Being depressed can cause a tremendously weird distortion in how I perceive things. Words can be twisted (by my own mind!) to sound worse than they were as they were issued from the mouth of their speaker. Situations seem hopeless even when there’s really a solution with a few strategic moves and some accommodation. It’s really frightening to look at these times and feel a lack of confidence in my own ability to know what’s really going on.
I got to thinking about depression again today because my brother is in a terrible funk with his own depression.  My depression sucks, but it seems to me that his is an enormous sewer of shit in which he’s unable to keep his head above water. In fact it often seems like he pulls his head under the surface just to punish himself.

He’s just lost his job after a severe depressive incident in which he took several weeks off from work.  This seems illegal to me, but apparently he only gets a year-to-year contract (non union, naturally) in the catholic private school in which he’s worked for the past 8 years.  So, though they are allowing him to work out the rest of his school year (not teaching, incidentally, but just killing time, proctoring exams,  monitoring halls, etc.), they have not renewed his contract for next year.

If he wasn’t so depressed and seeing the world through shit colored glasses, he’d recognize that he’s a bright, talented individual with a lot to offer the world. He would realize that he is soon to be free from a job that he’s hated for years.  He would see the enormous opportunity that lies before him: several months in which to polish up his resume, change his life course, find a new job, go back to school, or whatever.

But I don’t think any of that seems likely to him.  What he likely sees when he looks to the future is joblessness, inability to support his family (three kids, ages 11, 9, and 3), shame and rejection at every interview, humiliating minimum wage work (he’s done the factory production line work before) and eventually, suicide.

Clearly he needs help. I don’t know if he’s getting it, and he and I are no longer close - either geographically or emotionally.  Being hospitalized earlier this year was probably the closest he could get to getting help. But as with many illnesses, sometimes treatment can be costly, inconvenient, and involve unfortunate side effects.  And when you start to get better, you often don’t realize how much farther you still have to go. Many people, when not properly given good follow up, stop taking their medication and stop their therapy sessions - a huge mistake.

I’m looking at my entry now and wondering how bleak his future is going to be. So much depends on one’s perspective, point of view, luck, and supportive families (his wife is a very unlikely source of support, to put it mildly).   Mental illness still carries such a huge burden of stigma; many people don’t understand the huge difference between feeling depressed and being mired in major depression.

I’m currently somewhere above my worst in the land of depression.  But having lost my own sense of trust in my own perspective, I’ll suspend my judgment of my brother’s situation for now.  I don’t want to look through my own distorted lens of depression; the picture seems bad enough with it.