Why the Classic Advice Doesn’t Work for Major Depression

Hopelessness is a symptom of Major Depression and that’s why all the advice on depression fails.

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

This article could be two sentences long.

Those sentences would be: The classic advice doesn’t work for Major Depression because it doesn’t account for one thing: hopelessness. Hopelessness is what separates minor depression and major depression and no one knows what to do about that.

That’s why I hate most articles about depression. They’re written by people who are no longer depressed for people who are. Either they’ve never been in a major depression or have entirely forgotten how dark it gets. They’ve forgotten about hopelessness.

Major depression is like childbirth — once the pain passes, you forget how fucking painful it was and you’re ignorant to the fact that all your platitudes about the “joy” of childbirth are utterly fucking useless to someone who’s in the pain of labor.

That’s the only explanation for how these articles are written — the curiously upbeat tone, the same regurgitated 7 All-Natural Ways to Beat Depression, and the utter lack of awareness that the person who reads these articles already knows all of this. And, that most readers of these articles hate your fucking…