The Hilarious World of Depression

Depression is an illness that happened to you. Maybe it was from the chemicals and inherited genetic traits that appeared in your brain before you were even born. Maybe it was from a trauma that occurred and then festered in your brain. Maybe there were people with power over you who behaved in a way that screwed you up. It wasn’t you. You didn’t c

“Depression lies,” said Jenny Lawson on a season two episode. “Because every single time, it says, ‘You’ll never come out of this again. You are absolutely worthless, your family is better off without you.’ And then I remind myself depression lies. Those things are lies.”

No matter what, I have all the mechanisms of society in my favor to back me up. Even if someone has a bias against me for being a person with depression, I have plenty of other widely held biases that work in my favor, like racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia. I abhor all those things but there’s no question that, through no effort of my own, I

“Trauma that is not transformed is transmitted,”

Boy, I spin thoughts around in my head a lot, don’t I? Like, a lot. That’s what depression does. The dance floor of your mind is never without a pounding beat, and usually the DJ is playing eight or nine songs at the same time.

You’re not “in a major depression” when your team loses the big game, you’re just sad and disappointed like a normal healthy human gets. One’s a mood, the other’s a mental illness. If you were really depressed, you’d feel the same thing if your team won or lost, or perhaps feel nothing at all regardless of a game’s outcome.

I’m a straight white man. The last three words of the previous sentence give me three layers of support in this society. Toss in a college education and my status as married with kids, that’s a few more.

Depression can’t be cured by positive life circumstances because depression is not a reaction to circumstances.

How arrogant of me to think that they don’t know what they’re talking about?”