I had even more than him, and I was suicidally depressed at one point.
It’s literally your brain being broken. What’s happening outside doesn’t really matter.
This is what those who have never experienced genuine depression will never understand. Everything can be going perfectly in your life, but you still can’t find the energy to bring color back into your world no matter what you do. The overwhelming numbness just eats away at you, and you withdraw even further. Some of us may even turn to substances to just feel SOMETHING, regardless of how fleeting the escape may be, and how much worse we know we’ll feel afterwards. You are unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the future is bleak, and you will die alone in a world that doesn’t give a fuck, so what’s the point?
So you finally find the courage to confide in somebody, and they tell you that you just need to “get past it, think positive!” and that they also “get depressed too”… and the worst part is, you are unable to describe to them in any way how it truly feels, because they’ve genuinely never felt it themselves, so now you worry that you’re just coming across as dramatic, furthering the desire to withdraw and keep your thoughts to yourself.
I’m currently going through a depressed period, if it isn’t obvious. I’ll be okay in another week, but it’s fucking horrible, and I wouldn’t wish this on anybody.
What I hated most about my depression is it would take anything that happened and make it terrible. I got a promotion? Great, more work to do. My wife cooked my favorite meal? Great, now there’s a ton of dishes to do. I’m gonna take a break and play a game? I’ll probably lose, why bother playing.
And this fatalism morphed into anxiety that made it so I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I’d lay there paralyzed with fear about failing at everything that day, to the point where I’d set my alarm to go off early just so I could have time to have a panic attack.
One thing that helped me a lot was to give that little voice a name, and then tell it to fuck off every time it spoke up.
another good trick is to give the voice a stupid cartoonish voice: make it say things like goofy… it disarms it if it sounds ridiculous
(also works for intrusive thoughts about yourself: they’re late because they don’t want to spend time with me, they say they like my thing but they sounded sarcastic, etc)
So question: does it feel like another voice to you? For me I just feel like I’m talking to myself, or no voice at all, just first-person thoughts.
Is part of the work kinda externalizing that part of you, and giving it a voice?
it’s not a different voice to start with: i hear it as… my inner monologue i guess?… sometimes not even a voice exactly; it’s just a feeling… but if you repeat it, or put the feeling into a voice and say it in a ridiculous way then that, for me, overrides the original feeling
maybe it’s acknowledging it exists, thinking about it, and then turning it ridiculous makes you consciously put it into a “fuck you that feeling is false” category… i’m not really sure beyond here :p
Thank you, that is a helpful exercise. I’m going to try that
Humans have a lot of different cognitive processes that interact in ways that are still being studied. If you’re in a country with good medical infrastucture, ask your doctor about cognitive behavioral therapy. If not, try meditation: sit in a quiet area and focus on counting your breaths from 1 to 10 repeatedly. If a thought pops up just wordlessly acknowledge it and let it go. The part of you that’s left is (usually!) at peace.
Also if cbt doesn’t work for you try ndsr, it helped my wife where cbt didn’t. It’s more of an acceptance based focus with inspired by Buddhist philosophy.
That said, cbt helps me a lot with my plethora of anxieties. By learning to calmly analyze my fears as they wash over me I’ve become able to deal with the problems and minimize the non problems, which is especially helpful because as someone with adhd I often latch on to real problems because I’m bad at juggling life.
another good trick is to give the voice a stupid cartoonish voice: make it say things like goofy… it disarms it if it sounds ridiculous
Ooo, that’s a good one! Like “yoUr cowoRKeRs DOn’t ACTUALLy LIke YOU” or “yoU’Re GONNA gO BrOKE anD LIVe On tHe STrEET.”
Gawrsh, my buddy Donald has better luck working than you do! Guess you’re gonna keep being nothing! A-hyuck!
…actually yeah. This is helping. I’ll keep this in my back pocket.
Hey at least the voice still talks to you. I’m so far gone even my depression abandoned me.
I would go as far as to argue that if your life sucks and you aren’t happy about it that probably isn’t mental illness. That’s just having a shit life, and is a healthy response to your shit circumstances.
Not to say that can’t cause depression, of course. But just being unhappy about your shit life is not in of itself depression.
EXACTLY. These people think sadness = depression. Unhappiness is depression.
Depression is depression. It can happen to anyone. Even those with seemingly plenty of goodness in their lives.
It’s a classic incel viewpoint.
“Girls talk to you because you talk to them! Don’t give me some bullshit it about being depressed!”
