Depression

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In general, so. My name is Olya, I am quite young and will be quite young for another ten to twenty years, even if I continue to drink in the best traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. I don't have (at least not yet) cancer, AIDS, hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, and childbirth fever. Myopia is very moderate, gastritis has been successfully healed. All my relatives and friends are alive, plus or minus healthy and live far from any zones of hostilities. I live in Moscow, and I have enough money to buy coffee in Starbucks every day (to be honest, I even have enough for a sandwich and still have it). I love funny pictures, eloquence, sex, text, poking my finger at the sunsets over Strogino and drinking champagne in the middle of the week for nothing.

I would not have announced myself so curly, had it not been for all this raspberry-raspberry-old week. In the sense that about a week ago, the antidepressant that I am taking has finally reached the desired concentration in my body and began to work. This significant event was preceded by - attention, now there will be a dramatic pathos - Three. Of the year. Fucking. Emptiness. If without pathos, then I had the most ordinary depression, if figuratively - it was three years in an embrace with the Dementor from "Harry Potter". If in the context of "what I spend my life on" - three years, which with about the same success could lie in a coma (even though I would have had enough sleep, probably). During these three years I received a diploma, changed four jobs, bought a car and learned to drive it, something else, something else - in short, if you draw an analogy with a coma or lethargic sleep, I have repeatedly earned the "Honorary Sleepwalker" prize.

THREE YEARS. 1095 days, which, as it were, did not exist. I recently read somewhere that, they say, 23 years old - this is the best human age. 22 and 24 are probably a little worse, but I'll never check that again.

In general, I have to say (and, as it seems to me, I have the right to say) about depression. This word is used by everyone all the time, but I have never seen in these large Russian-language Internet a clear attempt to explain what it really means (inconsistent posts in thematic LJ communities and an article on Wikipedia does not count). However, even if someone has already said everything, I will say it again, because it is fucking important and concerns everyone. I will start from the very beginning and, I apologize, it will be long (even too long, probably with a lot of unnecessary details). I will write about it succinctly, succinctly and artistically, but for now let it be at least so. Please read, especially if you've never had depression before

See also: Depression. An excerpt from the book "Stop, Who Leads?" the nominee for the "Enlightener" award Dmitry Zhukov

First, imagine that you have real, very intense grief. Let's say someone important has died. Everything has become meaningless and ruthless, you hardly get out of bed and try to cry all the time. You are crying, banging your head against the wall (or not banging - it already depends on your temperament) and pouring alcohol into yourself. Everyone consoles you, they push you a plate with this cool cake, which you love so unnaturally much, and for the third or fifth time you, in general, agree to bite it once. Then you remember that the loan has not been paid, the dog is not walking, and in general there is something that needs to be done, and, by the way, look at how beautiful the sunset over Strogino is now, it's easy to go nuts.

Depression - this is when you do not bite off a cake for the third or thirty-third time, and they simply stop offering it to you. If we imagine that life is such a multi-colored liquid with which the human body is filled, then depression is when the liquid was pumped out almost to zero, leaving only some kind of cloudy suspension at the bottom, thanks to which you can use your hands, feet, speech apparatus, etc. logical thinking. They pumped it out and behind some kind of goblin tightly plugged the holes through which a new portion could be poured. Who, why and why is unknown. Maybe the terrible event was so terrible that there was no way to recover from it (then it is called exogenous, or reactive, I mean provoked by external factors, depression). Maybe, by nature, the level of this very liquid was slightly below normal, and the cells in which it was stored were leaking, and the liquid left them gradually, over the years, drip-drip. It is called " endogenous depression", and so it is even worse, because you are unlikely to be carefully offered cakes, you seem to have no one dying. I had an intermediate option - I, in general, and so did not claim the title of" Miss Cheerfulness ", and then and the world from the heart moved me to the scoreboard.

Depression is often described as "the whole world has gone gray", but this is a glaring inaccuracy. The world remains colorful and diverse, and you see it, with your eyesight everything is in perfect order. It's just that now all the color and variety is just information, from which you can't, NOT AT ALL. Not interested. It's not tasty. Not happy. It is not clear why it should please. It is not clear why others are happy, why they are rustling, reading something, going somewhere, gathering in groups of more or less three people. "Spring will not come for me, the Don will not spill over for me" - this is about depression. I don't know if this can be explained to a person who has never been there, in depression: you are not touched by the fact of the Don spill or its scale. The brook and the ocean are not equally pleasing. It makes no sense to save money to leave this fucking sinister Moscow to the sea - you come, stare at this sea (blue, deep, warm, endless, filled with colorful fish) and think: "Yeah, well, here's the sea. Color - blue. Depth - so many meters. Temperature - so many degrees. Length - so many kilometers. Fauna - of various shapes and colors. And? " Depression is such a compact personal winter that is always with you, like that holiday.

