What Does Depression Feel Like?

I have JK Rowling to thank for opening up the idea that mental illness is a real condition. In Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Voldemort, the villainous dark wizard, kills Harry Potter. Well, technically.

I won’t go into the details. Read the books, they’re worth it.

One quote stuck with me more than any other in the thousands of words I’ve read by Rowling, and it comes from Albus Dumbledore:

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

This answer came during a conversation in the afterlife with the recently deceased headmaster of Hogwarts, or Harry hallucinated an entire conversation so his mind could be distracted by the immense pain delivered by a killing curse. Like I said, read the books.

The problem for depressives, like myself, is that our vocabulary tends to fall flat with people who do not have the same lived experiences. It’s analogous to explaining color to a dog.

Decades ago, the analogy would have been trying to explain color to a dog and the dog didn’t believe color existed. So we’re making progress as a society in being able to explain a deeply personal and varied experience to those who don’t have any reference to said experiences.

So what does depression feel like?

That is a tricky question, and no, I’m not going to leave you with that astute observation. But it is a tricky question because unlike an understood physical ailment, mental illness is unique to each person living with it.

The CDC lists “fever, chills, sweats, headaches, and nauseous and vomiting” as some of the symptoms of malaria. For depression, someone can expect to experience “feeling sad, feeling anxious, feeling irritable, feeling restless, and feeling guilty, worthless, or helpless.”

Malaria symptoms are clear-cut and defined; while symptoms of depression are feelings, and with feelings come with the entire gradient of human experience.

A better question to ask may be: What does depression feel like to you?

I experience depression as a searing pain. It is hot, sharp, quick, and relentless. I will feel sad and feel as if someone is sliding a paring knife across my chest.

I will feel restless and have the sensation that lines of fire are being traced across my face. Sometimes, I see flashes of light paired with the fiery cuts. Like the aftereffect of being punched in the face.

I’ve spoken with other depressives who feel frostbitten; and others who feel as if they’re slowing being crushed to death. Why the variation? Because our brains interpret thing differently. Because Harry might have talked to Dumbledore in the afterlife, or his brain was trying to make sense of masses of conflicting signals and sensory inputs.

As the headmaster sagely put it: “why on earth should it mean that it is not real?”

Superpowers

Marcel Proust wrote

Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

When I was younger I fantasized that with a deep enough depression I might develop superpowers. Like Spiderman, or the Flash, or the Human Torch! Though the nerd within me still holds out hope that I will encounter the right genetically-modified spider, the practical inner voice focuses on how I can harness my illness as a power.

Sisyphus

I was asked recently if I thought I’d battle depression forever. I answered yes, unequivocally. While that sounds needlessly fatalistic, it is realistic. Like Sisyphus, I may be condemned to roll the boulder of my illness up the slope for eternity; only to trundle back down and try again when it inevitably falls. Leave it to the Greeks to give us mythology of fascinating punishments!

I am drawn to the story of Tantalus. Condemned by the gods to spend eternity in a pool of water, a fruit tree above him. Every time he lowered his mouth to the water, the water receded. Every time he raised his head for a bite to eat, the branches pulled away from him. Thus, we have the old English word tantalise - to desire a thing forever out of one’s grasp.

Now comes the question - could Sisyphus and Tantalus ever come to grips with their infinite afflictions? Could they ever accept their punishment, turn inward, and apply their daily lessons for, if not a pleasant eternity, at least a more bearable one?

My depression and anxiety keeps me sharp, for the price of occasionally getting cut. I could rage against that fact. Indeed, I have. I have shouted into the abyss of my mind, cursed every name of God I could recall, and hurt myself in the worst ways. That response gave me nothing but added misery.

I learned discipline from my depression.

I learned preparation from my anxiety.

I learned to identify the signs in my body that I was close to a panic attack, and then breathe that fear response away. The body tends to know things before the conscious mind does, be grateful for this because otherwise it would take way too long to pull your hand off a hot stove. I experience tendrils of energy, like worms slithering down my forearms before a panic attack. When I feel them I excuse myself and go through some breathing exercises.

Tantalus

I am Lex Luthor, Doc Ock, and The Joker. And I am also Superman, Spiderman, and Batman.

Unlike Sisyphus and Tantalus, I may be condemned but that does not stop me from learning how to improve my circumstances. That is a superpower, and what I believe Marcel Proust was getting at.

Know Your Enemy

I am obsessed with learning about depression, anxiety, and suicide. I believe that educating myself about the disorders I have helps me battle my dark thoughts. For many years I resisted the thought that I had any mental illness. I thought that mental illness was a “tough it out” illness; thing is, you cannot battle something you do not understand. So I endeavor to know the enemy within myself.

