Depression isn’t really about being depressed

I ran across a post on Hyperbole and a Half talking about her history dealing with depression. My own story diverges from hers a lot in some ways–I never hit quite such a low point (though how I managed that I can only attribute to sheer stubbornness) and things were such a slow, mild descent that people didn’t really seem to notice that anything was wrong (my mother’s initial response was that I didn’t seem depressed) so I didn’t deal with efforts to ‘cheer me up’. It took flunking school and a teacher telling me “you need help” for me to finally admit that the signs I’d been noticing for years were indicative of a larger problem that needed to be addressed, not just ignored and pushed through.

Her description of depression though, no longer being able to enjoy anything, was spot on with my own experience. To put in in my own words, think of the one thing that makes you happy, that more than anything else brings joy to your life, that you can count on to pick you up when you’re feeling down. Now imagine that thing no longer having any effect on you. That was me at my worst.

People generally aren’t great at understanding mental illness. That’s not surprising, as in some ways the difference between normal variation and actual issues in need of professional attention come down to how much of a problem they’re causing. So it doesn’t surprise me that some people seem to think of depression as simply being sad, but IME that doesn’t really encompass what it is. I’ve struggled with social issues my whole life, so in some ways I’ve always been depressed, but the difference between that and having a clinical diagnosis of depression is kind of like being wet versus being underwater. I wasn’t just unhappy, I was unable to be happy. The enjoyment had been sucked out of everything in my life, to the point where I wasn’t doing much more than simply existing because I couldn’t be bothered to do anything more. And it’s something of a self-reinforcing cycle–a common piece of advice is to keep busy (which DOES help), but if nothing is enjoyable then it’s hard to motivate yourself into any sort of activity.

One other thing that stuck out to me was a comment about always wanting to not care anymore, and finally getting there. I think that’s a state we’d all like to be in, to feel secure enough in ourselves and care little enough about other people to be able to brush stuff off, a Hyde-like ‘zen’. What I got wasn’t that. It was a lack of caring brought upon by despair, from feeling like nothing I did made any real difference so what did it matter anyways? That’s a pit of its own, and in no way a good place to be.

Although things are a lot better for me now, I’m still dealing with these things in lesser amounts, and I always will. Even with treatment I need to actively work at times to keep from falling back into depressed moods where I no longer care. While happiness is again a possibility for me, the darkness still lurks and is still capable of dragging me into places I don’t want to be in the right circumstances. I want people to understand that depression–clinical depression–isn’t just about feeling sad. It’s about feeling hopeless, and that’s far harder to shake than simply being down. If you know someone like this, don’t try and get them to ‘snap out of it’–if anything that’ll just make them feel worse when they inevitably are unable to do so. Encourage them to seek the professional help they need. I know a lot of people see this as a sign of weakness, especially in our individualistic society that puts self-reliance on a pedestal, but this is too big a problem for anyone to deal with on their own, and too important to try and deal with without trained support. This goes for any mental illness, really. Be supportive of people getting the help they need to feel better, because no matter what they deserve that.

What happened to choice?

There’s an interesting article on Salon about how feminism isn’t to blame for the fall of domesticity, but there was one aspect to the article that really stood out to me–the idea that not everyone enjoys being domestic. See, I’m one of those people who doesn’t enjoy cooking. I do it as a means to an end, because I need to eat, but while I can get behind the notion that it’s better to eat foods made from scratch, I’d much rather throw a pizza in the oven and watch TV than spending an hour or more preparing a single dish.

This is something that tends to bug me about certain social movements. There’s often a tendency to hold up one option as being objectively good, an ideal that everyone should aspire to, and those who don’t adhere to it tend to get demonized. Food tends to attract this type of thinking in particular, from femivores to veg*ns to breast-feeding advocates–I’ve seen members of that last group describe baby formula as being ‘crap in a can’. While I can’t argue with some of the health benefits of nursing, this thinking ignores that sometimes people decide it’s not the best way to go for their family, for reasons ranging from convenience (for working moms, pumping at work can be a minefield) to health problems on the part of either mother or child, to simply not wanting to. Shortly after finding out I was pregnant I found I was already feeling defensive about a choice I hadn’t even made, let alone started acting on, because of the possibility that personal circumstances would force me into the second group. At 8 weeks I was worried about having to defend the ‘choice’ (that I wasn’t even sure I had) to formula feed, because of how horribly I’ve seen some people refer to formula and those who use it. To some people, if you’re not nursing you’re failing as a mother.

