I did not, because I knew exactly what was wrong - I was trapped in multiple situations extremely toxic to my mind that a consultant has no power to fix. I knew it when the depression was getting the better of me. I was almost amused how some remote memories of DSM definitions from undergraduate Abnormal Psychology class came back to mind, "Wow! This is exactly like what the textbook said". But I did not feel abnormal, but thought it was a reasonable reaction to the circumstances. In fact, that was the most sobering experience so far in my life. It gave me time to look at myself, accept what I was, and acknowledge that it was okay to not force myself to be something I cannot be.
If you have a local infection on your body, the body begin to have some inflammation in response, to defend the tissue. The doctor would say "you had an infection" and treat you by removing the pathogen, knowing that the inflammation was doing its job. Now if you are in an environment where you were coerced to do things against your nature, and you had a depression in response, then there's something abnormal about you. People would begin to give you different medical advises except to remove yourself from that environment, because they themselves do not respond to that environment in the same way and/or they believe it's beyond their power to change that environment. Why not just disable the defense mechanism and pretend you did not have an infection?
Over the years, I have seen multiple friends or friends' friends experiencing, what I call, a "functional depression" in response to the situation that poisoned them. That is not to say a functional depression won't have dire consequences, just like a functional immune system may not win the battle over every inflection. There can also be dysfunctional depression, just like a dysfunctional immune system may attack healthy tissues. But more likely than not, the system is just doing its job, otherwise evolution would have eliminated the species equipped with such a useless system.
This is just a piece of my unscientific thought on depression. I have to constantly remind myself that when a friend is in distress, first consider what's poisoning them, rather than what's wrong with them. Because it is much easier to regard "everyone is different" as a trivial fact that everyone knows, than to act according to that knowledge.
4-14-2018 Boca
If you have a local infection on your body, the body begin to have some inflammation in response, to defend the tissue. The doctor would say "you had an infection" and treat you by removing the pathogen, knowing that the inflammation was doing its job. Now if you are in an environment where you were coerced to do things against your nature, and you had a depression in response, then there's something abnormal about you. People would begin to give you different medical advises except to remove yourself from that environment, because they themselves do not respond to that environment in the same way and/or they believe it's beyond their power to change that environment. Why not just disable the defense mechanism and pretend you did not have an infection?
Over the years, I have seen multiple friends or friends' friends experiencing, what I call, a "functional depression" in response to the situation that poisoned them. That is not to say a functional depression won't have dire consequences, just like a functional immune system may not win the battle over every inflection. There can also be dysfunctional depression, just like a dysfunctional immune system may attack healthy tissues. But more likely than not, the system is just doing its job, otherwise evolution would have eliminated the species equipped with such a useless system.
This is just a piece of my unscientific thought on depression. I have to constantly remind myself that when a friend is in distress, first consider what's poisoning them, rather than what's wrong with them. Because it is much easier to regard "everyone is different" as a trivial fact that everyone knows, than to act according to that knowledge.
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