Woman Creates Chart To Help Others Understand Her Depression

As the Mayo Clinic puts it, a depressive episode can affect most of someone's day for every day it persists, interfere with day-to-day activities, and leave people miserable or unhappy without necessarily knowing why.

It's not uncommon for the condition to make people feel like life isn't worth living.

As author B.L. Acker wrote on her blog, depression comes in unexpected waves and can randomly alternate between making those living with it feel numb and feeling everything intensely.

Not only that, but the time intervals and intensity at which it makes these switches isn't possible to predict either.

And in the blog named after her book, Unlovable, author B. L. Acker has done just that.

Although depression is known to randomly switch between these mental states or express both at the same time, its two main weapons are feelings of numbness and feelings of a personal downward spiral.

She said this chart is extremely simplified, but with it, she aimed to show that depression isn't just about sadness and hopelessness and to show what it can mean when the condition gets worse.

Oftentimes, those living with depression will experience a degree of both feelings at once.

For instance, it's possible that someone could feel a loss and interest and motivation to get anything done and also feel that life sucks and that everything is harder than it should be.

Some days, they may feel numb and detached, while they may feel everything more intensely than usual on other days.

In the latter case, this is why it's not uncommon for those with depression to get angry and frustrated over matters that seem smaller than that reaction warrants.

As she wrote, "Milder stages of depression might be akin to losing something that matters to you, perhaps something of sentimental value. As depression increases, imagine the pain of losing a beloved pet, your parents, your spouse or your child. Imagine the ache and the pain, the feeling in that moment of things never being okay again, of wanting to give up, to crumble under the weight of that pain."

It works to distort reality and make both life itself and the person living it seem worse than they really are. And it's for this reason that it's all the more important to understand it.

After all, if someone we care about gets it into their head that the world is better off without them, understanding depression introduces hope of revealing why that isn't true.

As Acker wrote, "The best I can do is to lay out what depression is like in a very simplified form and hope for your empathy, compassion, understanding and patience."

h/t: Unlovable