Saturday Essay: What Does Depression Feel Like?

It's Not The Same As Unhappiness.

This is my second post on mental health to coincide with mental health awareness week. I decided to write it because - on cue - I have the experience of depression fresh in my mind.

All too fresh.

This is despite the fact that only a few months ago I had folly to write a piece in this Substack called ‘How I Beat Depression’. The Black Dog struck me down a couple of months later and is only just departing the scene (hopefully).

It seems, with hindsight, folly to have written that piece. Or at the very least, tempting fate. Because the moment you think you think you’ve ‘beaten’ depression is the moment you’re almost certain to be reminded how cunning and diabolical this particular malady is. In fact the depression that has hit me this month rendered me almost incapable of posting this week. Then it seemed like sharing my experience might help to draw me out of my torpor.

For most of May I have found myself drifting in and out of clinical depression for reasons I find hard to understand. I haven’t been in this condition for this amount of time for some years, so why I should be stricken at this moment is a mystery to me. However, I thought I would take the opportunity to try and explain to non-sufferers, which presumably are the overwhelming majority of people, what it actually feels like. Because its not the same as deep unhappiness. which many people assume. It’s quite a distinct, albeit related, phenomenon.

What I’ve been experiencing over the last few weeks can best be described as ‘'panicky inertia’. It has elements of sadness, and the heaviness of heart that accompanies that emotion, but it is far more complex than that.