Personally I do believe in medication, because it works. It makes me more functional, it means I can eat food and taste it, it means I don't go into a horrible autopilot. It means I can sleep and get up in the morning. However despite having medication, clinical depression is absolutely exhausting, it fills most of your time in managing it and trying to cope with which mood you will be in. Then you get into managing diet and trying to deal with tiredness, a tiredness which has no bearing on sleep or exercise or light or season. Aside from the more eccentric other aspect of it, cause or whatever, you also have the joy of social stigma to deal with. The unfailing belief that most people have that they have had depression (like experienced extreme stress, SAD or been down in the dumps). Resulting in their case to having moved out of the situation and therefore believing that depression is something from which you can 'pull yourself together' from or alternately 'cheer up'. Of course this is total bullshit, because the reality is that clinical depression / unipolar depression is the result of chemical imbalance and learnt behaviour.
Ultimately while "not a real illness" in that you haven't broken your leg, it is a very real illness. We don't live in the fucking dark ages anymore. Mental illness is real and it doesn't matter how many times you plug someone's butt with garlic and tell them to cheer up. It's a crippling affliction. Not just some moaner who needs to get their shit together.
Personally i struggle every day to manage my depression by working extremely hard at it. It's not easy and the saddest thing about it is that I don't have the chance to opt out, or decide to get over it. I'm not feeling sorry for myself by posting this, just venting frustration in that I don't have the chance to do all the things my brain wants to do. There isn't an option NOT to feel like this. And I find it intensely sad (not depressing) that people fail to make that understanding that it's not a lifestyle choice, laziness, apathy or malaise. It's just like a broken leg, except it won't heal. Anyway, I'm going to pull myself together and go chop some wood.
