Depression "spiral" can be broken with outside help
There are few things easier to sink into than depression. You don’t even have to do anything. It’s the mental equivalent of finding yourself immersed in quicksand and not really feeling up to crawling out.
That’s the key to the whole deal: once you begin thinking that you’re “not really feeling up” to doing day-to-day activities, congratulations: you’re depressed.
The standard line on the subject is that depression is most likely to grip you when you enter college. And that’s sometimes true. Homesickness, displacement, failure to gel, whatever you want to call it, can bring full-fledged no-nonsense depression like a tidal wave silently rushing toward shore.
But the feeling that you’re being sucked into the earth, one sinking step at a time, can hit you in any time and at any place. That’s what makes it so precarious.
Not every feeling is a reaction to an outside event or occurrence, much as the utilitarian schools of thought would like to believe.
The utilitarian idea of happiness has a carrot-and-stick concept at its heart. A hungry person becomes happier when he buys a sandwich, while an overstressed person is less happy when an unexpected test comes around.
Human beings do not work that way. The hungry person in question might be on a religious fast, and takes comfort in carrying on the tradition of his ancestors. The overstressed person could find a certain grim happiness in knowing that, after this last hurdle, they might find some rest.
These things aren’t predictable and can be very complicated. Depression also has a way of welding the circle of self-hatred and self-pity tightly together. They compliment each other almost beautifully. Self-pity, the “Oh, poor me” syndrome, soon becomes “What am I saying, ‘Oh, poor me’ for? This is ridiculous.” And then, before you know it, it’s “Oh, poor me” again.
Rinse and repeat.
The Czech writer Milan Kundera captures the essence of this cycle in his "Book of Laughter and Forgetting." The “untranslatable” Czech word litost, translated by him to mean “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery,” sums up the feeling I’m attempting to talk about quite nicely.
It has two stages: shame and the desire to take revenge on the person who shamed you. It moves one to do petty things for revenge and makes one feel the inevitable guilt all the more.
Kundera goes on to write that this feeling is a closed circle. It doesn’t matter what’s going on around you, the snake continues to eat its own tail. You are so caught up in how you’re feeling and what you should do, that everyone else sort of fades out of your thinking.
What makes this relevant to the regular USC college student is that — let’s be honest — very few young people aren’t caught up in navel-gazing of some kind or another.
So what’s the answer here? Well, some part of it has to be placing yourself emotionally and mentally in the context of other people.
If you are able to recognize the sheer volume of misery taking place locally and around the world, some of your smaller torments might seem smaller in retrospect.
And this is not a “there but for the grace of god” sort of answer. My advice: talk to people, if you can. Try to amass the kind of knowledge in which you can find your place in the world. I’ve found some real solace talking with others about their problems and trying to help them through it.
In the end, it feels strangely good to be able to say, “I’ve been there.”