I know what I'm talking about - I went to the sea in depression. All week I sat in the hotel lobby, where there was a Wi-Fi, and jammed the whiskey. I spent on Wi-Fi and whiskey an amount for which I could go to a more distant sea for twice as long. When I was not sitting in the hotel lobby, I was lying in my room, watching a Russian channel on TV and jamming whiskey bought in duty free. Several times I went to the sea and even swam in it. Once I put on a mask and looked at the fish under water. I wrote several sms to my relatives and friends that the fish are beautiful, the sea is warm, and I am very pleased with the vacation. Fortunately, I was alone at sea, otherwise I would have to imitate joy all the time, which is very tiring. This, by the way, another side of depression, unknown to a healthy person - you have to constantly portray emotions that you do not experience. Moreover, you hardly remember how you experienced them before, so you have to strain your brains, constructing reactions that arise automatically in normal people. Let's say you're walking down the street with a friend past a cherry blossom. A friend says: "Look how beautiful it is!" You look. You fix: "White color of the petals. Sunlight falls at an obtuse angle, due to which the petals look voluminous. This should cause me joy, because it is aesthetically attractive, but moderate enough, because it is very common and often occurs at this time of year." … Accordingly, you say something like: "Yes, listen, awesome! How good that spring!" However, over time, logical constructions go somewhere in the background and light bulbs just light up in your mind - "joy", "interest", "humor". You diligently give out the necessary reactions and do not even admit that it could be somehow different. What I have just written about is, if anything, a moderate depression, not severe. That is, you are quite capable of portraying a sane member of society, going to work, maintaining a certain amount of social connections and automatically, without interest, consume unpretentious content such as TV shows and entertaining articles. Of course, all this is not very easy, you very vaguely understand why you need it, you do not hope for anything, you stupidly perform a certain set of actions (most likely, drinking plenty of alcohol in the evenings). Now imagine the same thing with one addition: an ax is stuck in your chest. The ax is invisible, there is no blood, the internal organs are working normally, but you are in pain all the time. It hurts regardless of the time of day, position in space and environment. It hurts so much that it becomes difficult even to talk - between you and the interlocutor it is as if a meter thick glass. It's hard to understand. Difficult to articulate. Even the simplest thoughts are hard to think. Any action that has been performed automatically all your life, such as brushing your teeth or going to the store, becomes like rolling huge boulders from place to place. You do not just dislike and do not want to live - you naturally want to die, and as soon as possible, and this is not a hoax in the spirit of "yes, it would be better if I was moved by a dump truck", this is serious. To live is painful and unbearable, in every single second. This is already a real depression, severe. It is almost impossible to work, to hide from others that something is wrong with you, too. I spent about a month and a half in this state, it was two and a half years ago, and more than anything else I am afraid that someday it will happen again. Because this is hell on earth, this is the bottom, it is worse than cancer, AIDS, war and all other misfortunes that can happen to a person combined. If my mother or my best friend had died on one of the days of that month and a half, I would not have felt any more pain, because the parameter "pain" has already been twisted to the absolute maximumaccessible to my nervous system. If all the people who cared about me died, I would simply commit suicide. In general, the presence of people who, in your opinion, will not become very much from your death, seems to be the only sufficient reason to continue this nightmare. This can hardly be considered a manifestation of altruism - it is rather something from the category of a long time ago and not too consciously memorized common truths that are kept in the head to the last.

By the way, depression can also be unsettling … This is when someone suddenly starts swinging an ax in your ribcage from side to side. This happened to me every morning - I was sitting under the hood, lighting cigarettes one after another and excruciatingly afraid of everything from the distant future to today's email. Sometimes anxiety grew at night, I would roll for hours from the edge of the bed to the wall and force myself to repeat: "If I survive this, I will become iron, if I survive this, I will become iron, if I survive this …". Gentlemen, this is complete nonsense. This is the case when, what does not kill you, makes you just less alive, but not strong in any way.

