P.S. Please spare me all the “don’t kys” comments, I’m fine, I still need to outlive my abusive parent.
Death is inherently permanent and life is inherently temporary. Any life problem is still ultimately temporary.
And just because a medical condition isn’t “curable” doesn’t mean it isn’t “treatable”, and treatments continue to be developed.
And, with many medical condition, environmental factors can significantly change quality of life.
One can’t definitely know what their personal experience of an incurable medical condition will be in the future.
Edit: what I just said but in meme form:
Oftentimes people ignore that depression is also a product of a system that prioritizes profit over everything else including mental and physical health. You can go to therapy all you want but it doesnt put more money in your pocket or lower prices to lower financial stress, decrease food insecurity, doesnt increase job security and satisfaction, doesnt give you back the time your employment has robbed from you, doesnt improve relationships and your ability to form them, doesnt make third places pop into existence, etc. Therapy cant remove those factors that cause depression in the first place. I have increasingly heard stories of people going to therapy only for the therapists to realize that they literally cant do anything about the stressors because modern life is so systematically stacked against the individual.
Depression can cause permanent changes to your brain and thought patterns which makes it more likely for you to relapse or slip back into negative thought patterns if the right pressures are added, which is constant today. Therapy can provide alternative ways of thinking and coping mechanisms but cant completely remove those pressures which are outside of your control.
People that say that don’t understand the difference between having a bad experience vs having a miserable life.
My depression only lets me see the worst in everything; then the mind falls into a familiar cycle of hating myself and not wanting to exist anymore to stop the pain. This problem is permanent.
This not to be confused with grieving for a failed relationship or losing a job or losing a loved one. Feeling sadness is a typical experience just by being a human. This type of problem is ‘temporary’ even though it can last a long time.
Buddhists say the exact opposite - suicide is a temporary solution to a permanent problem.
Yeah but in Buddhism suicide is basically just using a reroll.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Buddhism.
They do have punishment time in between reincarnations, though I am not sure if suicide is something you’d be punished for or not. 🤔
I thought reincarnating to a “lesser” life form is punishment.
it’s not a punishment.
if you live your human life as a terrible person, then that would be a great shame because you were endowed a chance to more directly change your soul’s karma but you absconded it.
therefore, such souls are given a new chance on the wheel. it’s hard to fuck up being a fly and inconsequential if you die, for example. it’s not exactly a big cosmic timeout to think about what you’ve done, and more is the universe throwing you a bone, saying “hey, you fucked up, i get it. try something more your size for a change.”
anyway i’m not a buddhist but afaik this is generally correct for most of the major branches of it.
God damn it budda, I don’t wanna be reincarnated as a fucking insect 😭
If it makes you feel any better, it shouldn’t last long - most insects live very short lives 🤷♂️
I like this a lot
people are uncomfortable accepting a person’s mental health can be so debilitating and detrimental it makes their life unlivable. treatment resistant depression is a documented illness. each person is fighting a battle only they know the extent of. people want to believe that treatment is a guaranteed success if you do it the right way (this is subject to change from individual to individual). they’ll acknowledge the fact that mental healthcare is a disaster (if you’re in the US) but talk like you’re giving up for ceasing treatment. regardless, the unwillingness to validate suicidal people’s pain is why you hear these kinds of things.
Depression can’t be fully “cured”, but it can be managed. And as people get better at managing it, they get better at dealing with the hopelessness and despair.
The despair comes in waves; handling depression is about pulling yourself out of that temporary hole rather than giving up.
I’d add as well that “managed” doesn’t necessarily just mean “reduced”; it can mean “effectively eliminated” in many cases, with the proper treatment(s). Some people - not all, but some - are able to find balanced solutions without being a slave to medication and side effects, or weird diets, or frequent therapy sessions.
Depression manifests differently in everyone, unfortunately, which means that each person must find the treatments that work best for them. Heck, even for a single person the effective treatments will change over time.
For some people, all that is needed is to find the rights meds or combination of meds, at the right dosage; others may find that simply changing their diet and/or sleep schedule can help; psychotherapy and/or certain learned cognitive techniques may be the answer for many; most people will use several of these.
Regardless, even though your solution may be unique, it’s really important to realize that you’re not the only one going through it, and there have been thousands and thousands that have gone through it and gotten better. Not cured, you’re right - but better. There are many, many of us out there ready and eager to help you get through it, so you don’t have to do it alone.
