Introduction
What does severe depression actually feel like?
If you haven’t suffered from it, you likely don’t understand. If you don’t understand that, you also likely don’t understand how it can lead to suicide. I’ll try to explain both what severe depression feels like and its connection to suicide in this post.
Before I begin, let me say that each human being is unique. Each case of depression can be different from the last. That includes being different across people and being different across time in the same people. What I’m sharing today comes from my personal experience. Your experience or the experience of someone you love may differ from mine.
What Does Severe Depression Feel Like?
For me, severe depression involves intense emotions. (It took many years for me to fully understand this.) My depression takes the emotions of a normal person, and amplifies them. How much amplification? If I compare it to the emotions I feel when I’m managing my depression properly – it is a lot.
The emotions amplified by my depression are mostly negative. But I think the positive emotions get amplified too. The result is an emotional roller coaster. This ride has a few peaks but mostly long dives and flat sections near the ground.
Sadness and loneliness are the emotions most frequently amplified in my depression. For other people, I think fear and anxiety are also amplified. I also occasionally experience intense anger, but that is almost always after a flashback of severe child sex abuse. (That anger may not relate to my depression.)
It is difficult for me to describe to a normal person the level of emotional intensity my depression brings. It is an intensity that completely overwhelms me. The negative emotions are so intense, that they begin to cause sharp physical pain in my chest and my throat. The closest experience a non-depressed person likely has to this is the grief after the death of a loved one. Imagine that kind of emotional pain, but several times a month, not a few times in a lifespan. If you can imagine that, you can begin to understand what my severe depression feels like.
Another way I can try to explain it is with an illustration. Picture a wide and swift river. Instead of being filled with water, this river is filled with emotions. (For me, this river is filled with sadness and loneliness.) Now picture yourself in the middle of that river, trying to fight the current for your next breath of air. You have a large weight dragging your legs towards the river bottom and downstream. Overwhelming. An intense struggle. Think about the exhaustion and trauma almost drowning in a river would cause you. Now put yourself through that trauma twice a week.
The Connection To Suicide
How are these intense emotions connected to suicide?
Before I answer that question, let me state without any wavering that suicide isn’t a solution for depression. Suicide is a horrible (and almost always preventable) tragedy. What follows isn’t promoting suicide as a solution. I’m trying to help people understand why people they love with severe depression might consider suicide.
I regularly (once a month) considered suicide when I was in my late teens and early twenties. This wasn’t just thoughts about ending my life. It was taking the initial steps to do so. It was holding a knife against my skin or putting a gun barrel in my mouth. I did this so many times in that period of my life I’ve lost count.
I never went beyond the initial steps. I never pulled the knife across my skin or pulled the trigger. Despite intense emotions that caused terrible pain, the desire to live that burns inside humans prevented a horrible outcome. But I was dancing on a razor-sharp precipice. I was a fraction of a second and a hair’s breadth away from ending my life many times.
Why would I even consider this? I was young. I was in good health. I was a hard worker with lots of potential. I had an entire life in front of me.
For a person without depression, the idea of a 17 year old committing suicide seems either repulsive and shameful, or weird and deranged. I understand it is none of those things. For a person with severe depression, suicide is a relief. Is it is a way to end the intense emotional pain.
Consider my illustration of drowning in the river. How long would you want to physically do that before you were ready to give up? Before you were ready to just end the struggle?
In my case, I don’t fear death. I don’t believe in the existence (or suffering) of an immortal soul. For me, death was like going to sleep and not having to wake up the next day to struggle against the river current.
I don’t know how I can emphasize this enough: For a person with severe depression, suicide is about an escape from terrible suffering. It is about relief from intense pain. It is about exhaustion. It isn’t about running away, or about being a coward, or about being selfish.
The person with severe depression who fights to avoid suicide is making an honorable choice. But it is a choice that comes with great cost. They are making a choice to continue suffering. To continue feeling emotions so intense they create physical pain. By choosing to live, they chose to continue their struggle.
Realizing this fact about a depressed person you love may help you provide the support and care they need.
Conclusion
After 35 years, I’ve learned to manage my depression effectively. (My medication dials down the intensity level of my emotions.) My emotional roller coaster now has fewer peaks and fewer dives. I’m more stable as a person – and my suffering is greatly reduced. I rarely think of ending my own life, and I haven’t taken the initial steps to do so in over two (2) decades.
I hope this post has helped those without severe depression to understand what it may be like to experience it. I hope it also helps people understand why severely depressed people may choose to end their own life. If you have a loved one with depression who made that terrible choice in the past, I hope what you’ve learned in this post will make it easier to forgive them.
If you are reading this and you suffer from severe depression, I hope this post will help you see the need to manage your depression. Not tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Today. Because a failure to do so can lead to a horrible outcome, the ending of one’s own life to ease suffering. For the sake of the people in your life that you love, you have to take yourself out of the situation in which death is a reasonable alternative to continuing the fight to live.
Photo Credit: Shane Stagner (Unsplash)