He's not spot on. Depression is depression. And the answer is to talk to somebody. That's actually the cold hard evidence-based answer. Talk. To somebody.
I've thought a lot about depression over the years. I also
talked to a Psychiatrist about my melancholy for over 20 years. He has told me there are basically three differnt
types of depression; situational(your life sucks), dysthymia(low level depression, that seems to linger),
clinical depression(you want to end it all).
Supposedly, drugs are effective in clinical depression--I
don't think I have been that depressed.
My life flew off the rails years ago. I went from a guy who
thought life, school, and sucess came to easy; to a guy who
couldn't walk in a grocery store because I felt dizzy around
people, and had daily panic attacks. Over the years, the
anxiety improved, but then depression set in. Sleep became
reversed. I became an alohoholic, etc.
Well, I don't have any sure fire cures, but I do know this you will get better with age. There were times when I thought it just isn't going away, but the bad feelings do
go away. You will forget just how bad you felt. I spent
about a year in Therapy(2 x week). I'm not sure how nuch it helped, but it did alleviate some concerns I had at the time. I didn't have any big break throughs, but I'm glad I
went. I found the more a Psychologist charged, or the fact
that they had a Ph.D didn't matter whatsoever. The worst
person I saw was a $400/hr Psychiatrist. The best was a 15.00/hr student working on their Masters. As to medication, you will need to see a Psychiatrist; shop around! Personally, the only medications that worked in my case were highly addictive, but they were better on my body than alcohol I was abusing
All I can say is you will feel better, and you are not alone.
I'm sorry about your experience and hope you keep improving your situation. I do have one question: you say you went from someone who was quite ok to someone who was having a hard time and then you say you know things will get better with age; how do you make sense of this? I'm asking because some people do get more anxious with age so my understanding is things tend to get worse with age but, on a somewhat positive note, you will eventually learn how to deal with it with age as well. So, given you can only work on one of the sides, the end net result can be positive.
What does suck though is you migth spend a big part of your life fighting against yourself. That's something I still have a hard time thinking about, it's hard to accept it.
Yup. I think the real problem here is the overly tight coupling of achievement and self-esteem. You have to separate the two, because otherwise you're stuck on a treadmill with no escape.
I think Elizabeth Gilbert put together an accessible TED talk about this, and it's also in parallel with Albert Ellis's idea of Conditional-Self-Esteem vs Unconditional-Self-Acceptance. All you can hold yourself to is a commitment to showing up and doing the work. The results are almost irrelevant.
