There are different kinds of depression; obviously in some cases there are biological sources. But the way I had non-biologically-based depression described to me was this.
We all have filters -- things come to us that are good, bad, or indifferent, but we only really pay attention to a fairly small proportion of it -- the rest we filter out.
But for whatever reason, sometimes our filters become skewed -- we start to filter out good things (or interpret them as neutral), we start to interpret neutral things as bad, and we interpret bad things as *really* bad. When that happens it's often a positive feedback loop -- because what's coming in seems mostly bad, it reinforces the filter.
I suspect that there probably were a number of good things going on in your life during that time, but that you weren't really paying attention to them, or you were interpreting them less positive or more negative than they needed to be. Saying that the time you enjoyed with your friends was "tempered with the knowledge that this was temporary" seems to me like it's probably an example of that.
What a psychologist or therapist can do (after determining that it's not biologically based), is to give you help you recognize when you're doing the filtering, and to give you the tools to change how you think about things.
I'd highly recommend anyone read a book called "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies". I'm just a normal shy geek like most of us, and until some pretty severe problems in my marriage I was doing mostly OK. But by giving me tools to figure out what was going on in my head and how to change them, it has made my life even better.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Filter
Date: 2013-01-17 06:45 pm (UTC)We all have filters -- things come to us that are good, bad, or indifferent, but we only really pay attention to a fairly small proportion of it -- the rest we filter out.
But for whatever reason, sometimes our filters become skewed -- we start to filter out good things (or interpret them as neutral), we start to interpret neutral things as bad, and we interpret bad things as *really* bad. When that happens it's often a positive feedback loop -- because what's coming in seems mostly bad, it reinforces the filter.
I suspect that there probably were a number of good things going on in your life during that time, but that you weren't really paying attention to them, or you were interpreting them less positive or more negative than they needed to be. Saying that the time you enjoyed with your friends was "tempered with the knowledge that this was temporary" seems to me like it's probably an example of that.
What a psychologist or therapist can do (after determining that it's not biologically based), is to give you help you recognize when you're doing the filtering, and to give you the tools to change how you think about things.
I'd highly recommend anyone read a book called "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies". I'm just a normal shy geek like most of us, and until some pretty severe problems in my marriage I was doing mostly OK. But by giving me tools to figure out what was going on in my head and how to change them, it has made my life even better.