Depression and Sadness--How to Cope with Depression

DEPRESSION / SADNESS

Depression doesn't have to ruin our lives. The most urgent thing we need to do is understand how depression is unlike sadness - and why self-understanding is the primary route to a cure. Almost half of us will suffer from depression at some point in our lives, but the condition remains badly misunderstood and, therefore often mistreated. At the heart of our collective difficulty with depression is a confusion about what it actually is–and in particular, how it can be distinguished from a state all of us know very well and with which it is has a distracting number of similarities, namely sadness. It’s because we tend to apply to cases of depression several assumptions drawn from, and better suited to, an understanding of sadness that we end up suffering far more than we should.

There are, on the surface, some notable similarities between those who are sad and those who are depressed. Both groups cry; both withdraw from the world; both complaint of listlessness and a sense of alienation from their normal lives. But there is one categorical difference between depression and sadness. The sad person knows what they are sad about; the depressed person doesn’t.

Sad people can, without difficulty, tell us what is troubling them. I am sad that my grandmother has died. Or that I lost my job. Or that my friends are being unkind to me. And–though it might sound strange - this is what the depressed person cannot do. They may be tearful and at a very low level, but they can’t put a finger on what has drained life of meaning for them: they simply say it has no meaning, seems everything is now completely hopeless.

There’s another key difference to note between sadness and depression. Sad people are grief-stricken about something out in the world but they aren’t necessarily sad about themselves, their self-esteem is unaffected by their grief, whereas depressed people will feel wretched about themselves and be full of self-recrimination, guilt, shame, and self-loathing paranoia that may, at tragic extremes, culminate in suicidal thoughts.

 

COPE WITH DEPRESSION

At this stage, one can hear it said that if depression doesn’t have any sensible psychological causes, the problem must be up with some kind of imbalance in brain chemistry, which it would be kinder and more effective to treat with pills - an idea of great appeal to the pharmaceutical industry first, but also too worried families and schools and employers who crave rapid and cost-effective solutions.

But there is another approach to depression which, though slower and more arduous, maybe a great deal more effective in the long-term. This stems from insights drawn from psychotherapy, the discipline that has understood depression better than any other. The basic premise of psychotherapy is that the depressed person isn’t depressed - as they suggest - for no reason. There is a reason. They are very distressed about something, but that something is proving extremely difficult to take on board and has therefore been pushed into the outer zones of consciousness - from where it wreaks havoc on the whole person, prompting boundless feelings of nihilism.

To make things yet more difficult, the depressed person doesn’t consciously feel that they are, in fact, lacking insight. They are not aware of a gap in their self-understanding. Furthermore, they are nowadays often taught to assume that they are 'just depressed’, as one might be physically ill - a verdict that can be of appeal as much to the pharmaceutical industry about certain people close to the patient with an interest in insights remaining buried.

Also, worth noting in all this is that most times, we associate depression with an opposite mood, a kind of euphoric state termed mania, hence the term ‘manic-depressive’. The mania in question looks, from a distance, a bit like happiness, like depression, can look like sadness. But in one area, in particular, the relationship between mania and happiness is identical to that between depression and sadness. It disavowed the common element of self-knowledge. In mania, one is euphoric, but cannot go into one’s own deep mind and discover its bitter truths. Which explains one of the leading characteristics of manic people: their habit of being in flight from themselves, talking too fast about nothing, over-exercising, working continuously, or spending too much - all as an escape from submerged grief, rage, and loss.

 

Learn coping Skills for Depression

For this, they will need a huge, so there are many coping strategies that help to teach the depressed people.  We can divide it into several categories people who are depressed, have very negative thoughts about themselves about other people, and their future.

So one of the coping strategies we've developed is how to deal with those negative thoughts. So, on the one hand, some of those sauce needs to be taken out of the darkness reflected upon and checked so that you can start building more helpful thoughts instead, but also sometimes it's not that easy to change a thought intellectually. You understand this is a negative thought, but it's not completely realistic, and yet you still find that you keep thinking it over and over in your head, which contributes to the depression. So there is also a type of coping strategy that helps you to change your relationship with your thoughts instead of accepting your thoughts as fact as a truth you see them for what they are, which is a mental event. Anybody can have a thought, we have 60,000 thoughts in a day that's the average, and we don't pay attention to all of it so how do we change our relationship with these thoughts so that we don't just take them as fact and at face value.

Another category of coping strategies that really deals with behaviors, so is the person having good sleep hygiene, are they taking part in healthy activities and having a healthy lifestyle? All these things feed into risk factors for depression and can perpetuate it. It also is important for us to focus on the behaviors that might strengthen the depressive symptoms, for example, social isolation.

Social isolation is another category of coping strategy that we work on, which is helping people to build connectedness and meaning in their lives, and we know from research that when individuals are isolated, they have a very hard time climbing out of their depression. It is because they're alone with those thoughts' nobody's checking them, and also they don't feel like they're part of a bigger thing and all human beings want to be part of something bigger. So it should teach people that social connectedness skills are interpersonal effectiveness skills, so they can have better relationships and get what they want out of the relationships that they have. With all these different techniques, the individual starts to piece together their very own toolbox for how to overcome the clinical depression.

 

Indeed, of the above strategies, one has a supportive and patient listener. They may also - used appropriately benefit from the temporary use of medication to lift their mood enough so that they can endure a conversation. But the assumption isn’t that brain chemistry is where the problem either begins or ends; an undigested, unknown, and unresolved trauma causes the despair. Far from needing to be taken through reasons to trust that life is beautiful, depressives have to feel and to remember specific damage - and to be a fundamental sense of the legitimacy of their emotions. They need to be angry, and for the anger to settle on the right, awkward targets. 

The goal in treating depression is to move a sufferer from feeling limitlessly despairing to mourning the loss of something in particular: the last twenty years, a marriage, a hope one would be loved by one’s father, a career... Yet agonizing the insight and mourning might be, these must always be preferable to allowing loss to contaminate the totality of one’s perspective. There are plenty of dreadful things in every life - which is why it is normal to feel sad on a regular basis. But there are also always enough things that remain beautiful and hopeful, so long as one has been allowed to understand and known one’s pain and anger - and adequately mourn one’s losses.