What do you do when life gets you down

[Angrboda]

That makes a lot of sense, apophenia. When I was first getting depressed, there was no rhyme and reason to it. I couldn't make sense of anything I was feeling, nor could I justify why I felt that way. It wasn't until I experienced a real tragedy that sent me spiraling into a very deep depression that I became resolved to learn and benefit from that experience. Essentially, I was a pessimist determined to become an optimist.

As to whether depression "comes for a reason" or not, I'd say different people have different responses and different types. (The affective disorders might more profitably be looked upon as a cluster of disorders with overlapping symptomology. As a person with schizo-affective disorder, my illness is a mix of bipolar symptoms and schizophrenic ones, where most people think of the two as completely distinct disorders.) Anyway, I'm wandering off point. For some symptoms and episodes, and some people, they can tie episodes to triggers. Migraines run in my family. One of my sisters is able to intuit that her headaches are coming. Me, I never could detect any pattern. My headaches were as unpredictable as the weather. My depressions are much the same. They just come. No sense or reason to them. And generally no predicting when they will leave again. I suspect this is generally true of the more organic or endogenous depressions, though this is not to deny that even then, behavior can modify symptoms. Alcohol, a well known depressant, can complicate and precipitate episodes. I used to use a sedative with a well known propensity for "depression hangovers" — a tendency for the CNS depressive activity of the sedative to linger long into the next day in terms similar to a depressive episode. Caffeine and stress are other potential complicators.

In general, I think "looking for reasons" is a part of trying to find something to hang responsibility for our depressed behavior on. Society has historically looked upon mental illness generally, and depression specifically, as a moral problem: they just need to buck up and start dealing, and if they don't, they simply aren't fit in character or temperament. I think "the reasons game" is a way of trying to have to face your own internalized stigma and accept that depression is an illness, and nobody is weak or at fault for being depressed. Yes we need to apply self-criticism and insight to know when we aren't really giving it our all and trying, but people who are actually depressed are in the worst position to be doing this, as they are already blaming themself for anything and everything that is or might happen. It's a paradox, but one that I think, perhaps, without thinking it through, is best resolved by the maxims: trust yourself, and if you can't trust yourself, trust others who know you to tell you what is what.

-rae/apo