Depression: Life's Leech

“That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.”
- Elizabeth Wurtzel

People often say that they are feeling depressed, that the weather is depressing, work is depressing, the way your neighbours’ cat jumps over the fence and makes your recently cut lawn its new toilet is depressing. I feel that the word is used so casually these days that it has lost its context. We live in a time where in some sense it’s ‘cool’ to be depressed, some teenagers actively wanting to be labelled as depressed and brandishing straight red scars on their arms or legs like medals. But what exactly is cool about this illness? Is it really the illness that people find attractive or the romantic notion of a tortured but beautiful mind drawing from its inner damaged self to spew out countless creative masterpieces? In reality, people forget the one simple thing, and that is depression is an illness. It isn’t glamorous, it most definitely isn’t nice, and it has the ability to reduce even the strongest person to a helpless and lifeless entity.

I have read many descriptions about depression, some putting it in very simple terms, some putting it in a more poetic way, but all seem to manage to vividly describe the feelings and emotions involved. I am not a writer. I am a science student, a physics student no less, I should be playing with numbers not words, but I feel it’s important for me to give my own take on it and not just quote a description written by someone else.

To me, depression is like a leech. Anyone who has been to a rainforest will know that these annoying, slimy, bloodsucking creatures latch onto you unnoticed and quite happily feed themselves on your blood. Depression is a lot like this but on a bigger, meaner, and more heartless scale. It attaches itself to you unexpectedly and sucks away on your very life-force. It drains you of all energy to the point that all you want to do is stay curled up in bed. You lose all enthusiasm; it hungrily feeds on any happiness until you just want to give up. Like a leech, once it has firmly attached itself to you, it’s a bugger to get rid of. You can’t just pull a leech off; you have to either wait for it to finish its feed and just fall off or you apply some heat (alternatively you could pour some salt on it and watch it combust but that would just be mean wouldn’t it). Depression does sometimes just go away, but you have no way of knowing how hungry it is, you don’t know how long it’s going to make you suffer or how badly. Like a leech, it isn’t picky about who it’s going to feed on, or when, but the earlier you catch it, the easier it is to deal with.

I regret the years of denial. By the time I came to dealing with it, it had attached itself so firmly onto me that in some way it has become a part of me. Now it seems that both roads scare me. If I let it carry on draining my life, what state will I be in say five years time? But if I manage to get rid of it, has it drained so much of me now that I would lose a part of myself?