As far as I know, such conditions (when with an ax in the chest) are treated in a hospital. But many, at the very least, crawl out on their own - youth, vitality helps, that's all. I also got out at some point - together with my ax I dragged myself to the gym closest to my house, bought a subscription (then it was very strange and scary to look at my photo in this subscription - it was completely gray, dead and swollen face) and began kick yourself out for training every day. I plowed to bloody sweat for two to three or four hours daily, sometimes twice a day, and gradually, very slowly, the ax in my chest began to dissolve. After a couple of months, it transformed into a kind of small clip, which sometimes disappeared altogether in the evenings. I don’t know what it’s called in medical terms, but I got out of the tailspin. They found a job, restored the ability to think, communicate and even construct something out of words. I decided that I was quite normal for myself.

And here is a big fat set-up. Because after months of being minced, your old personality turns into a perfectly homogeneous minced meat. You vaguely remember who you are, what you loved, and what gave you pleasure (and whether anything at all). This is certainly not amnesia, just you get yourself in the form of a set of dried characteristics without any filling. "I have an analytical mind." "I'm overly emotional.""I can and I love to write lyrics." You take these caked sets of words, conscientiously put them on your inner skeleton, and everything seems to be okay. With one remark: you don’t remember that the "analytical mindset", in fact, used to mean the ability to rise above chaos and see a distinct structure in it, and how fun it was, and how you loved your brain for being it knows how. And how interesting it was for you with your brain to build chains of arguments for hours, admire them, destroy them and build new ones. You don’t remember that writing texts is a sacred act, pain and awe, and how scary it is to accidentally miss and make ugly holes in the fabric of the language, and what an acute happiness it is to catch the current and neatly embed your meaning into the DNA of words. And that excessive emotionality is the ability, without hesitation, to dive into the darkest wells and pass through its nervous system such discharges from which an elephant would be enchanted, that in addition to pain incompatible with life, this is the same intensity of delight, divine light and alpine peaks, and special, hardly anyone can find a balance on a thin trembling wire somewhere between despair and orgasm. (Substitute any other characteristics here, the essence will remain unchanged - instead of all the flamboyance that used to denote your "I", you only have some kind of dusty burlap).

Depression is not over, but you don't know that, you take ten-degree frost for zero. Well, what, birds no longer freeze on the fly, you can breathe, - probably it has always been so. You begin to live as if behind a muddy glass, without even realizing that most people live somehow differently. Sometimes the glass brightens slightly, and you feel something like joy (or rather, you force yourself to feel - joy does not come by itself, it takes a long time and diligently to pick it out of yourself; sometimes it works). You think that this is the notorious plus twenty-two, the sun and a light breeze, you don't understand what the catch is, but in fact the thermometer shows minus two and you have dirt with reagents under your feet. Life seems like a boring conference, to which, once you have dragged yourself, you have to stay at least for the sake of a buffet table, but at a buffet table they give nothing but windy sandwiches, and, undoubtedly, it would be better not to come here at all.

But since he was born and decided not to die, you must be responsible for the market and live, you think. Since this activity in itself does not interest you at all, most likely, sooner or later, you will get into something unhealthy. Depression is the most appropriate state to join a cult, to pursue religions, to become serial killers, or to take heroin. With the above, I personally somehow did not work out, but I thoroughly ate three other, no less dumb, depressing dishes.

The first dish is the construction of meanings. I'm not a fool and not a masochist to trudge through the frozen gray desert just like that, for the sake of the process. So I strained my brains and came up with a meaning and purpose. I will not go into details now, but the meaning was good, humanistic, and a worthy goal. The problem is that with full anhedonia no goals and meanings illuminate or fill anything, they only give a sense of a lead duty, to the fulfillment of which you must drive yourself every second and in accordance with which your every step must be brought. Nothing is done just like that - I even had sex with the thought "I am doing this so that dissatisfaction does not interfere with my goal." A step to the side entails an internal shooting, the tension never weakens, you cannot relax. The chances of getting out of depression in such situations are zero, because if somewhere on the periphery a faint shadow of joy looms, you will immediately forbid it to yourself, because it does not bring you closer to the goal. In addition, any contact with other people's goals and meanings becomes insanely painful (and pain, as opposed to joy, you feel as good as you can). Not because you consider yours to be the only correct one - you just sense that others carry all these goals and meanings somehow differently. That for them this, apparently, is not a journey through the desert with cannonballs on both legs, among barbed wire and watchtowers. You do not understand, you envy, you get angry, you despair, you become isolated. Your goal is all that you have, while you know that you are hanging on it, like on a sheer wall, literally on one nail, and the smallest failure can send you down, back, to where sleepless nights with an ax in breasts. And once it happens, because failures are inevitable in any case, and even more so in yours - you are driven out, exhausted, almost incapacitated, what kind of conquest of the peaks is there.

