I have a colleague who has decided to “battle the stigma attached to depression.” Now he sends everybody who works at the university lengthy emails that describe the symptoms of his depression and exhort his colleagues to treat depression “just like any other illness.”
Of course, this man himself doesn’t believe that depression is either stigmatized or is “just like any illness.” I’m sure he’s had other illnesses in the course of his life, yet he’s sent us no emails detailing the physiological consequences of those diseases for his body. We have people with all kinds of medical conditions on campus, including terminal cancer. Yet nobody sends out detailed narratives of their symptoms and the suffering they cause through professional email.
The colleague in question knows that we cannot avoid reading the emails we get through this professional email service. He also knows that we are all polite and kind and won’t tell him how disgusting his behavior is. He keeps insisting that depression is a disease and not a character flaw, yet his behavior is that of an immature drama queen whose character has nothing but flaws.
I hate these professional depressives and their abusive behavior, so I need to vent here.
Clarissa's Blog 
“He keeps insisting that depression is a disease and not a character flaw”
oooh, talk some more about this, please?
By the way, I’m skeptical of most ‘raising awareness’ campaigns. Instead of pouring millions of dollars in raising awareness, one could actually spend that money on, you know, actually solving the problem.
Livestrong raised hundreds of millions of dollars for ‘cancer awareness’ and spent something like 2% of it on actual cancer research. Susan G Komen foundation’s the same.
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““He keeps insisting that depression is a disease and not a character flaw” oooh, talk some more about this, please?”
I have both been victimized by professional depressives and been one myself. This is why I feel no reverence in the presence of these showy drama queens. I know everything about them very intimately.
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Oh I completely agree with you. I try to be kind and compassionate but I find myself getting so frustrated with most of those who claim they suffer from depression. It just seems so self indulgent to me. An excuse that allows the depressive to bow out of responsibilities and sit around watching TV– all under the guise of “disease.” I also get frustrated because OF COURSE people feel depressed if they lay around, don’t shower, don’t eat/eat poorly, and watch TV all day. It’s depressing to do those things. I find myself wanting to shout: “Just take a shower, go for a jog, and do something nice for somebody else instead of spending every waking minute thinking about your self.” I know I’m being simplistic here. But it’s nice to indulge in a non-PC rant. 🙂
And there are real diseases out in the world. Diseases that ravage people’s bodies and cause excruciating pain or death. I think that comparing depression to something like leukemia is terribly insensitive.
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“an excuse that allows the depressive to bow out of responsibilities and sit around watching TV– all under the guise of “disease.” ”
Shows how well he knew me. 🙂
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I doubt it’s depression that’s behind this behavior. Depression, in and of itself, doesn’t lead to this kind of pushiness or intrusiveness over social boundaries.
Many people with depression in fact tend to stay quiet about it. Many of them do shower and go to work and move around (if more like an automaton than people fully alive). And if they want to understand what’s going on with them, they have to sort through a lot of dubious or outright misleading information – from people pushing meds, meds, meds and nothing else, to people who are ignorant and full of platitudes (“Just cheer up already!” “Everyone feels sad now and then!”)
I don’t know how valuable the information is in these emails – but yes, he could publish it on his own site for people to find and not try to push it on everyone else – especially not repeatedly.
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“I doubt it’s depression that’s behind this behavior. Depression, in and of itself, doesn’t lead to this kind of pushiness or intrusiveness over social boundaries.”
I completely agree.
I think the person just sounds like an attention whore (to put it bluntly).
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Be thankful, imagine the hell of working with Elizabeth Wurtzel. :p
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I had no idea who Elizabeth Wurtzel was, started Googling, and found this great article: http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/01/elizabeth-wurtzel-on-self-help.html
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The article made me feel nostalgic for female Bildungsroman. Great stuff.
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She’s best known for Prozac Nation , a histrionic trainwreck of a memoir where everyone indulges her depression because she’s the most special PYT genius ever.
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And the recent article is the perfect illustration of where such a life strategy leads.
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So actually some kind of Jewish literary star. Because she wrote well and was well-poised, socially, to spring into the world of literature, she could push the boundaries and write in this way. In the end it is just a text, which is to say that whatever becomes of the author has to do with her own ability to untangle herself from the mess she was in.
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Not going to argue about the realness or unrealness of depression one way or the other since it seems to me like the sort of weird framing of a subject that’s actually used to argue about something else, but one way you can jiu-jitsu out of the whole deal (if you can stomach it) is tell them that as someone who’s suffered from depression you find their posts triggering and can they please tag them in the subject line if it’s not too much of a bother, and then delete any emails with such tags on sight. If it’s too much of a bother for them to tag, then you just regretfully inform them that you’ll have to stop reading any emails they send whatsoever because this creates a mentally unsafe environment for you. I dunno, this whole thing can definitely be beaten by out-Tumblring these people, but the cost of bringing Tumblr manners in a professional setting might be too high.