Yeah I think a lot of 4chan has other mental issues (often failure to launch or other sociodevelopmental problems, maybe not even innate or biological) that results in a shit life and being miserable and so they think they have depression when the reality is their life just sucks.
I don’t have depression but I’ve been in a bad place in life, when I improved my life or got what I needed I felt better. And sometimes it’s other issues that can look a lot like depression. But those of us like that need to remember y’all because what worked for us won’t work for y’all,
Troofax
It’s almost like the point is to show that depression is a thing that’s not very well treated by having super cool things happen in life. That’s the scary thing. Being successful, but still not being enough for yourself. Having friends having lovers, but still feeling like you’re not worth the time of day. If everyone with depression only suffered from SLS, depression would be way less compelling and way less prevalent.
You can still have a pretty good life and still be depressed my worst episode I was passing all my classes and picking up a new hobby and had a good part time job but I was still depressed. I started taking meds and the next day the crippling sadness was gone.
I started taking meds and couldn’t nut anymore either, so your mileage may vary
Well, sometimes you have to choose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Never gatekeep mental health. Every person is stuck with the life they live inside their head, no matter what it looks like on the outside.
OK, but this is fiction. Someone made Mr. Robot up. There’s no gatekeeping here because there’s no real person trying to be recognized for their MH problems.
however implying because this fictional character has sex and has a good job means your depression is somehow “less” is problematic; fictional or not
i have a well paid job and have plenty of sex, but my depression is very much real… to someone in my situation struggling with working out their mental health, the kind of sentiment on display might make me reconsider whether my problems are “big enough” or whether i should “just get over it” or that “other people have it worse so my feelings are invalid”
fictional or not, the situation has parallels to real life, and real people are in similar positions. the damage is in reinforcing that their problems aren’t worthy of mental health support, and i can absolutely tell you that in this situation, acknowledging that you’re worth the support exactly because your problems seem trivial is a huge issue
Speak for yourself. I’ve never seen a movie or read a book that so succinctly captured exactly how my mind works before. It actually scared the shit out of me, stopped watching the first episode because I almost had a panic attack. I both realized I’ve never seen someone else process things the way I do and seeing Mr Robot was like looking into a mirror. It was terrifying, but I quickly got addicted to her show.
Your average joe isn’t out there having casual sex with random drug dealers.
He’s not allowed to be depressed because he’s friends with a woman? Why?
Incel logic: “Everything wrong with my life is because I don’t have a woman, if only I had a woman things would be alright.”
What they don’t realize/refuse to understand is: no, they wouldn’t. That’s not how it works. It’s just this conspiratorial-mythological story they tell themselves and each other.
Well yeah what are they going to do, understand we’re just people?
“ I don’t understand the show I watch. Everything is about me. “
To be fair, he’s full on schizophrenic.
No, he is is not. He has Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Which (late spoiler alert) actually explains anon’s apparent misunderstanding. The master developed as Elliott’s protector, and that alter would naturally need to be avoidant while also being high functioning.
I thought it was one of the better Hollywood portrayals of DID, actually, at least from my understanding of the condition. He’s not violent like the characters in “Split” or “Identity”, just like the vast majority of DID sufferers, and the roots of his behavior are tied to his childhood sexual trauma where DID tragically originates most of the time.
Yup. And he didn’t just have a female best friend. They were going to get married.
But I don’t think anon finished watching the show.
his anxiety becomes irrelevant after a while too
I honestly thought the friends I was watching with didn’t like that show because I was the only one laughing.
Took me like 3 episodes to realize it wasn’t satire.
Yeah, it’s pretty rough. I’m glad people like it though, just not for me.
Wasn’t the drug dealer he fucked his sister?
No it was Sheila iirc
Shayla
He tries to kiss his sister when he has repressed most of his memories
That’s right. I never watched it with subtitles so I didn’t know how to spell it.
Shit who tf is Sheila? I need to rewatch that show.
Shayla is the cute brunette neighbor portrayed by actress Frankie Shaw who sells him morphine and later ends up in the trunk of a car.
The drug dealer who gets stuffed in the trunk of a car.
it’s just standard hollywood bs, you gotta put some sex in there to keep people watching. it was just your mandatory pilot episode hornyness, forced into the show by the studio.
What about it struck you as unrealistic? There’s a lot more going on with the main character besides anxiety and depression. Often, people with a history of certain kinds of trauma are actually hypersexual as a result.
Also, without getting into spoilers, depression is the absolute least of the main character’s issues.
It’s how Game of Throne built their show before it all collapsed.
