aggression turned inwards

Throughout my life, I've oscillated between  approaches to mental illness; fighting it or accepting it. Some might say we need to find a middle ground, wherein we manage it, e.g. with medications, etc, and then accept whatever's left, but that's not a meaningful distinction. Of course we do what we can to manage it, but the question still remains, what do you do when you can't get out of bed? When you can't shower, or prepare a meal? When you're a painter who never wants to paint? When you can't meet responsibilities, or uphold a conversation? What do you do in these individual moments of dysfunction?

You accept it, or you fight it. These options are mutually exclusive. Whatever else we do, as far as self-care and treatment, we still need to face these battles over and over every day. Maybe we comfort ourselves and say that we don't need to get out of bed. We're depressed, we have an illness, it's ok. Or maybe we say no, that's unacceptable, and we fight tooth and nail to get the fuck out of bed, in spite of everything. So then, there's your "aggression turned inwards." Especially when we lose the fight.

That's an outcome of depression, not a cause. The whole framing of it implies that if we stop being aggressive towards ourselves, we wouldn't be depressed, but this is backwards. I have to be aggressive with myself to overcome these constant hurdles, and while that's a vicious cycle, so is laying in bed, trying to tell myself it's ok.

Depression is crippling. That is the worst thing about it. When I explain that I've been especially depressed, I'm not complaining about how I feel. I'm explaining that I've been especially dysfunctional. Try not to expect much. How I feel about it is beside the point, but suffice to say, of course it's not good.

Likewise with terms such as "learned helplessness" - that is what we learn from depression. Look at the list of symptoms holding a person down, and it makes total sense that such a person would learn that they've been rendered helpless by those symptoms. If someone with crippling mental illness wants to be a functional member of society, it can take years of baby steps and rehabilitation, and often that doesn't even work. It takes optimism, determination, a skillful approach, and luck. Just to make some modest improvements.

Learned helplessness sounds a lot like imagined helplessness, but you can't just learn the symptoms of biological impairment away. Being nicer to ourselves can make us feel better, but generally won't make it any easier to get out of bed. Depression is not something we do to ourselves, any more than cancer is. Lifestyle matters; how we eat, how we sleep, how active we are, what environmental risk factors we're exposed to. We can change some of that, but options can be limited, and we don't always have any. Sometimes there's a pandemic, and some of us have little choice but to sit alone all day every day, even though that's a huge risk factor for stress, depression, cancer, and blogging way too much.

In both depression and cancer alike, stress is a big one, but even stress - or maybe even more fundamentally and frequently misunderstood - stress is not something we can think away. A few deep breaths will only do so much. Working out for two hours every day can only do so much. Incidentally, stress is managed by corticotropin, a hormone produced by the pituitary. If you're lucky enough to have one of those. Without it, stress just burns through dopamine instead.

We're not the only species that can suffer stress and depression. We're just the only ones who make up nonsense reasons for it. How we think does not cause depression. How we think can not cure depression. It can help or it can hurt, but not all that much. People can certainly be impaired by bad ideas too, but that is a whole other subject.