The second dish is senseless and merciless work. Over the course of three years of depression, I got into the story of constructing meanings several times, and only once into work, but on a grand scale. When the meaning once again began to slip out of my fingers, I worked as an editor at the publishing house of the corporate press (in order to have money, to eat food, to go towards the goal). The work turned out pretty well for me, and when the goal burst, I just continued to do it - no longer "so", but just like that. I began to work harder and better, then more, more, more. I worked fifteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day. I woke up at night, opened my work mail and answered letters. When I was awake, I checked my work mail every three to five minutes. In the morning I went to the office and worked, in the afternoon sometimes I went out somewhere with a laptop and worked for food, or at least answered letters from the phone. If I didn't catch Wi-Fi in a cafe, I started to panic, I frantically stuffed food into myself and literally ran to the office. I almost always left work last, came home or to visit and continued to work until late at night, gradually pumping myself up with alcohol until it was impossible to work and it was possible to fall asleep. I drank every night, because otherwise the clamp in my chest would start to turn into a good old ax, and I had to work. On weekends I also worked, and if I suddenly did not work, I felt terribly guilty and drank twice as much. I could only talk about work (and I only talked with colleagues). After a while, I was promoted, and I tried to work even more, but there was nowhere else, and I felt guilty, and drank and slept for two or three hours, and was constantly afraid that I was doing something wrong. I didn’t like my job, I didn’t see any point in it, I didn’t get any pleasure from it, and I stupidly drank my salary or gave it to my mother, but continued to plow. I didn't cut my hair, didn't buy clothes, didn't go on vacation, didn't start a relationship. Occasionally I went alone to some bar, got drunk in the dust, exchanged some words with the first drunk male body I came across and went to fuck him. In the taxi taking me home from some Otradnoye, I checked my work mail and no longer remembered the name or face of this man. Then I stopped doing that too, and just worked, worked, got drunk and worked again.

And then the day just came when I was unable to work - in general, at all, even if I put a lot of pressure on it. Nervous exhaustion was, apparently, so strong that I do not even remember how I explained to my superiors that I wanted to quit, what I did instead of checking my work mail, and whether I discussed what had happened with anyone. I only remember the absolute, one hundred percent, by pantone, emptiness inside.

The third dish is love instead of plague. Based on this story, I will someday write a novel and make a movie over which Cannes is bursting with blood, but now we are not talking about an exciting plot.

In general, love happened to me. This is normal love for a living and very imperfect man, not too mutual, burdened by difficult circumstances - well, it happens to everyone. But I lived in the desert, behind a dull glass, in a world without joy and desires, at an ever-negative temperature. And then the glass suddenly cleared, serotonin hit right in the brain, the temperature jumped to plus forty, for the first time in a long, long time, I felt that something was bringing me joy. That I want something, damn it. I really want to, without any complex mental constructs. And this is something - this person. And everything began to revolve around this man, and it was completely natural, because only an idiot would go into the desert from the spring, and thirty-three times did not care what kind of poisonous thorns this spring was planted with.

Before every meeting with a man, I knew that the next day I would feel bad, very bad. The man believed that our meetings were wrong, and, waking up next to me, was gloomy and cold, and in a hurry to leave. It was pointless to ask him to stay, and all I could do was drink and cry. But on the eve of all this was not important, because I saw him, and touched, and talked to him, and there was also sex, which had never happened to me before, and at night you could lie and gently stroke his sleeping arm. It was a real joy, and although there was probably more than half of the bitterness in it, it was impossible to refuse it.

The man and I were in endless correspondence - every day in the morning I began to wait for him to write. If he didn’t write, the clamp in my chest turned into a uniform vice, and I wrote myself, not giving a damn about all the "advice of wise women," which says that you must not be intrusive. He wrote almost always, and I answered wherever and with whom I was. I dropped out of the conversation, quit my job, stopped following the road, turned off the film and went into this correspondence, because only it was interesting and mattered. If a man wanted to see me, I canceled any plans. If a man unexpectedly canceled a meeting (and he often did), an ax was immediately stuck into my chest and stuck there until I was "filmed" by correspondence. Sometimes these relationships hurt me so much that I, completely fucking, made an attempt to break them off. About a second after talking about the rip, I had the feeling that it was tearing me into small, meaningless shreds, into fucking atoms. I was just paralyzed from pain, I stood for several hours and wrote - please, forgive me, I was drunk, on drugs, not myself, I didn't want to, let's return everything as it was, let's return it somehow. Do you just want to be friends with me? Well, let them be friends, just write to me, just let me see you.

