Depression: A Modern-Era Milestone

It all started when my band broke up. We were doing well enough for the break-up to be a big deal and cause a good amount of moral and emotional damage, other than the obvious financial and social damage. And pretty soon, there were these voices in my head that’d constantly tell me things like: ‘It’s not going to work out for you. It’s not going to happen.’ Honestly, these voices had always been there – they just grew louder. I posited that I had depression.

Sometime after that, my girlfriend (now my wife – what was she thinking?) who was working at IIT Mumbai then, suggested that I come to Mumbai for a few days and lookout for some opportunities for work there. May be just living at the beautiful campus of IIT Mumbai for a couple of days would make me feel better. I went there for around a month, met a couple of industry professionals, but obviously, nothing worked out. The voices grew louder. I pretty much started hearing them everywhere in everything I did. They wouldn’t let me compose a new song, they wouldn’t let me put together a confident pitch to clients, they wouldn’t let me orgasm, and they wouldn’t even let me have a couple of beers and chill the fuck out. Pretty soon I saw a lack of interest in, well, almost everything. And I was sure – I was clinically depressed.

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Recently, one of my Physics students, a sharp and studious girl who was all set to appear for her Class XII boards and other competitive exams, said that she felt like she was beginning to get depressed. We talked about it – at length – and I realized that all she was was stressed – school, separate tuition classes for boards and competitive exams, test series for JEE/NEET, labs and submissions, and above all, the fear of failure (the voices). She did need a break and some counseling, lest it actually became depression. But, for some reason, she couldn’t really accept that she needed therapy. It was as if I was taking something away from her. I didn’t push any further and she got a lot better in a week.

Now, Indian school curricula don’t have mental health or emotional health (or even sexual health) courses, and quite frankly, our society does not really even think of it as worthy of being a subject to learn about. So where did this fourteen-year-old girl learn about depression? More than that, why did she seem strangely, ironically pleased to be depressed?

And there’s no twist to the answer. We adults are no different. Everyone has baggage. Unfortunately, it has to be kept in a secret closet because the outside world judges you for being sad. It makes you feel like there’s something wrong with you. And since it’s already been one hell of a journey to adulthood, we’re in no mood of taking any more condescension. We cannot take being treated as less in any manner. We have already failed a lot in a society where failure is taboo. And we don’t want to know that there’s any more failure to face. And before we know it, we transcend into the age when sadness actually becomes a disease. And that’s why we prefer to open up with a therapist instead of a close friend or a family member.

When we get the idea that we’re depressed, a part of our brain starts looking for signs to confirm it. And like any other educated and self-sufficient person we ask the internet because we know we won’t be disappointed. With every microsecond of our surfing tracked, the internet knows what we want to know, far more than we do. And with a couple of generic articles and the ‘quick diagnosis’ offered by self-proclaimed mental health expert websites, it becomes easy to confuse sadness with depression.; it becomes easy to cut-off from family and friends when we know we need them the most; it becomes easy to challenge our mind and body when we know they need their space and time to get in sync again. But after everything, we at least have a good story to share – a sincere testament to our struggle where we fell victim to the cruelty of the world, fought bravely and emerged victorious. Unfortunately, nobody gets to know about the struggle when you’re going through it. And that’s because struggle stories are warmly validated by the society, but not the struggle.

They always say that happiness lies within. But so does pain. And it’s not our constant pursuit of happiness that’s the problem here; it’s the avoidance of pain. We spend an entire lifetime trying to avoid pain, failure and conflict and we forget it’s our failure that teaches us the most important lessons in life, it’s the conflict that makes a relationship stronger and it’s the pain that makes us more evolved as humans. All we need to do is develop the strength to get past them. And that’s not even the bummer, it’s this: You already know it.

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I had already seen a sexologist and a therapist by now, and was about to see a psychiatrist. A couple of hours before the appointment, I’m not sure what changed but I could hear another voice in my head. Like the other voices, this one too had always been there, just suppressed by my negligence. It said: “Do the right thing. You know you can!” I cancelled the appointment and turned to my loved ones – my friends, my girlfriend, my mom. I’d call them up day and night, I’d talk, I’d cry, I’d ask for help, and they were always there. They’d take me to my favorite ice-cream parlor at 2 in the morning, they’d bring beers on their way back from work, they’d spend weekends at my place and they’d keep checking with my roommate how I was doing on weekdays. It took me a month but I came out of whatever mess I was in. I could see how my depression was nothing but a conscious reverberation of the voices that said I was.

And since then, a few things have changed: I have accepted sadness as an equally probable state as happiness, I have stopped judging myself and others for feeling sad or miserable, and I have started admitting I’m sad (when I am), and I have started sharing my baggage instead of hiding it and shutting it up in a closet.