Depression is not just a Bummer

"I'm depressed," we tend to lament pretty easily on any given day or week -- at least I know I've done this. Maybe we're low on funds in our checking account or we didn't get something we wanted or the dishwasher is on the fritz -- again. But with the suicide of Robin Williams earlier this week, I can't help but think we've lost the meaning of this very important word -- depression.

Depression is not just a bummer. It's not that blip in your day or your week. It's not that you don't have enough money to go to dinner with your friends, or that your car needs $500 worth of repairs or that you have to make due with last winter's coat. Yet every day we utter the words I'm depressed about these sometimes small or annoying or frustrating things.

Perhaps we should save the word depression for true, serious depression. Just so that we can honor and acknowledge what it is.

For people who've never been depressed, it's hard to imagine the truly gray pallor that seeps over the life of the depressed person all the time. I once read an article about a woman who was so desperate to get out of her decades-long depression that she allowed her doctor to perform experimental brain surgery to try to figure out exactly where in the brain the depression was coming from. As he touched various parts of her brain -- while she was awake, no less -- she was to tell him if she noticed anything different.  And at one point, she did. "Who turned the lights up?" she asked. She felt the pall lift.

People with depression don't want to be depressed. They also just can't snap out of it. They can't enjoy the things you and I enjoy -- the movies or a good meal or time with friends and family. They don't understand that you want them to live when the depression tells them not to. They don't understand how it will hurt you if the depression tells them to end their life. They are not being selfish. They are suffering beyond what any of us can imagine.

We need to live in a world where it's okay to talk about depression and what it really means. We need to live in a world where it's okay to be depressed, and no one will tell you just stop. And let's decide to live in a world where we don't say that we're depressed when we're just having a bit of a bummer of a day. Let's honor depression for everything it is. And everything we wish it wasn't.