Edwin Shneidman

I discovered several books that helped me wrap my head around how a suicidally depressed person copes with thoughts of killing themselves.

The very first book I dug into was “The Suicidal Mind” by Dr. Edwin Shneidman. Dr. Shneidman was a professor of Thanatology (the study of death) at Emeritus University in Los Angeles, California, and “The Suicidal Mind” was the culmination of years of work studying suicide notes left behind by those that had committed their final act. 

This quote from “The Suicidal Mind” accurately describes what I craved while planning my death:

“Perturbation is felt pain; lethality relates to the idea of death (nothingness, cessation) as the solution. By itself, mental anguish is not lethal. But lethality, when coupled with elevated perturbation, is a principal ingredient in self-inflicted death. Perturbation supplies the motivation for suicide; lethality is the fatal trigger. Lethality - the idea that ‘I can stop this pain; I can kill myself’ - is the unique essence of suicide anybody who has ever switched off an electric light deliberately to plunge a hideous room into darkness, or with equal deliberation, stopped the action of an annoying engine by turning the key to OFF, has, for that moment been granted the swift satisfaction the suicidal person hungers for. After all, the suicidal person intends to stop the ongoing activities of life.”

The great thing about Dr. Shneidman’s writings was that he didn’t just lift the veil, he also described how to help a suicidal person:

“The sad and dangerous fact is that in a state of constriction, the usual life-sustaining responsibilities toward loved ones are not merely disregarded; much worse. They are sometimes not even within the range of what is in the mind. A person who commits suicide turns off all ties to the past, declares a kind of mental bankruptcy, and his or her memories have no lien. These memories can no longer save him; he is beyond their reach. Any attempt at rescue has to deal, from the first, with the suicidal person’s psychological constriction. The challenge and the task are clear: Open up the possibilities, widen the perceptual blinders.”

I had a definition of suicidal action (perturbation and lethality) and how to help myself (widen the blinders on my mind). That however, wasn’t enough. I needed more so I kept reading more books.

• Why People Die By Suicide - Thomas Joiner

• Insiders | Outsiders - Steven Scott

• Taming the Black Dog - Patrick Ellverton

• How I Stayed Alive While My Brain was Trying to Kill Me - Susan Rose Blauner

• Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind - Edwin Shneidman

After reading about various experiences with mental illness and suicide attempts I no longer felt alone. I felt in the company of some truly remarkable people who experienced a traumatic event, but learned to overcome it.

These books lifted me up. It was no longer me versus the world. All of a sudden I had a whole bunch of people in my corner who had battled the black dog and came out of the fight stronger. The more I read, the less mysterious depression and suicide became. I learned that it was possible to successfully deal with my suicidal urges, and if other people had done it then I was certainly capable of doing the same.

Education leads to empowerment. The more you educate yourself about your mental illness the better equipped you become at dealing with whatever it throws at you.

There is a critical thing that I learned from all of my readings. I am not my diagnosis.

This is the most empowering concept that I learned. Not being my diagnosis meant that I could do something about it. It was possible for me to change and overcome the cards that genetics dealt me.

All I had to do was apply myself and fight like hell. 

Canto XIII - The Violent Against Themselves

700 years ago Dante Alighieri published his “Divine Comedy".

• The Inferno - Journey Through Hell

• The Purgatorio - Journey Through Purgatory (limbo)

• The Paradiso - Journey Through Heaven

Dante wrote in Italian, rather than Latin, so his story would be accessible to the “common” readers. In the 1300s in Tuscany, people lived their lives following the guidance of the Church. Heaven and Hell were real places according to scripture, but Dante brought these places to life in memorable detail in a language that the masses could easily understand.

I hope to do the same with this website in regards to Suicide Awareness and Prevention. I write what comes to me in accessible language that, I hope, removes the veneer of silence from mental illness and suicide.

Here is a synopsis of the The 7th Circle/Shelf/Abyss in “The Inferno":

Nessus, [a Centaur], carries the Poets across the river of boiling blood and leaves them in the Second Round of the Seventh Circle, THE WOOD OF THE SUICIDES. Here are punished those who destroyed their own lives and those who destroyed their substance.

The souls of the Suicides are encased in thorny trees whose leaves are eaten by the odious HARPIES [sic], the overseers of the damned. When the Harpies feed upon them, damaging their leaves and limbs, the wound bleeds. Only as long as the blood flows are the souls of the trees able to speak.

Thus, they who destroyed their own bodies are denied a human form; and just as the supreme expression of their lives was self-destruction, so they are permitted to speak only through that which tears and destroys them. Only through their own blood do they find voice. And to add one more dimension to the symbolism, it is the Harpies - defilers of all they touch - who give them their eternally recurring wounds.