You cant “cure” hunger, you have to keep eating
Noooooooo! I need to stop my Dihydrogen monoxide addiction 😭
I think this is very colloquial, and I’m gonna take a crack at the interpretation:
Depression means a depressive episode, or a depressive disorder (featuring those episodes). Usually depression can’t be cured or healed, but you can go to therapy some people manage to accomodate for it or have preventative measures in place.
Depression can be triggered by lots of things or nothing at all, but iirc there’s a genetic component to it.
For all those events that trigger it, those don’t last forever and maybe the depression is dependent on the trigger. If so, killing yourself means there’s a life without depression you will never know. You could view the depression as temporary, and killing yourself as permanent.
With the genetic predispositions and randomly triggered depressive episodes or depressive disorders that last forever it’s harder. However, what if you find a way to deal with it, but you need to get over the worst part of your depressive episode? Then you might kill yourself, and you never know there’s a normal life out there you could have lived.
I think this is what people are getting at. That you never know whether it just took not killing yourself on that one day to get back on track and maybe live a more fulfilling life right after.
That said, there’s plenty of bad situations where things only get resolved if you manage to physically change your habits or social circle. For these, if you’re forced into your circumstances, I can totally say people arguing that there’s no way out. And I should also point out that if you’re killing yourself, you have not given up, but much more importantly, society has most likely failed you in multiple significant ways.
For some folks depression is at least partially hormonal; and changes in age/diet/environment cause the episodes to really drop off.
That isn’t to say that this saying is fair/true/useful. It is not an argument that I like - some temporary problems are still worth solutions with side effects, and I think people should think/talk it through.
I’m curious who says depression isn’t curable. I hadn’t heard that before.
Chronic depression sufferer here. My perspective on it is you don’t cure it so much as you learn how to live with it.
Most western sources say that depression is “treatable” but not “curable” meaning its like cancer, it can go into remission but it can always come back just like cancer.
So far, AFIAK, only in PRC they says its “curable”, but I that’s like an outlier, and its probably due to the culture of denying mental health isssues.
Interesting. I’d never heard that before. I totally understand the point.
If it gives you or anyone else hope I was diagnosed and institutionalized over three and a half decades ago and I’d assumed I’d been “cured”. Honestly I don’t even give it much thought anymore. I haven’t needed therapy or been prescribed any medication for it in decades and I’ve been able to lead a full and happy life.
Hope you get what you need ❤️
You may never be free of it, but once you find a treatment that works for you, it’s like the depression isn’t there. You can then potentially treat it forever and it won’t affect you.
It starts with whether you consider mental disorders, such as depression as an illness or not. In western literature we are moving away from the illness aspect, because of its linguistic implication.
Illnesses are often thought of as being curable and have a foundation in something that causes the illness, like a virus, bacteria or similar causes. Whereas depression causes are manifold, from the light levels during winter, over learned behaviour to the very system of society. Which is why we consider depression not to be an illness but a condition.
As an analogy, you would not classify bad eyesight as an illness but a condition, there is no cure but there’s treatment, glasses. In some cases the treatment can be lasers and surgery which fix the condition, but generally speaking the same goes for depression. You can treat it with different methods, some can remove the cause and others require constant treatment.
Changing social and/or material conditions can relieve it. Cure is a strong word in this comtest since adulthood inherently gonna have stress. It is a out magic it but more importantly being able to do it, which the key.
Because feeling suicidal is rarely permanent. Hope you get through this
Having a life worth living is rarely temporal
depends on which kind of depression, major depression or clinically diagnosed needs treatment from mental health professional and medicaiton, because there might be an actual chemical imbalance. Panic attacks, anxiety epsiodes co-occur with depression.
temporary, is like when you get sad, or disappointed because something happened at that moment.
Your premise is fallacious. No mental illness is curable. No, you can’t cure depression. You can’t cure happiness, either. You can get treatments that will take away either one.
There’s no virus that causes depression. No bacterial infection that can be wiped out.
Depression can be induced in lots of different ways: environmental, chemical, habitual, etc.
Depression can be alleviated in lots of different ways: medicine, food, exercise, etc.
Depression is a function of our brains. The brain isn’t infected, it’s operating outside of “normal” parameters. It doesn’t need a cure it needs tuning. That requires adjustments to behaviors and chemistry. Sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error to find out what adjustments need to be made. The vast majority of people need help discovering the right adjustments.
You have to keep trying.
Depression goes away after a while and can be managed.
