CHRONIC DEPRESSION

Chronic Depression

When we talk about depression, it’s important to differentiate between the two types: major depression and chronic depression.

Major Depression is debilitating. It’s what people tend to think of depression — laying in bed for hours, crying uncontrollably, feeling numb and apathetic. It’s also episodic, meaning that there’s a clear start-and-end point, and often an identifiable trigger for the depression.

Chronic Depression is insidious. It’s characterized by many years of low mood, fatigue, poor self-esteem, and de-prioritization of self-care. It’s chronic, meaning that it’s unclear when the depression started or what triggers it.

To visualize depression, imagine wearing a dirty pair of glasses.

If you have major depression, you know that your glasses are dirty and you’re working to get them cleaned. Whether the trigger is a break-up, transition, loss, or any other stressor — you can see that your glasses are dirty and you have a non-depressed baseline you’re trying to get back to.

If you have chronic depression, you’ve been living with dirty glasses for so long that you can’t even remember what it’s like for them to be clean. Depression is your baseline and it never even comes to mind that there could be something wrong with your glasses.

There’s a passive hopelessness to chronic depression that convinces you there’s nothing you can do to feel better. There’s a deep-seated shame that tells you that you deserve to feel how you do and you’re foolish for thinking you deserve better. After all, there’s something uniquely wrong with you.

Hallmarks of chronic depression include:

• Unrelenting feeling of not being good enough, thinking you provide little value to others

• Hypervigilance; always being on-guard, hearing critical intentions in the things people tell you

• Comparing yourself to other people, feeling like you never measure up

• Not putting yourself out there because you don’t want to be rejected or look ‘dumb’

• Time has to be spent being productive or else you feel guilty

Arriving at therapy is a big step for someone with chronic depression, as doing so challenges the deep-seated belief that they can’t be helped.

Depth therapy is uniquely suited for treating chronic depression, as we don’t try to change the way you see things, but instead we try to help you understand why you see things the way you do.

We can help you take your emotions seriously and see that you’re not broken; in fact, there’s a perfectly good reason why you feel the way you do.

With chronic depression there’s no amount of convincing or re-framing that will make a difference.

It’s about understanding why you feel so poorly about yourself, where do those messages come from? When you can see that you’ve been basing your self-evaluation on someone else’s criteria, you can start to let go of that worldview.

We change the way we view ourselves when we enter into a relationship where we trust that someone can give us honest feedback. That’s what it means to be seen, to have someone understand our intentions and why we move through the world the way we do.

For folks with chronic depression, the work is counterintuitive, it’s to begin believing the positive qualities people see in them.