It was an endless cycle of distance and approach, and at some point the man let me get very close to him, began to say all sorts of good words to me, hug me somehow tenderly and even include me in his plans for the near future. And then he generally said that he needed me, that he kind of stays with me. It should be noted here that all this time I tried very hard to harm myself. I said - a person cannot be the goal, meaning and outcome for another person. If all this ends, of course, it will be very painful for me, but I will survive. If he leaves me completely, I will manage (how exactly - I preferred not to think). Good people, never hurt yourself. When literally a week after the good words that he needed me, the man told me on the phone that no, he would not stay with me, and in general this whole muddy story is over, I very clearly understood that nifiga. That a person can be a goal and a meaning, and now, at this second, the goal and meaning are leaving me. And I don't know how to get through it, and I can't cope. At this point, for the first time in my life, a real hysteria happened to me - my consciousness simply went out, and that insignificant part of it, which was still working, heard someone yelling in my voice "NO NO NO". Then I wrote messages to the man, screamed, cried, looked at one point, fell asleep for a while, screamed again. Then I began to feel sick - I vomited all day, until I persuaded the man to continue somehow to communicate with me. I was ready to beg, threaten, roll at my feet and cling to his trousers, because an ax had already stuck into my chest, and there is no humiliation in the world that would be worse than life with an ax in my chest.

Do you know what is the funniest thing in this whole story? These three years of longing, horror and madness could simply not have happened. It turned out to be no more difficult to stop my depression than to cure some lacunar sore throat. Two weeks of well-chosen medications - and the dull glass that separated me from the world disappeared. The perennial chest clamp, which already seemed to me to be an integral part of my anatomy, just unclenched. I leaned back from the zone, came out of a coma, returned from the Far North - I don't know how best to describe this state. I felt fine - probably this is the most accurate way. I am warm, my coffee is strong and tasty, the foliage on the trees is green, and over Strogino today there will probably be an amazing, some kind of orange-green sunset. I see that all people have different faces, stories and ways of thinking, the world is full of good texts and funny pictures, something is constantly happening in the city, and someone is wrong on the Internet, and all this is insanely interesting. When I get off my pills and I can continue to drink in the best traditions of the Russian intelligentsia, my sister and I will buy a bottle of champagne and go wandering around the center on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, rubbing over the national cinema, and it will be cool. And I will also come to the sea and run into it right in my clothes, screaming and splashing - I love the sea, I just completely forgot about it.

You have no idea what a shock it is to suddenly remember that coping with life option included in your base package by default and does not require constant painful efforts. Life, it turns out, you can just live without straining, and even adjust at your own discretion. When a cannonball is not tied to each of your legs, this very life seems easy, like poplar fluff (which, by the way, I love very much, and which I could not check out for three summers in a row). Without these nuclei, I have so much strength that I can, like that same Munchausen, plan a feat for myself at 8-30, and a victorious war at 13-00. It’s probably time to really start a diary, because now I’m always running out of time. All the unwritten texts over these three years painfully want me to write them urgently, all unread books dream of being read, and aborted thoughts are thoughtful. I want to talk with all the people I passed by without noticing them, and go to all those countries where I was invited, but I did not go, excuse myself with lack of money, but in fact, I simply did not understand why it was necessary - to go somewhere …

And still very sorry for myself. Not in the sense of "no one loves me, I will go to the swamp", but in the past tense - very sorry for this brave man who managed not only to walk with cannonballs on both legs, but also to participate in some races, and even sometimes take some places in them. And it's a little offensive - because the story of three years of my life, whose heroine suffered a lot and tried very hard, turned out to be a case history.

I started writing this text a week ago, but I did not finish it on purpose and did not post it anywhere - I was afraid that all this was some kind of deviation from the norm, inadequacy against the background of taking medications, hypomania, God knows what else. I asked a psychiatrist ten times if everything was fine with me, googled the symptoms of hypomanic states, asked my friends if I looked strange. If you believe the psychiatrist, Google and friends, as well as my own memories of myself before depression (supported, by the way, by written evidence), then yes, right now everything is fine with me. I feel about the same as most people (adjusted for the delight of the neophyte, of course) and it does not fit into my head very well. Three years, THREE YEARS, FUCK.

