Last week I wrote a piece about my depression and got a lot of messages of support in my inbox. I appreciate that support on some level, but there’s a part of me that feels very strange in accepting it. Namely: this is normal for me. I’ve had depression for years, and I’m well beyond the period where it’s new or sharply painful. I got some messages asking whether I was on any sort of medication for depression. Currently, I’m not on anything, and I’m unsure if I want to go down that path quite yet. But of all the messages I received throughout this week, the messages of solidarity were the most weirdly resonant.
When you say you have depression on the internet, you tend to get a lot of people who tell you, “same.” Depression is such a widely-suffered-from illness, but conversation around it seems to be muffled. I don’t know nearly anyone who doesn’t have depression or mental illness in some form, and yet, nobody really seems to want to talk about it.
There’s a stigma around mental illness and the mentally ill from the outside. But that doesn’t really seem adequate to describe what’s going on here. Mental illness seems to be awkward to talk about because it necessarily requires you to be much, much more intimate with random strangers, casual acquaintances and even decently good friends than you might at first feel comfortable with.
Part of why people might feel uncomfortable talking about their mental illnesses and therefore don’t could be because the same illness — say, depression — will manifest itself differently in different people. Even similar symptoms will affect someone differently. People might be afraid that their manifestations of their illnesses aren’t “legitimate.”
I’ve had that thought more than once about my depression. Add to that a pinch of anxiety and a healthy dose of imposter syndrome and I’m a hive of self-doubt.