So, I’ll just say that I’m very happy a few people understood my point. I sincerely believe that establishing a standard of how people “should” feel and how “happy they should be” – and treating every minor deviation of the norm – causes a huge lot of suffering and anxiety, not to mention that it completely disrespects individual differences.

Treating every minor (attention to the word “minor”, for christ sake!) bruise (in the mind or in the body) may not always be the way to go. (unless by “treating” you mean, in some cases, “learn to live with a few things you can’t change,” in which case I completely agree)

Anyway, it took me a long time to figure this out. If you don’t agree, that’s fine.

1) the absolute incapacity that a clinical depression can cause; it’s a *brain disease*, and it can be *seen* in MRI scanning. Try to read up a little, or go visit a psychiatrist and ask about this. Again, clinical depression is a *disease*. Try getting used to thinking about it that way. It’s not “being in a funk”, or being in a bad mood”, or “not feeling like doing anything”; it’s a *whole body disease that often leads people to *suicide* if not treated. Would you like to see a loved one go through this and take a chance that they’ll survive it? I wouldn’t, because I have seen what this disease can do, up close and personal, twice.

2) How *minor* depression that goes on for years, untreated, never reaching clinical proportions, can so thwart a person’s ability to function that an entire life can be 90% wasted for lack of access to simple therapies that are as effective or almost as effective as drugs? Have you any idea that many people who smoke, or drink, or use recreational drugs, or eat too much are actually treating themselves with substances that will cause them physical harm in the long run – and more expensive medical care in the long run.

Sure, there are ups and downs in life, and not every sad or bad or angry mood shuold be subjected to ‘formal” treatment, but there are *10′s-of-millions* of people, and I would venture to say probably in the low *billions* worldwide, who at one time or another suffer from real psychological and depressive malaise to a degree that ranges from life-altering, to life-ending. Why not treat that? Why not let people know there is a pathway to help them feel better? Is that being weak? On the contrary; that’s being *smart*.

Treating even minor mental illness is *the right thing to do*. It will help sufferers be better parents, better workers, better members of society – and they won’t lose the ability to “handle the hard times”. On the contrary, they will *gain* the ability to handle the normal ups and downs of daily life in a way that doesn’t lead them to addictive dependencies, obsessive self- absorption ,or outright self-destruction (while taking others along with them).

In a word, have *empathy* for those who suffer, including one’s self. Being “tough” won’t cure a cancer, nor will it cure a clinical or lifelong dysthymia (low level depression). Why? Because both cancer and depression are *diseases* that can now be seen and measured with medical instruments. It’s about time the ignorance about mental illness stopped, because that ignorance leads to ineffective self-treattments, as well as social perceptions about those who have mental illness that cause those with mental illness to be victimized twice – once by their illness, and again by those who should help them, and empathize with them.

When someone is depressed their brain is actually not workiing in the “normal” way. It does not matter whether it is from a significant loss or a genetic predisposition, their brain is producing reactions to life differently than when they were not depressed. The neurotransmitters and electrical signals in the brain are stimulating, over stimulating or not stimulating different parts of the brain. (Depends on the type of depression) When someone is grieving a loved one, a lost job, bankruptcy, loss of face, or the end of a marriage, their brain is not working the same way it did before the loss. The degrees of depression vary, but its effects on the brain our measurable.

Luckily, we know more about depression than we did ten years ago. We have numerous effective treatments. Unfortunately, in our country treating a brain with an illness has a stigma. While treating a heart with an illness deserves everyones support, attention and resources.

Our refusal to adequately treat brain illness, leads to suicides, self-medication (sometimes drug addiction), failures in personal and professional lives, homelessness and sometimes incareration.
In the mental health community the standard joke is the largest population of institutionalized mental patients in the LA County Jail.

I ask you to rethink the acceptance model. Better yet, next time you think your having a heart attack – just accept it. Tell your family, yes the tingling in my arm will go away with time if we all just accept it as normal. If you have a child born with a hole in their heart, don’t seek treatment. That’s embarassing, accept it. Maybe a few leaches will work.

