Psychological First Aid: Emotional Honesty
I can’t believe how depressed I’ve become within the last few months. I think I’ve managed to stave it off quite well, but the past few days have just been an absolute avalanche of lethargy, nightmares, and depressive moods. I can’t bring myself to do the work I’m paid for, or the wall of mounting deadlines at school. Even exercise can’t seem to shake this creeping shadow — that’s usually a good sign that I have to take a deeper look under the hood. And that’s the reason I’m writing this.
Symptoms that Shit’s Gone Wrong. I’ve started to realize that my compulsive snacking and binge eating is traceable to a desire to drug my brain to stem the tide of negativity. And it’s tracking my depressive moods — picking up in intensity and frequency as I sink lower into the shit state I’m in. For some people it’s alcohol, for others it’s cigarettes — for me, it’s food. That’s hardly a surprise as our pleasure receptors wired to train us to seek out nutrients can also be tweaked to give us a high, much in the same way that drugs do. I find myself compulsively searching for anything to do but the thing I need to do — I’m searching for YouTube videos to watch that I normally hate, I’m scrolling through social media although I don’t really care for what I’m seeing. I’ve got a good feeling that my body is trying to claw at anything that will slow down the slide into suicidal ideation — the abyss I’m almost certain always lies at the end of this tunnel of torment.
I’ve hinted at my struggle with suicidality before in my first ever post on Medium. I’d talked about death as the ultimate painkiller — a tempting pill to swallow when all you want is for the feelings to stop.
Stoicism. I’ve come to realize how used I am to bottling things up — especially when we live in a world that constantly demands that we appear strong, without addressing the underlying problems that gnaw away at us from the inside. Especially as a male, unlike the females in our society, boys have been socialized into a stoic philosophy of not showing emotion; especially negative ones like anger, or sadness. I can’t remember how often I had been told that “boys don’t cry”.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the value of rationality — the importance of staying on top of tough situations, and never letting one’s head be ruled by the heart. These are all traits that have served me well in their time. Whether it be hiking in dangerous terrain and having to decide whether or not to push on or turn back, or in deciding on the invest-ability of a business or financial instrument. I’ve made incredibly stupid decisions in my life that have almost always been caused by a dangerous cocktail of ignorance, overconfidence, and emotionality.
The Danger of Denial. However, there is something deeply unhealthy about the suppression of emotion — the refusal to acknowledge the persistent presence of those emotions, and much less to understand where those emotions come from. The danger of telling people to stuff their emotions away is denialism. As we say in the business — good marketing only helps a bad product fail faster. No amount of bravado and theatrics will make real problems magically go away. The danger of pop psychology and “positive thinking” is the message that if you just pretend the problem doesn’t exist — it won’t exist. Fake it till you make it. Smile until it becomes real. Right. Tell me that when you have cancer.
Depression is as real as software faults are in computer systems. Just because nothing is observably wrong with the hardware doesn’t mean that turning it off and turning it back on will solve systemic errors. Sure, it works sometimes. But when those band aids start failing, you have to accept that simplistic solutions are off the table. You have to look into the source code, sequentially retrace the logical flow, and isolate the errors. It’s hard, but its the only option I have left.
The stoic veneration of emotion suppression is equally built on wishful thinking — a desire to avoid feeling a certain way, rather than to recognize them for what they are — symptomatic manifestations of deeper issues. No matter how much I want to put on a brave front, I can’t afford to.
This article marks the start of my attempt to look under the hood at my struggle with suicidality. I struggle with two major issues — outrage and depression. I will explore each of them in turn, with one article devoted to deep diving into each of those issues.
I’ve never shared so openly and honestly before, but I’m confident as a mater of statistical probability that I’m not alone. And since society is increasingly stepping up to address the systemic software faults of the human mind, I hope that my story will add but a drop to the ocean of knowledge that is the internet — and remind others that its time we stopped putting band-aids on bullet holes.
In my next article, I explain why I steer clear of “professional help”. Read it here.
