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one fairly common experience of gifted children is wishing for pain. wishing you had some great big horrible thing in your past so that you can justify the pain you’re in, and so that you’ll deserve help. it’s exhausting and it fucks you up and to anyone out there who feels like they haven’t suffered enough to get help: you’re allowed to want help. you’re in enough pain. you deserve to feel better
holy shit yeah
is this one of those things that everyone actually does?? i just assumed i was a shitty person
Wait that’s normal?
It’s not “normal” as in “everybody feels this way so suck it up and quit whining”.
It’s “normal” as in “many people experience pain, loneliness, anxiety, self-hatred, and other symptoms of mental illness that feel like they ‘don’t count’ because there’s no real Thing they can point to to explain it, but their pain and suffering are real and ought to be taken seriously.”
However, when I say “many people” I actually mean “less than a quarter of the population”. The vast majority of people aren’t in massive internal pain most of the time. If this post resonates with you, I super recommend you look into mental health resources, because nobody deserves to feel this way, and there’s a very real hope that information, understanding, therapy, and/or medication can work together to help you feel better.
Fantasizing about being hurt or dying in some way so that everyone realizes how much pain you’re in isn’t a sign that you’re a terrible person. It’s a sign that YOU’RE IN A LOT OF PAIN. Pain that deserves help and that CAN be helped.
The notes on this post today make me wanna CRY.
…sorry, did you just say the vast majority of people aren’t in massive internal pain most of the time???? what
So here’s where I’m getting my statistics from:
One basic test of massive internal pain is a depression test. Here’s one such questionnaire, the PHQ-9. It lists nine symptoms of depression and asks people how much they have experienced them over the last few weeks. Among them are symptoms like, “Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless,” “Feeling bad about yourself – or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down,” and “Thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way.”
It’s scored by asking people to rate if they’ve experienced the thing: 0, not at all, 1, several days, 2, more than half the days, or 3, nearly every day. Then you get a total score by adding up the ranking of each of the nine symptoms listed. So the lowest possible score is 0 (never experienced any of the symptoms) and the highest possible is 27 (all the symptoms nearly every day). The PHQ-9 considers scores above 5 to indicate mild depression, above 10, moderate, and above 15, moderate to severe depression.
When you run thousands of people through the PHQ-9–for example, if you ask doctor’s offices to ask everyone seeing their doctor for any reason to take it–this is what the score distribution looks like:
Far and away, the most common score is 0. The vast majority of people experience no symptoms of depression in their daily lives. The vast majority of people do not feel hopeless, do not feel like failures, and do not think they would be better off if they were dead in their day-to-day lives.
Depression really is unusual, not the natural state of human existence, and, in the majority of cases, really truly treatable.
FWIW, I think a large part of why people often have the impression that depression, and sometimes even suicidal depression, is normal or common, is because it’s common within their particular social circle. It may be important to bear in mind that LGBTQ people suffer from depression at much higher rates than the general population, especially trans people. I was absolutely floored when I first read that very, VERY few cisgender, straight, etc. people experience suicidal thoughts with any kind of frequency, because almost all of my friends were depressed.
Also honestly: mentally ill people often clump up the same way that queer people will.
My social circle contains my BFF who we also occasionally call our token heterosexual. And also our token neurotypical. (she’s even not quite, as she’s Gifted.)
Some mentally ill people, like some queer people, will indeed find themselves totally isolated in a world of the majority: but if there ARE others like us around? we do tend to clump up. Because our shared point of view, our shared experiences, etc, often make us more relatable to one another
re the depression assessment tool linked upthread, be careful, i feel like the pandemic situation is a potential confounder? situational depression counts as depression so the test is probably accurate in the broad y/n sense regardless, but the scoring rubric may not be calibrated for our times. i just tested as moderate to severe because, like, okay, “little interest or pleasure in doing things,” why yes, this describes my experience on approximately 14 out of the last 14 days, guess i’m scoring the maximum three points on that question! but it’s not actually very interesting information right now because *gestures at fucking everything* i’m fairly sure functionally speaking what i have is mild depression, and, like, not to minimize that, but i’m not in the day-to-day bad way moderate to severe implies.
star_anise thoughts? idk what therapists are doing about this currently.
also i don’t know what i’m even trying to suggest here, i’m mostly just being fretful and overthinky. if you think you might have hitherto unsuspected depression try and make a telehealth appointment and get assessed by a human. primary care can do it, or your area may have a mental health hotline.
Eh, it… kind of is interesting information, actually. Depression and anxiety rates really are spiking because of the pandemic and if they aren’t treated, they can lead to really unhealthy behaviours and comorbid health conditions.
Because while situational depression may often dissipate when the situation changes, it’s still depression now. Especially since this situation might drag out for months—god forbid, maybe even years. It’s not like it’s going to end next week. So we can’t just sit back and say “It’s situational! It’ll be over before you know it!”
What therapists are doing, so far as I can see, is madly scrambling to make therapy accessible to isolated people, and breaking down the doors of insurance companies and governments to try to make them disburse radically more for affordable mental health treatment than they normally do. My licensing body, for example, keeps sending me letter templates they want me to send to my elected officials asking them for more funding. (And it is working, at least here—there’s a lot more free therapy available now than there was in March)