Back in the summer term, we had the opportunity to speak with a 1B ECE student about their experience with depression. In particular the experience of feeling nothing even in situations which would ordinarily be fraught with emotion. This is their story.

Q: Tell me a little bit about yourself and your involvement with mental health.

I would say that things really started in ninth grade. How do even start off? It’s so fuzzy now; it’s been so many years. It just seems like this is normal now.

When I was in grade eight and nine I was in a really good place. I was the ideal student and an ideal child for an Indian parent. We were living in India at that time, we didn’t move here until grade nine. That said, for all of my life I have been very obsessive and attached. Even the thought of someone dying, like anyone dying, would make me cry. So I just tried not to think about it. But then one day it happened, and it just broke me.

My grandfather died. And for a year, I would randomly start crying. It’s just that my brain couldn’t handle it, and it couldn’t get over it. I knew he was dead, but I just could not stop crying. I cried so much that I eventually just stopped feeling.

That’s a part of depression. When you’re in a good place mentally, an event like this is sad, but when you get into the territory when you stop feeling everything, that’s when you know you’re fucked. Well, actually, you don’t even know you’re fucked. Because you initially think that feeling nothing is better than feeling sad. It’s only when a year or two passes that you realize it has killed your soul.

It’s like being stuck in a limbo you feel you can never get out of; you’re stuck and everything else is just flowing around you. You start isolating yourself without even realizing it. Tasks like waking up that used to be second nature become hard, and sleeping for twenty hours a day feels normal.

It’s even harder if the people in your family have been through the same suffering. For me, I lost both of my grandfathers, but that implies that my mother’s father, and my father’s father had died. It becomes harder and harder to cope when everyone you can fall back onto support for is in the same situation.

I feel like it took away quite a few years of my life. Like even after you can say that depression is not in control of you anymore, all that means is that at this particular time you are not in the danger zone, but does not take into account the actual quality of life. Unfortunately, I’d say that’s what mental health care means to most healthcare professionals. It’s hard to explain what it feels like to someone else because I don’t think the human brain itself is capable of understanding something that involves physical changes inside of the brain.

You can empathize with something that has happened when something similar has happened to you, but not with something that is caused by biological differences in perception. If someone ‘feels’ more, like a bipolar person, you really can’t empathize with them; you know that they feel more, but people call them crazy. You can’t really understand something that is caused with physical differences in one’s brain. So yeah, it’s hard for people to understand. People look at me and just think that I’m lazy.

Q: That was your experience back in high school, has it changed since then? How are you doing now?

Well, it’s certainly better. Especially the four months during co-op. What I did for co-op was I deliberately sought a job in Waterloo. Even my father knew I wouldn’t be able to cope well enough if it was somewhere else. Even then, it was hard for me to adjust when I came back here.

Here’s the thing, things are becoming better, and they’re becoming better really fast. Eight months ago is very different from what I’m experiencing now, and two years ago is different from that also.

But during the co-op term I had to get my father to come here. Well, I didn’t have to, he knew and he just came here and started living with me. He’s a doctor, so he had to leave his practice and move to a whole different province to come here for four months just to help me through all of this stuff.

For the first two months of co-op he would drive me to work every single day. After that I got used to it and started taking the bus. Something like this makes you afraid of normal, everyday things, as simple as getting outside. And then, you haven’t done it for so long that you actually start being afraid. There’s no real reason why, it’s just inexplicable.

I just feel like depression is like the fight or flight mechanism; but our brains worked when we were cavemen and not now. Like they don’t know how to handle when you’re under so much stress, but the source of that stress is not really tangible. It’s not like you’re running away from a bear or really need to meet a deadline, it’s stress created by your own mind.

It’s a vicious cycle, the more stressed you are the more you think about it, and you keep doing it again over and over and over again.

The body’s mechanism once it realizes that thinking is killing itself with stress is to stop thinking. For me, this was the worst part. I used to be someone who would think a lot; not talk a lot, or dwell a lot, but just think a lot. And I was really smart, but I feel like it robbed me of my ability to do something that was once a big part of my identity.

I just couldn’t talk to myself anymore. It was gradual, but one day I woke up and I just I couldn’t. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s just this fog that stops you from even talking to yourself.

You start realizing that you can’t even read properly. I don’t know. You start reading a single sentence. Actually not even a sentence. A group of four words that you read five or six times sometimes. You start losing memory of things. Memory become shit, your vocabulary decreases too. It’s so interesting how the human brain works, because the part of the brain that controls memory and emotion are actually very related. Moreover, if you can’t talk to yourself, you’re talking less, so you tend to actually lose vocabulary to the point where you can’t quite find a word more and more often.

And things you used to be good at, like science and math, they become harder and harder to grasp. Before this all, I was very inclined towards these things, and after this I couldn’t work on them very well. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them, I just I couldn’t do them, the motivation wasn’t there. I was so down.

Sometimes I would fall off my bed at night, and I just wouldn’t get up because really I couldn’t even get myself to do it. Everything becomes so shitty. It seems so stupid to someone who’s not been through it, but it’s like your body can do it but your mind just can’t.

Q: You mentioned it was slightly easier or better during the co-op term?

It’s been getting better generally. For example during the first co-op term I was under quite a lot of pressure from 1A, so I just slept for two months again because I had time. Then I started waking up again and things started getting better. I started taking the bus, I started going out with friends. It was pretty weird because these are things I don’t remember having done for years before that term.