It’s always a problem when people frame personal choices as being objectively better than the choices others make. To the people holding these views, they are better, because those choices best uphold their values. But to others who have somewhat different priorities, they’re not. To come back to nursing, I was concerned that my ‘choices’ might be using formula or going off my anti-depressants–while some would probably say I should do the latter, if it came down to it there’s no question I would pick formula, for the sake of both myself and my child. The health benefits, to me, aren’t worth the negatives of having to go off the medication that has helped me function somewhat normally for the last 5 years–I don’t consider quitting my medication to be an option. And that’s what bugs me about some of the more adamant sections of some social movements. Everything is a trade-off, and something that is better in one respect might not be worth the trade-offs needed elsewhere, and what is an acceptable price for one person isn’t for another. Some people are really good at forgetting that.

“Less Romantic Than It Sounds” for $200, Alex

I’ve talked before about how our ideas of romance tend to be rather effed up, presenting women as objects to be won and generally giving lousy relationship advice. This last week has provided me with an example that hits both of those, while describing as ‘romantic’ abusive actions.

Tell her, why she’s perfect for you. Pick her up. & tickle her until she can barely breath, she’ll scream and fight you, but secretly she’ll love it. Protect her. Hold her hand when you talk to her. Look at her like she’s the only girl you ever want to be with. When she least expects, it, pull her in close & kiss her hard. Tell her she looks beautiful. Get her mad, then kiss her. Let her fall asleep in your arms. Call her. Give her piggy-back rides. Kiss her forehead. Be slow. Don’t push anything. Make her feel loved. Kiss her in the rain. And when you fall in love with her, tell her.

Some of the advice in there is decent (“Don’t push anything”), some falls back on harmful cultural narratives but isn’t necessarily bad advice (“Tell her she looks beautiful”), and a couple really should not be anywhere near something that claims to be relationship advice. Can you spot them?

Pick her up and tickle her until she can barely breath, she’ll scream and fight you, but secretly she’ll love it.
There’s a time and place for stuff like this, but as blanket advice it’s terrible. Ignoring a ‘no’ of any sort should not be a default action, but rather something that gets negotiated between two people who know each other well. The best description I can think of is ‘mild rape culture’–while it’s not actually about rape, it still encourages men to ignore boundaries, to believe they know what a woman wants better than she does, that ‘no’ doesn’t actually mean ‘no’. Having your boundaries ignored isn’t endearing, it’s frightening.

Get her mad, then kiss her.
The first term to come to mind for me when I read this was ‘gaslighting’. This isn’t quite that, but I’d say it’s in the same ballpark. First of all, people who care about others don’t deliberately make them mad. And the kiss follow-up puts me in mind of men who say “You’re cute when you’re angry”. It’s dismissive of her anger, treating it not as something that deserves validation and resolution but as something to be ignored, endured, or even found endearing, with a possible side order of “See, I love you so much even your anger can’t change that”. It’s manipulative, and a real relationship doesn’t rely on manipulation.

The icing on this particular crud-cake is that it was posted on a page entitled, “Boyfriends who actually treat their girlfriends like princesses”. Guys, if this is what you consider treating a person like royalty, I’m afraid to ask how you behave around everyone else.

So what: Mommies and Daddies

With Prop 8 and DOMA making appearances in the Supreme Court, the anti-same-sex marriage crowd has been a bit louder than usual. One recurring theme is the idea that it is best for a child to have two parents of opposite genders. For the sake of argument, lets say that this is indeed the ideal arrangement and that having two parents of the same gender isn’t as good.

How is keeping same-sex marriage illegal going to help make sure that kids grow up with both a mommy and a daddy?

It’s not like banning same-sex unions is going to encourage gay people to go out and find someone of the opposite gender to marry. It’s already illegal to marry someone of your sex and plenty of people live together with a partner of their gender, including raising kids with them. Marriage as a legal institution offers certain benefits, but as a social institution it’s viewed as being primarily for love and love is rarely pragmatic. So we can either have same-sex couples raising kids with the benefits that legal marriage provides or have them raising kids without those benefits, but they’re not going to go and ‘choose’ to fall in love with someone of the opposite gender for the sake of getting married, or they’d already be doing that. These children aren’t growing up in mom-and-dad homes today, so saying that such an arrangement is ‘ideal’ is irrelevant–clearly only recognizing opposite-sex couples isn’t enough to make sure that kids are being raised by such couples. All opponents of same-sex marriage are doing is denying some families legal benefits that other families already enjoy.

