Even if your particular depression does include sadness, it’ll only be one of many other symptoms. The others might be much more painful and salient for you than the sadness is. Some people can’t sleep, others gain weight, some think constantly about death, others can’t concentrate or remember anything. Many lose interest in sex, or food, or both. Almost everyone, it seems, experiences a crushing fatigue in which your limbs feel like stone and no amount of sleep ever helps. Then there are headaches, stomachaches, and so on.
So, depression doesn’t necessarily mean sadness to us. (And a gentle reminder to non-depressed folks: being sad doesn’t mean you’re “depressed,” either.)
Depression is not sadness; it’s an illness that often, though not always, involves sadness. No amount of happy things will make a depressed person spontaneously recover, and, usually, no amount of sad things will make a well-adjusted person with good mental health suddenly develop depression. (Grief, of course, is another matter.) And sadness, on its own, does not cause suicide.
[…]People don’t kill themselves because they’re sad. They kill themselves because they have an illness that, among other things, makes them feel sad. It also makes them feel like their life is worthless, like they’re a burden to others, like death would be easier, and all the other beliefs that lead people down the path to suicide.
There is a tendency, I think, to assume that people are depressed because they are sad. A better way to look at it is that people are sad because they are depressed. That’s why, even if we could “turn that frown upside down!” and “just look on the sunny side!” for your benefit, it would do absolutely no good. The depression would still be there, but in a different form.
Miriam Mogilevsky, Depression Is Not Sadness: Junior Seau and Public Discourse on Mental Illness (via theladyofthorns)
I spent about two years clinically depressed at the end of my undergrad degree (I’m fortunate to not be naturally geared that way, but when life dumps sufficient crap on you, it can happen to anybody), and I didn’t even know till I was coming out of it. Because it’s just not like you expect, you know? If you’re not familiar with how it feels, you expect it to be…I dunno, dramatic, I guess. Sorrow and angst and suicide. But (for me) it wasn’t like that. It was just…grueling. Like trying to live life was too exhausting to cope with. Like no matter what I did, it wasn’t enough, and I spent most of my energy fighting just to keep from being dragged under every time I fell short on something (which I did a lot, objectively speaking, because I’d look at things I should be doing and want to go hide under my bed).
It fucked me up long-term, too, because I fought my own way out of it, but it left a lot of wreckage behind, both psychologically and life-wise. I had some life mistakes I had to clean up or come to terms with, and psychologically I developed some really bad coping habits that I still have to fight with.
It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of depression goes unreported, because if you haven’t lived with it, you don’t really know what it looks like. I wish I’d known, because I would’ve sought help. I’m not sorry that I went through it—it taught me a lot about myself and about how to have compassion for other people—but if I had it to do over again, getting help could have minimized the damage I did to myself.