Normal things like going out, walking, talking to people, getting food they become a lot harder when you’re depressed. You start becoming really scared. Like you see a car and you don’t want to sit in it because what if an accident happens?. It’s just irrational and driven by unfamiliarity. If you haven’t been out there for two months you’re confused and everything is scary. It’s just a weird situation and very hard to get out of.

Q: What are your usual coping techniques?

You would cope if there was some kind of outburst or stuff, but when it’s like part of your life you need to create these little ways to keep yourself up. Watching motivational videos like I did in grade nine doesn’t work anymore well, it just wouldn’t because now I can’t feel as much. From eight months ago to two years ago I just couldn’t feel anything. It’s like my body could still produce things that are supposed to make you ‘feel’, but it couldn’t understand them.

I actually saw a glimpse of it when I was standing for a class rep election. I went to the front of the class and prepared to talk. When it was my turn I started talking and it’s just normal, regular things. But then, the adrenaline starts pumping, I feel my ears start to flush. This is when you’re supposed to feel scared, or at least nervous. I could feel my cheeks were red and my heart was pumping, but I wasn’t scared. And that made me realize something was still off.

Sometimes it gets confusing. Not so much now that I can actually feel things, but for example, one day at my school, a child died. I was like “What the fuck? Why can’t I feel something?” I know I was supposed to feel sad, but I just couldn’t. It just didn’t happen.

You stop giving a shit about everything, starting from food, and even sometimes water. Especially food, I’ve noticed that I don’t feel as hungry. Even when I start eating, it’s not because I’m hungry but just because I’m eating. And then I’m eating so much. I’ll eat so much food in like five hours, but then for two days I eat almost nothing. Your diet is fucked up, your sleep is messed up, you can’t think properly. I can’t think of a better way to fuck someone over.

Q: Have you been to see a counsellor?

Yeah, sometime in high school I did, but it wasn’t really helpful, at least not to me. The better part about that is that at that time I was living in India, and my parents could see that something was wrong. So that’s why my Dad moved with me to Canada.

We moved to Saskatchewan, to a very small town. It was so helpful. I got to start over again and have another chance. The studies here are quite a lot easier. The people were so nice in Saskatchewan, because there’s so few people around, the psychology of the general person is different. You don’t see other people as a threat; in a big city if you pass someone on the street you might be wary of them, but in this little town that’s not something you would even consider. In this little place there was like two hundred people in your school, including the teachers. It forms sort of a family. You’re familiar with everyone and everything so you’re never scared.

That one square kilometer was my entire life for two years, and it was amazing. People were just so supportive, and everyone feels like a part of the family. Something like that would never happen in Toronto, or a similar urban area because the general psychology is just so different. I was just lucky, that’s what I’m trying to say. It helped quite a bit. Grade 11 I couldn’t see the changes as much, but from grade 11 to 12 things changed so much. I was looking at photos from grade 10 and grade 12, and my posture had changed so much. The transition from being hunchbacked and not realizing it to standing up straight was incredible. It tells you a lot, and it’s not really something you could actively control, so it tells you a lot about how you were doing at the time.

Q: What helps you get better?

I would say that being in Saskatchewan helped. The small town, friendly people was nice. They’d try to get you to do things, have fun.

It’s like when you’re playing hockey the first time, you can’t hit the puck. But they’re cheering you on, everyone stops playing even when it takes you twenty tries just to hit the puck. And when you finally do, everyone cheers you on. That wouldn’t ever happen in a place like this, just because of the nature of the thinking outside of small towns.

Q: Out of curiosity, how much bigger is Waterloo than your Saskatchewan town?

Waterloo’s about 100x bigger. 100, 000 people rather than 1000. It’s pretty small, but that was my world and it was pretty good.

Q: Do you think the cohort helps you out in class since you’re always with the same about 100 people for all your classes?

Well, you can’t really compare it to Saskatchewan because the mindset is different. The cohorts though are also kind of nice. It’s nice going to class and seeing friends, always having the three or four people I talk to a lot in class with me.

Q: Anything you want to say with others with depression?

There’s nothing that I know of I could ‘say’ that’s going to help…that’s the truth. I could say things like “hang on” but stuff like that doesn’t help. This isn’t me being a dick, it’s just in my own experience, when you get that low, no platitudes or statements like that were ever going to help me. It only makes it seem like you’re in a better place now and you’re expecting me to just magically be recovered also. When what happened to me was very big, and luck played a big part in how it worked out. I wouldn’t want to just tell someone else to “hang on” because it’s not going to help.

You just never know what the other person is feeling. Or, when they’re in deep trouble they might just be feeling nothing which is the worst part. Feeling nothing feels like being dead. It’s way worse than feeling pain. You’d rather feel pain than be in that place; feeling nothing is just a horrible place to be.

I will say that one thing that seems to have helped me is exercise. As you can imagine, it is fairly hard to get started. Rather than running on the treadmill, which requires a lot of willpower, I find it is better to get involved in social sports like soccer, futsal, squash etc. since they are more engaging. Over time, I noticed it was easier to stay awake, which significantly contributed to improving productivity. Moreover, I started ‘feeling’ more and more over time. Slow and steady wins the race.

Q: What makes you happy? What are you looking forwards to most?

It makes me happy that I’m improving. I’m looking forward to changing my life; trying to do things that I want to do. Your habits and your lifestyle are a big part of who you are. I feel like if I change it well enough, It’ll help me out quite a bit.

If you have a story to share and want to be featured on the blog, reach out to one of the Mental Health Awareness directors, or contact us at engsocmha@gmail.com