If anything, this is by no means a post of pill propaganda. I just want to say that the disease depression existsthat it can happen to anyone, that it can and should be treated, and that I don’t understand why this is still not written in huge letters on billboards. How exactly to treat - this is already up to the specialists. I don’t know how all these receptors work, whether or not they capture serotonin and norepinephrine (but I’ll probably study now - at least on top). Maybe meditation, prayer, talking, herbal teas or jogging can really help someone. But if you run, pray and talk for a month, two months, three months, and the depression does not end, it means that specifically in your case this particular method does not work, and you need to look for another. If you are not sure whether the depression is over or not, then it is not over. When it's over, you can't help but notice, no matter how hard you want to be. It's like having an orgasm - if you doubt whether you're experiencing it or not, then you don't, I'm sorry.

It is very easy to understand that there is no more depression. But to get it to the point that it was not there before, and now you are stuck in it up to your ears, is much more difficult. I couldn’t finish it for three years - and now I just don’t understand how this is possible. I live in the capital and drink coffee in Starbucks, I am educated, I have an above-average income and unlimited access to information - and in three years I never realized that something was wrong with me. I even went to psychologists - and even they did not understand anything. Maybe they were just bad specialists, or maybe it was me who turned out to be a good actress and very talentedly imitated a normal person. I said: "I am tormented by my conscience for a perfect act," "I have a difficult relationship with my mother," "I have a painful relationship with a man," "I hate my job," but it never occurred to me to tell the truth: "Me nothing pleases me and nothing interests me. " I just didn't admit it to myself.

In general, dear all, I conjure you with all your gods, the theory of probability or whatever else you worship there - take care of yourself! This x-nya sneaks up quietly and carefully, and no one except you will notice how your rich (now this word is here without any irony) inner world turns into a frozen desert. And you are not the fact that you will notice. Therefore, watch yourself - in the literal sense, follow, track thoughts and emotions, and if you feel bad or even just not good for two weeks, three, a month - sound the alarm. Go to the doctor, and if you cannot go, call someone and let them drag you there by your foot on the asphalt. Better let the anxiety be in vain - no one will prescribe pills for you if you do not need them. If you feel bad, painful and joyless for many months in a row, it’s not because you have such a special age, not because someone doesn’t love you or loves you in the wrong way, not because you don’t know What is the meaning of life, not because this life is cruel and right now someone is dying somewhere, not because you have no money or some ultra-important plans have collapsed. Chances are, you are just sick. If this month you have never been just fine in the moment, because it is warm, light, tasty and the people are good, something is clearly wrong with you. If it seems to you that no one understands you, and you are more than 15 years old, most likely, no one really understands you, because it is extremely difficult for healthy people to understand a person in depression.

Take care of yourself, please. And if you don’t save it and it starts, send everyone into the forest who will say that you’re just a rag, a whiner, didn’t smell gunpowder and are mad with fat. Don't even try to heal yourself with motivating quotes about the value of the moment or the hope that things will get better when you have more money, meaning, or love. Do not even think about reading articles from the series "128 Ways to Fight Depression" on the Internet, which usually begin with the words "learn to see the good in everything." Shut up the hell with all this nonsense, go to the doctor and say everything as it is, without rationalization and "well, in fact, it's not that bad, that's me." If you have children, take care of them too, tell them what happens. And children have it too. Now I understand that depressive episodes, albeit seasonal and not very long, happened in my elementary school, and from the age of 12 to 17 - generally stable every winter. I was sure that it was normal to turn into a stupefied frozen semi-finished product with a clothespin in my chest in the cold season and gradually thaw by the summer, wrote poetry about it and was very surprised when the next winter came, but for some reason I was just as interested and cool to live like in the summer.

This is really dumb. It's really worth writing about on billboards, filming public service announcements and talking about it in schools. Depression - this is not cancer for you, of course, people usually don't die from it, but they don't live with it. A depressed person cannot give anything to this world, he becomes a thing in himself, and the world does not need him in the same way as the world is to him. A depressed employee will not be affected by any fancy motivation systems. It is pointless to try to plant morality, patriotism, or ultraliberal political programs in a depressed citizen. It is useless for a depressed viewer to show an amazing movie and play good-quality commercials in front of it, calling to buy Kia Rio and Coca-Cola.

"It is bad if the world outside is studied by those who are exhausted inside"