depression help: Is it so simple? - Help.com

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An interesting post.

If you are in darkness, there are ways out of it. Really! I spent alot of time feeling suicidal when I was 18-19, but I became a Christian and life got much better.

Do you want to talk more about this?

And I have spent hours reading-
Of depression and the cause of self-destructive tendencies
“A rock you can step over.” How is it so simple?

It’s not simple when things are not understood. And even when the solution is understood, which is by nature a simplification from the chaos of the problems, it is usually “easier said than done”. For example, if I suggested to you that you could overcome depression by doing some web reading about “how to overcome depression” I would most likely mean that if you opened every page from a search like that, trying to at least slightly comprehend the meaning of each page, for extensive periods of time each day, then you would probably have useful practical understanding starting in about a week, with actual lasting improvements in life being even less predictable. On the other hand I think if you stuck with such a completely and utterly simple solution, of dedicating yourself to studying how to overcome depression, for an two hours a day, then this brute force intellectual method would enable you to achieve that in a month or two.

That may seem a lot of effort for very little life change, but depression can be life-threatening. Devoting your whole life to overcome it is not that unreasonable.

Savanna_ wrote:

mindhealer wrote:

That may seem a lot of effort for very little life change, but depression can be life-threatening. Devoting your whole life to overcome it is not that unreasonable.

I understand.. but is it worth it..?

If you value anything, then, yes, because your values come from your life and living, so anything you do that makes you feel and be more thrivingly alive meets the need of all values your living creates.

[…here’s the next stuff I wrote, that didn’t post for some reason, so I’ll try to rewrite it, in hopes there’s something helpful there…]

I think it’s just as important to look at your question, “is it worth it?” This could be a symptom of the feelings of worthlessness of depression, rather than any interest in valid information. Do you understand? If your own mind is full of pain, then your logical thoughts are also biased and distorted by that, even if you are an intelligent and careful thinker, as you seem to me to be. So, a solution is to not rely upon your own thoughts about the situation. Trust and honor your own thoughts and feelings but realize that helpful solutions to make life better might be contained in the thoughts of others. Those thoughts of others might not make much sense, and probably won’t at each step of the way if you’re going into the unknown of changing your life, but at each step you can find what feels best to you, gradually make sense of it then move on.

Sorry if that writing is too incoherent. It didn’t make much sense the first time I wrote it, and I just tried to quickly rewrite it. But I felt I should explain more of what I was meaning.

Savanna_ wrote:
And that while I should value my own thoughts, feeling miserable could change the way I see things and I should try to ask others for their opinion and see how it fits in with my own reasoning?

No, if you can identify anything you wish to achieve but don’t really know how, such as, the example I was using before, “overcome depression”, it is usually your own thoughts and feelings that hold you trapped, so while it is important to honor them as being uniquely your thoughts and feelings, their relation to enacting a solution is more as a stumbling block, or something that would prevent you from understanding what the people are saying who are presenting solutions. But you just go on the principle of fiction. It is possible to have willing suspension of disbelief, which is to say that it is possible to really believe in completely contradictory visions of reality. So that’s how you enact a solution that is beyond your own belief system, you find someone with the answers, enact a willing suspension of disbelief so that your beliefs don’t sabotage the process too much, and try to learn — not through reasoning and seeing whose logic will win, but by following with your imagination, the guidance of people who may have solutions and answers that you don’t have. It’s not a philosophical thing at all, just find every solution out there about an issue and absorb them until it all brings the solution into your life.

I’m just babbling, venting, ranting, wordling It’s just a poem, pay no attention to it.

Why was I suicidal? I was at university and struggling with life in general. I have Asperger’s Syndrome. When I was young I struggled with relationships as I didn’t know what was acceptable and what was not. I suspect I was a pain for others to engage with too!

I became a Christian because I went to a church (so what!), saw people worshipping (so what!)… but God was there (I so wanted God!). I have found God to be good, even though He sometimes wants me to do things I don’t want to do. (As God, he knows better than I do and things work out better when I am obedient).