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My mother suffered from horrifying migraines for 20 years. She’d have them every 2-3-4-6 weeks whenever my sister and I disappointed her in some way. There was nobody but us – two small children – to help her through 3 days of retching, hallucinations, fainting, and excruciating pain.
The migraines were very real. But they ended, just stopped, the moment when my sister and I moved out. The audience wasn’t there, so the migraines didn’t come back for another performance.
This doesn’t make the migraines any less real. But it’s an indisputable fact that they served a purpose.
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Accidentally commented anonymously and it’s stuck in moderation, so please delete that one, Clarissa.
Comment text:
Not going to argue about the realness or unrealness of depression one way or the other since it seems to me like the sort of weird framing of a subject that’s actually used to argue about something else, but one way you can jiu-jitsu out of the whole deal (if you can stomach it) is tell them that as someone who’s suffered from depression you find their posts triggering and can they please tag them in the subject line if it’s not too much of a bother, and then delete any emails with such tags on sight. If it’s too much of a bother for them to tag, then you just regretfully inform them that you’ll have to stop reading any emails they send whatsoever because this creates a mentally unsafe environment for you. I dunno, this whole thing can definitely be beaten by out-Tumblring these people, but the cost of bringing Tumblr manners in a professional setting might be too high.
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It sounds like he is slightly manic now. I’m no psychologist but I’ve known enough people with BPD to recognize slight manic episodes here and there. These emails sound like a symptom and a big warning sign that he needs to get his meds readjusted. I hope his doctor realizes this before it’s too late, and either he harms himself or one of you strangles him.
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Rebecca! How are you doing?
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good! better than your manic colleague, that’s for sure…
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That does sound like a low bar…..
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Rebecca is about to have a baby.
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“It puts the medicine down its gullet or it gets the hose again”
Sorry, I really couldn’t resist. 🙂
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Something tells me this guy is already putting some meds down his gullet. Just not the right ones.
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I must confess I have also been guilty of pushiness and intrusiveness over social boundaries. But in reality I was just pushing back whilst also trying to create some psychological space around myself so I could buy time to figure out what had been going on. From the moment I landed as a migrant, people have been pushing into my boundaries, telling me what my real character was, where they thought I was pretending and not being real, how I needed to be cut down to size, how all of my problems were imaginary, and so on. And this is because of their understanding of Rhodesia, which was based on their media constructs of the situation conducted in a mode of psychological warfare. And this has gone on and on. Even a couple of days ago, somebody reprimanded me for reposting a very sentimental picture of the Victoria Falls with the group’s title of “Rhodesian memories”. She has already reprimanded me before and now she ws doing it again for using a historical name to refer to a historical time and place. “Can’t you just like the image and not repost it?” she demanded. This is 2015 and she couldn’t let the psy. war die and become redundant.
I believe that this endless reflexive politicking, without stopping to find out who one is talking to, their real background, or their real attitudes, did give me a lot of justification for imposing my own experiences directly on others, especially after I was workplace bullied, losing my digestive health, and those I sought help from kept insisting it wasn’t really anything and they knew this because they simply knew.
It may be that intrusions into people’s lives come about as a result of their own actions, since they were the aggressor.
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Just found this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/warped-brain-lobes-could-underlie-depression-symptoms/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook
Of course people assume “it’s in the brain”, so it must start from the brain. But that is like saying my deformed ring finger started out that way. Actually my martial arts activity caused it.
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The url without the facebook coding
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/warped-brain-lobes-could-underlie-depression-symptoms/
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“… exhort his colleagues to treat depression ‘just like any other illness’ …”
Very well, I choose gonorrhoea as the “any other illness”, and I kindly suggest this person kindly stifle any further ejections of wishful pustulence, especially in my general direction …
🙂
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Thanks for posting about this stuff. I struggled with depression for many years. Years when I was also in a bad relationship, on the wrong (for me) career path, and living far from friends and family. I’m now in a different (very good relationship) in a different (better for me) career path, and I have friends where I live. Wonder of wonders, my depression is totally gone.
I have a friend who struggled with depression for years trying finish a dissertation. He eventually abandoned the dissertation and wound up opening a small store. The store has been a hit, he’s busy and earning decent money and ta-da, like magic, no more struggles with depression.
The problem with depression is that it’s usually difficult to see what needs to be changed in your life. I was in total denial about how bad my relationship was. It was hard to change my career path because I had sunk so much time and work into it. But no one tells depressed people to spend some time analyzing their lives and decide what is working for them and what isn’t.
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