like a regular ‘sleep over it and the next day you’ll feel good’ incident. Even the person here cannot detect it unless it’s very severe. So then do we really, actually know ourselves? And in severe cases, even though people know, they’d only support you by cheering you up with “many others have it worse than you” (because they clearly haven’t gone through a similar stage, they can’t sympathize) Leaving the person going through this all alone.

So I scanned the web and found an incredible article from The Guardian that takes into account what a severely depressed person feels like.

The article in The Guardian states

“So how is this misleadingly named curse different from recognizable grief?

For a start, it can produce symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s – forgetfulness, confusion, and disorientation. Making even the smallest decisions can be agonizing. It can affect not just the mind but also the body – You cannot conjure your actual personality, which you can remember only vaguely, in a theoretical sense. You live in, or close to, a state of perpetual fear, although you are not sure what it is you are afraid of. The writer William Styron called it a “brainstorm”, which is much more accurate than “unhappiness”.

Thus your personality – the normal, accustomed “you” – has changed. But crucially, although near-apocalyptic from the inside, this transformation is barely perceptible to the observer – except for, perhaps, a certain withdrawnness, or increased anger and irritability. Viewed from the outside – the wall of skin and the windows of eyes – everything remains familiar. Inside, there is a dark storm.

Other negative emotions – self-pity, guilt, apathy, pessimism, narcissism – make it a deeply unattractive illness to be around, one that requires unusual levels of understanding and tolerance from family and friends. For all its horrors, it is not naturally evocative of sympathy. Apart from being mistaken for someone who might be a miserable, loveless killjoy, one also has to face the fact that one might be a bit, well, crazy – one of the people who can’t be trusted to be reliable parents, partners, or even employees. So to the list of predictable torments, shame can be added.”

Seeking therapy becomes difficult and getting back to normal life seems like a distinct dream. You can recover, of course, that’s what they tell you but this recovery is dependent on the individuals progress that they make each and every day. Some take months and some years with the treatment to get back to who they were before the illness got to them.

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