I think one of the most valuable Mental Illness Skills™ is teaching your brain not overgeneralize. I have a lot of bad days, and usually when I look back on them they were bad for a situational reason. I skipped breakfast or didn’t sleep well the previous night or have a crazy pile of stuff to get done or didn’t take my meds or broke my phone and can’t listen to music.
But it never feels in the moment like that’s why I’m having a bad day. Without fail, it feels like my life is permanently and forever in a miserable equilibrium of exhaustion and stress, and all the good days are the anomalies, and nothing will ever get better until the human race accidentally annihilates ourselves.
And – it’s good sometimes to treat your emotions like they’re telling you something. Sometimes, you feel awful because you’re in an unsustainable situation, and your brain is trying to tell you ‘hey, we can’t do this, we’ve got to change something’, and it’s much better to listen than to get mad at yourself. But – sometimes you feel awful because you didn’t eat breakfast. In my experience that’s honestly more common. And you can drive yourself into a hell of a spiral if you treat your experiences as pointing to existential truths about your life and your future, when they’re produced by having stayed up late last night.
My checklist for myself is: “Is life fundamentally devoid of meaning? Okay:
– did I eat breakfast?
– did I have a cup of coffee?
– did I get eight hours of sleep last night?
– did I take my meds?
– did I snuggle a small child?
– did I have a quiet commute listening to soaring music about space travel?
And:
– did something awful recently happen in real life that I’m still grieving and processing?
– did I spend more than an hour in the last day fretting about/trying to assist friends who are homeless or trapped in abusive homes?”
It’s always one of those, for me. Your list might look different. But I really think it’s good to have one.
(My brain offers the interpretation “look at that long list! the fact that all those things have to go right to have a good day is proof we are DOOMED TO SUFFER”. But I manage all of these things for myself on nearly every day, and that’s a perfectly good path to a good life, and my brain would agree if I’d …taken my meds and eaten breakfast today, oops.)
Ah yes, we have reached the time when everyone posts bullshit articles about research on depression
okay look.
If depressive realism were real, what would that mean?
What things would depressed people be ‘right’ about more than non-depressed people? What would a message of ‘depressed people are more accurate’ be useful for? what would the potential tradeoffs be? How certain do you want to be before you tell depressed people that their understanding of the world is accurate, and more so than non-depressed people?
How do you feel about the times depressed people feel like suicide is relieving a burden on others? or excessive guilt? or feelings of worthlessness? Have you so tailored your message so that you don’t accidentally just tell people that they’re right to hate themselves? How the hell would we even know what it means to say ‘depressed people see the world more clearly’? Have you thought about what a compelling study would look like that proved this?
No, perhaps you just shared this article, which buries the lede of it doesn’t fucking replicate paragraphs in. don’t write an article about a thing we don’t think really happens based on a 1979 paper.
Thank you for this! I clicked the link, and as a layman I’d totally have swallowed that misinformation without your post. And I think that it would’ve made me feel more resistant to help during my next depressive episode. In fact, I’ve heard that misinformation before (but didn’t know the term for it) and it did make me more resistant to help. That probably doesn’t help allay your anger, but anyway.
There isn’t even a question mark in that headline. Really irresponsible.
Question for you, which you’re free to ignore if you lack the bandwidth: How does CBT actually handle the fact that some negative and harmful beliefs aren’t distortions and have a clear basis in fact? Does it ignore them, or teach the patient not to focus on them, or is the premise that everything is kind of subjective and can be cast in a negative or positive light?
almost verbatim, this is how I explain it to my clients:
there are two things we care about in this therapy: truth, and salience. sometimes, unhappy, unpleasant, or unflattering things are true. sometimes you do fuck up at work. sometimes people ARE irritated by you. this is a fact about living.
your brain might be predisposed to believe the unflattering or unpleasant things though, so we want to interrogate claims on two axes:
-is this true?
-how much time do I think is reasonable for me to be thinking about this? / how much bandwidth does it make sense for this to take up?
so yeah, it might be that you screwed up a big project at work. assuming that’s really true, and you checked, some other questions*:
-is your brain being accurate about how much other people are thinking about this in relation to you? -when is it useful to be thinking about this? will things be improved by thinking about this when you are with your partner? will things be improved by staying up all night feeling bad about it? if yes, why? what are the tradeoffs? has it worked before? -is your brain balancing this against your other experiences at work? -is your brain generalizing this to how you are As A Person? -would your life be improved by thinking about this less? if no, what’s your sense of what the limit of thinking about this is? 80% of the time? 90? How did you figure this out? How will you know when you reach that limit, and what will you do then?