Be the ball

So Anita Sarkeesian has released her first video in her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, which I’ve been looking forward to as a lifelong gamer. While boys and men still make up the majority of gamers (though not by nearly as much as they used to) there have always been girls and women interested in the medium, and I’ve touched in the past on how bad the offerings towards our segment of the market is, varying between non-existent and patronisingly stereotypical.

I do sometimes wonder if, when critiquing sexism in the media, there’s not some confirmation bias going on. That things are better than we think and we’re just focusing on the worst aspects of it. But it’s hard to argue with the multitude of examples for the damsel in distress alone, especially given how many of them underpin games that are part of a still-continuing series (Mario and Zelda), and/or being re-released via markets like Steam and the Wii shop. Many of them are undeniably great games, and I think that’s part of the problem. Issues like this tend to be taken more seriously by (some) indie developers than the mainstream producers, so the games with the most resources behind them are often don’t pay attention to these issues. When mainstream developers do try to break outside the bow, they often don’t put much support behind the project, so they wind up as paltry offerings to the Goddess of Stereotypes rather than comparable but more socially aware or diverse counterparts to their other titles. So whatever is out there that’s better on issues like this tends to be harder to find, and often not solid games to begin with.

The problem isn’t so much individual games. Yes the tropes are horribly sexist, but some of those examples have pretty poor story-telling to begin with so expecting much better may be expecting too much. Princess Peach isn’t a very deep character, but neither is Mario, and stereotypes do help fill in the rather large blanks, as horrible as they are. The problem is how ubiquitous the tropes are. Having one or two games where the male hero rescues the female damsel wouldn’t be too bad, but the trope dominates the genre and there are precious few examples where the reverse is true (assuming there’s any at all–I can’t think of any off-hand).

Finally, to continue the ‘ball’ metaphor, the only really difference between this trope and a game of football is that in football the ball doesn’t have an opinion on what team should be holding it.

Sexuality is about more than sex

One common concern that comes up when talking about same-sex couples is that explaining their existence to children would require talking about subjects considered too ‘adult’ for them.

This concern is basically bull, because we talk to our children about opposite-sex couples all the time.

Take the Disney princesses, for example. Every single one of them falls for someone of the opposite sex. And those are considered kids’ movies. Somehow they manage to depict heterosexuality without ever coming near the topic of sex. Many children’s shows, books, and movies depict the main character as part of an opposite sex coupling (so does most adult media, but that’s a bit beside the point). We just don’t think of this as talking about sexuality because it’s considered normal, but that is what is happening–children are constantly learning about opposite sex relationships*. ‘Adult’ topics don’t enter the picture, because they don’t need to. “Bobby loves Marcia” is enough to explain an opposite sex couple. Why is “Bobby loves Dan” not sufficient to explain a same-sex couple?

*Whether or not what they’re learning is healthy, on the other hand…

How is this news?

Duh.

Bullying is one of those things that we treat as far less serious than it is. Many people see it as a rite of passage (which in other contexts would be considered hazing), as something that builds character, as an innate and fairly harmless part of childhood. But lets take the ways that a child is bullied and place them into an adult context, and the words used would no longer sound so harmless.

Harassment. Abuse. Assault.

Bullying is something that gets treated much differently when it happens among adults than among children (although still often not as seriously as it should be) and adults enjoy a lot of benefits that children don’t in dealing with it. They have more power to remove themselves from the situation. They have already formed an identity. They’re more emotionally mature. A child’s ability to remove themselves from a situation rests on hir ability to convince others to help. Hir identity is still forming and is more vulnerable to the messages of worthlessness. Ze lacks the emotional development to handle things well.

So why do we tell adults they don’t have to deal with this crap, and children get told to suck it up?

We knows the effects of abuse in adults, and it often takes years to recover. Why would we expect different when it occurs in childhood? While I think this sort of study is worth doing, this shouldn’t be novel enough to be newsworthy. That it is says a lot about how we deal with this issue as a culture.