John Ciardi, The Inferno

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Build a Support Network

A strong support network is essential to a sustainable recovery. Having someone to call on in a moment of need can be a huge boost for you. That means some frank discussions with friends and family about what you need from them when you are hurting. These days my support network is strong, large, and sophisticated. I have multiple people I can call if I am in trouble, but that did not happen overnight. It took me a lot of time to develop, and there were many painful admissions along the way. If you are persistent in creating your network you lay the foundation for a successful recovery.

I started developing a support network before I knew what to call it. My friend Ben was the first person I recognized as a part of my support network, but I had been building my network since I was fifteen without even realizing it.

Shortly after my fifteenth birthday I started training Muay Thai Kickboxing and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu at Tiger Academy of Martial Arts in Roswell, Georgia. This place became a refuge from my tortuous mind. I did not know it at the time, but this martial arts academy would keep me from killing myself when I was in my darkest moments as a young teenager.

At first going to the academy was just a good, physical hobby for a young boy to go let off some steam and get good exercise and life instruction in the process. At the academy I became good friends with one of the younger instructors named Bret. Bret saw that I was serious about training hard and improving my skills at kickboxing and jiu-jitsu so he took me under his wing. I signed up for private lessons with him and he worked my butt off. I still feel sore when I think back at the workouts he put me through. Endless kicking drills and squats and pushups awaited me at every lesson. He never let off because he knew that I could take the hard work. Through those difficult training sessions we forged a stronger bond and he became my adopted older brother.

Bret told me all of the mistakes he made in his life from experimenting with drugs and alcohol to not applying himself well in school. He told me these things so I would not repeat his mistakes. Through his actions at the academy he showed me the importance of working and training hard. He put one hundred percent of himself into his workouts and into his job as an instructor at the academy. In short, Bret was the most influential man in my life after my father.

With all of this training I started to get pretty good at both kickboxing and jiu-jitsu. Eventually my physical hobby turned into a full-fledged passion. When my parents gave me the keys to my Jeep all I would drive to was school and the academy. Every day except Sundays for two years I drove to school and waited there, a ghost amongst my classmates waiting for the final bell to ring before I could drive back to the academy where I was among people that liked me. At eighteen my depression worsened and I began planning my catastrophic car accident, but the reason it took me so many months to finally commit to it was Tiger Academy.

In that academy I felt wanted. I felt a part of something special. I felt good.

I wanted to hold onto those feelings for my entire day, but my depression would rear it’s ugly head as soon as I started the drive home after the last workout. For the better part of that year I would be incredibly depressed while at home and at school, but I was downright lively at Tiger. I could talk to anyone there, and I would introduce myself to anyone who walked through the door. I barely spoke at school, but at Tiger I was in my element. Surrounded by good people who all shared my passion for training hard. Looking back, those moments at Tiger carried me through the worst of my depressed episodes. If I had a hard day at school I would go to the academy and train until my body couldn’t move.

I trained like an animal. I poured myself into every workout as if my life depended on it. Which, in a way, it did. If I didn’t have Tiger and my adopted brother Bret, I am certain I would have tried to kill myself. I would have wrecked my car, or tried to overdose, or attempted to hang myself. Tiger was my medication before I ever knew I needed medication. Every day there forestalled my plans of dying and kept my depression at bay. Besides the endorphins that coursed through my veins after a workout, Tiger was a support network that protected me from my dark thoughts. I use Tiger Academy as an example of a support structure because it helped me, but at the time I had no idea I was using it to keep myself sane.

You need a support network if you are going to have a sustainable recovery, but it is up to you to create and maintain it. I used Tiger Academy as an example, but it has been years since I last trained there. Nowadays I have a support network of my own making, and you can make one too.

What is the 7th Shelf?

The 7th Shelf is the Wood of the Suicides in Dante’s Inferno.

The Poet began again: “That this man may
with all his heart do for you what your words
entreat him to, imprisoned spirit, I pray,

tell us how the soul is bound and bent
into these knots, and whether any ever
frees itself from such imprisonment.”

At that the trunk blew powerfully, and then
the wind became a voice that spoke these words:
”Briefly is the answer given: when

out of the flesh from which it tore itself,
the violent spirit comes to punishment,
Minos assigns it to the seventh shelf.

It falls into the wood, and landing there,
wherever fortune flings it, it strikes root,
and there it sprouts, lusty as any tare,

Shoots up a sapling, and becomes a tree.
The Harpies, feeding on its leaves then, give it
pain and pain’s outlet simultaneously.

Like the rest, we shall go for our husks on Judgment Day,
but not that we may wear them, for it is not just
that a man be given what he throws away.

Here shall we drag them and in this mournful glade
our bodies will dangle to the end of time,
each on the thorns of its tormented shade.”

The Inferno - Dante Alighieri, translated by John Ciardi