I think there are real, not fake answers to these questions that can be complicated. I also think it is extremely easy to fall into “this is TRUE and thus I am TERRIBLE FOR ALL TIME” even when you are an extremely smart person who has heard of CBT and cognitive distortions.
*the canny reader will notice that these are all cognitive distortions! I’m just being a little more sophisticated than “is this belief about how much I messed up/am hated true?” I am not being unusually clever, this is pretty normal. People who still perseverate on trying to find the Exactly Correct answers to these questions may find Acceptance and Commitment Therapy a better fit than CBT.
I really like seeing your personal posts, even the whiny angsty ones, and particularly the strange boring ones. I like these little windows into your lives even if I’ve never seen pictures of you and all I really know is that we like a few of the same tv shows. Please continue to let me read your to do lists and your conversations with strange relatives.
@elodieunderglass is that a leucistic bear cub? (looks a bit dark for that, but it’s so much lighter than its parent I can’t imagine it’s normal variation)
When people suffer, it often makes them into worse people.
It sucks. I know it sucks. It is quite possibly the single most unjust thing about this universe of ours, which is filled from top to bottom with soul-breaking injustices. If you yourself are suffering, it’s pretty much the most insulting thing you can hear, a cosmic insult-added-to-injury where the authors of your pain are sneering at you for retroactively having deserved it.
And yet it’s true, for basically any sane definition of “worse” than can be applied to human beings.
…I was going to have a very long essay here about all the different ways in which this phenomenon can manifest. I don’t think I need it, and I don’t think you need to see it. You can generate any number of examples perfectly well on your own, even if they’re not things that you’d ever want to say or even think.
The point is that, as with any Big Truth of the Human Condition, you’re not going to be able to engage with the world in an enlightened and principled way until you own up to it and face it down.
Don’t worry about fault or responsibility or moral dessert. Don’t worry about how much you’re supposed to blame the poor suffering soul for the poison fruits of his pain. Blame is a stupid sideline, more useful for crafting rhetorical barbs than for actually figuring out what to do.
But make yourself remember –
* Alleviating the suffering of bad people is a useful tool for making them into better people, or at least for preventing them from becoming even-worse people. This is true even if they don’t deserve it, which as postulated they presumably don’t.
* The fact that people are suffering…or the fact that their suffering is unjust…is not a contradiction or counter to the claim that they are bad, or that the things they are doing is bad. It is supporting evidence for such a claim.
* If you decide that you are going to dedicate yourself wholly to fighting on behalf of those who are suffering – or, especially, to fighting on behalf of some specific subset of those who are suffering – you are constantly going to have to deal with the fact that your clients are doing terrible things, and that by reasonable standards they’re often much worse people than the people who are making them suffer.
* Redemptive stories about the morally-purifying nature of harsh ordeals aren’t always false, but they’re usually false.
this is why ‘punishing evil’ is a very poor life goal that won’t really make the world a better place. ‘increasing happiness’ or ‘understanding people’ or ‘reducing suffering’ is a much more practical and effective goal.
my favorite thing about watching american TV shows dubbed in German is how everyone has to speak extremely quickly to fit in all the extra dialogue
… elderly people keep telling me I talk way too fast, now I wonder if some of that is due to TV consumption during my formative years that made me pick up the habit.
OTOH I never felt like people were talking uncommonly slowly when I switched to watching series/TV in English, rather the other way around. Maybe it’s just some difficulty with watching things in one’s second language?
Do you feel that radio hosts or people on non-dubbed German TV also speak very quickly?
i know ‘revelations’ was either political satire or a mushroom trip, but it’d be hilarious if it was literally true
this kaiju comes stomping up the beach swearing up a blue streak and people are like “dude listen to that motherfucker GO, we should make him our king”
exCUSE me, someone didn’t read right – it’s not the dragon who swears, it’s the beast called forth by the dragon!
You know, the leopard-like one with ten horns with blasphemies written on them and seven heads, bear paws and a lion-mouth (very, very leopard-like; also, what do the other six heads have instead of mouths? what is the horn distribution like if there are ten horns and seven heads, are we talking five heads with double horns and two without, or three with double horns and four with one each, or…).
Also the beast isn’t king, the beast is just worshipped. The dragon is the king and worshipped.
Omphaloskeptomai 