We only know a small amount about the brain, but within the next 10 years even you will see a sick brain deserves treatment just like any other organ in our body.

Being expected to function at 100% of our capacity 100% of the time throughout our lives – that’s cruel. And that’s what I meant.

I believe MichW understood what I meant.

Additionally, plenty of people commit suicide without ever having appeared as debilitatingly depressed as you set as the standard. Should people try to intervene on the part of someone who’s going through the motions of life while miserable and hopeless?

Being bedridden from depression sucks. It sucks quite a lot more than mere emotional agony and one’s own unpredictable behavior and mood swings, I’ll agree with that. I’d take a screaming suicidal fit over being bedridden any day. But someone who can be a productive worker yet derive no pleasure from life, rely on alcohol, and just be a general dark, stormy presence, get involved in abusive relationships, blablabla–if they can benefit from treatment, we all benefit if they get it.

@Barbara Axt

You sound ignorant. Treatment is dealing with the disorder. Treatment for me right now involves valerian root, self-care, social networking, and developing life skills after growing up with severe, untreated mental illness. So much of what I believed and obsessed about before simply isn’t relevant or accurate to the “real world”, where I’m gonna have to provide myself with food and shelter and try to be a decent friend to the other people in my life. If I hadn’t treated my mental illness as an illness and sought help from others who’d experienced it and from services directed toward it, I’d still be caught in the mess of self-blame and criticism based on values I don’t even hold anymore.

There is a degree of fear that you can’t simply deal with. You have to buckle down and just wait it out, when you’re seeing demons or seeing spiders everywhere when they’re not really there. You spend weeks unable to touch anything on your floor because you think it might be contaminated. You go mute whenever you’re around people other than your family, who you can speak to in monosyllables, or the couple trusted friends you might see once every few weeks. Turning a corner evokes the same emotional response as stepping off a platform high up in a tree.

Anxiety does other things, too–you starve yourself to 60% of your recommended body weight. You start picking out your body hairs with tweezers and end up picking at your skin and go all the way to the muscle. You spend hours in a trancelike state in front of a mirror, miming holding a gun to your head, every day. You wake up hours before you have to get up and spend hours trapping in agonizing loops of thought, and can’t break out on time to get to school or work. You procrastinate on homework so much you’re failing classes where you’re making 98/100 on the exams. You’re constantly nauseous because you compulsively eat every time you think about doing homework. You don’t have any concept of doing anything for pleasure–everything you do is a compulsive reaction to your own fears.

A lot of people might have some of these symptoms, and you could deal with them fine. I’ve been doing it for years, and it isn’t really that bad. But when they dominate your life to the extent that you decide it’s worthwhile to try treatment–well, then that’s when you should try treatment. Which isn’t without its risks and costs, so you can also later decide to discontinue if it doesn’t seem like the benefits outweigh the costs.

The entire idea of studying mental illness and developing resources for those with psychological problems is to find out and facilitate the best way of dealing with them. Does it matter whether those problems are considered debilitating by our work-obsessed culture? “Lesser” problems cause aggression and miscommunication. They contribute to alcohol, abuse, codependence, and poverty. They worsen physical health. They create environments where children can grow up hopeless. They restrain creativity and self-fulfillment. I agree that there’s serious problems when it comes to how professionals, researchers, and the public describe these issues, and that ambiguity’s not going away any time soon. But I highly doubt people realizing, “Hey, I shouldn’t be miserable all the time!” and “I can talk to someone about the emotional reasons for why I’m failing socially, academically, in work, or at home,” is invalidating. Someone with an experience of mild depression and who uses the word depression to describe such chronic mood states may not know about serious cases of depression or what that means for the sufferers, but who seriously thinks that their experiences will make them *less* likely to listen to the needs of someone with major depression? They’re consciously and unconsciously striving to live up to the role they’ve put themselves in–someone who accepts mental illness as valid and wants to spread its message.

And someone with mild depression who doesn’t understand why, for instance, it took me seven months to change a lightbulb and who wants me to “just do” something isn’t any worse than they would’ve been before they adopted the word and a faux-understanding of depression–back then they would’ve told me the exact same thing.