 Good afternoon, Asperger's Legion. Welcome back to another video. Today we're going to be talking about mental health once again, something that is very close to my heart, and not in a good way. I hate it. It's horrible. Mental health, illness, disorders are one of the most difficult things to deal with on this planet in this first world society that we live in, and today I'm going to be talking about depression. I've been through all sorts of different levels of feeling terrible, and I want to give you guys an idea of the different severities of my mood, because obviously I can't speak for every single person out there, but I will do my best to describe how it feels, how it looks on the outside, the type of thoughts that go through your head, the type of behaviours that you can expect, the motivation, the energy, all of that stuff. Hopefully it will help other people understand what depression is about. All coming up in the video, unfiltered as usual, and honest, brutally, truthfully honest. So, in our society, we have a lot of misconceptions around depression. Sure, a lot of people may understand what it is, and how difficult it can be for someone, and the consequences of untreated, long-term, severe depression. And I honestly don't think that people have a good idea of what it looks like, what the different levels are. It's very difficult to try and describe what having very little serotonin feels like. I'll be going all the way from dysphoria to mild, moderate, and then severe depression, based on an account of my own life. Dysphoria, starting at the beginning. It really can just be described as having brown coloured glasses, if you know what I mean. It's almost like everything in life has a negative spin on it. Good things that happen to you. You know, they always have an aspect of negative emotion associated with it. Whether it's all gonna go topsy-turvy after, or it's not gonna last forever, or it's gonna put down on my day, I know that it's gonna come back to bite me. All of those kind of phrases are very much associated with dysphoria for me. It doesn't always have to be a verbal thing, it doesn't always have to be your interactions with people. You don't need to express how you feel for it to exist within you. You could go about and be very happy and positive and try and bring people up, but inside always have that niggly, annoying thought in the back of your mind that nothing's as good as it seems, and everything's gonna go bad. Dysphoria can have a little bit of an effect on motivation, so it's gonna be a little bit harder to do everything, just a fraction. If you're having a bad day and you've had a bad day at work, possibly it can be amplified. There are a lot of peaks and troughs in any sort of mood disorder, so even if in general you have this sort of dysphoric outlook on life and this dysphoric feelings and those symptoms and those feelings and behaviors can be amplified in a trough when you feel particularly bad or something bad's happened around you, and you may feel fairly good and fairly okay on a peak. And to be honest that's pretty much the same with all of the levels, the severities. It's just that if you feel like what I'm talking about is how you feel on a more regular basis, not all the time, on a regular basis, then maybe you are dysphoric. From the outside, dysphoria can, what most people who really don't understand mental health, really don't understand what depression is about and think that they've been depressed in the past and actually haven't, that's what they think depression feels like. They think it's just, oh you've got a bit of, you know, brown colour glasses, you're feeling a bit under the weather. That's what they think all depression is about and whether it doesn't matter how severe it is, it's always the same, it's always dysphoria. And the reason that people, you know, like, God forbid, self-harm and hurt themselves and shut themselves away from the world is because they're weak, because that's what those kind of people think, and it's not like that. Sure there may be some dysphoric, weak people in the world, but I think those people are extremely rare and in the most cases the actions and the torment and the shutting yourself away can be attributed to more severe depression. Mild depression. I feel like mild is a very silly name to call a mood disorder because if you get diagnosed with mild depression you're not going to be very happy, are you? You're not going to feel like the doctors really understand what's going on. Quite honestly, mild depression can be horrible and bad, and the thing with these sort of severity scales, the ones that are used in GPs and used at psychologists and psychiatrists is that it's based on your symptoms, based on notable symptoms, based on what you say rather than how you feel. So I'm just going to go off how you feel. Mild depression is marked by a considerable dull feeling in the back of your mind. It's like you feel like it's the end of the day, it's the end of days all the time, you always feel like there's just one more little push until you fall over and you want to hide away. You don't feel like you have any energy to get up in the morning, you don't feel like you're getting anything from your efforts, you don't feel like there's a point to anything. You may try and escape, you may, even if it's just play too many games on your phone or suck yourself into social media too much. Any sort of escapism is very much, you know, it starts when you are mildly depressed. In my mind, when I'm mildly depressed. It may be a lot harder to smile, it may be a lot harder to laugh, it may take you a considerable amount of time to get into a social occasion, you may have to spend an hour or two before you start to actually feel the atmosphere that other people are creating around you, otherwise you just feel like you're in some little isolated bubble where you just don't quite feel what everybody else is feeling. It does put a dampener on the emotions that you feel, you do feel numb, but you don't feel so numb that you can't cry or get upset or feel intense emotion. It doesn't completely block out any source of happiness or positivity, it just makes it a lot harder to get that. You may find that you get some symptoms of dissociation now and again when you're feeling particularly bad when you're in those troughs and you may even feel happy or you may just feel dysphoric when you're in a peak, from my experience of course. I'm gonna say that for everything, but I think it's worth mentioning. You may stop doing as much self care, you may not shower as much, you may forget your medications a little now and again, you may feel the need to push people away, you may feel the need to distance yourself from the world a little bit now and again. And you will come back and you will engage with the world again and you will step back into it, but you'll always be in this little wavy line, little wavy line of trying and then feeling like you're failing and then trying again and sometimes when you're in a really bad place you may feel a lot worse. Now let's talk about moderate depression. Still feels, it still sounds like, you know, psychiatrists are trying to, you know, push you down a little bit, you only have moderate depression, you're not too bad. Well in reality moderate depression is actually hell, it's horrible. Moderate depression comes with a lot more isolation, a lot of people will take to self harming, whether it's, you know, going outside in the cold with less layers than you would have expected most people to go out with just to feel something, you may listen to a sad song over and over again, not being able to reach that point at which you can let your emotion out and cry and be cathartic and let it out and get rid of it, you'll find yourself pushing people away a lot. You're likely to isolate yourself, you're likely to ignore messages, you're likely to put stuff off heavily. When I am moderately depressed, I eat a lot. So I'm not quite at the point where I'm so ridden and so sparse of any positive emotion that food doesn't help. So I binge a lot when I'm in that sort of stage, not always of course. A lot of it is time bound, depends on how long you feel like that. After a while it's going to be difficult to keep up a healthy diet and keep up yourself care and take care of yourself. You may find that you will be a lot more selfish, not in a bad way because it really requires a lot of energy to deal with and because of that you may feel like others may feel like you are neglecting them. It feels almost like you've been numbed, you'll feel a lot of aspects of dissociation, you'll feel like the world around you isn't real, sort of a weird brain foggish haze. You look at yourself and wonder what you are and when you talk and when you act and when you see yourself in the mirror it feels like it's not you. You'll find that time goes by so quickly that you can blink and then hours have gone by. You'll stay on watching videos on your phone even though you don't enjoy it. You'll find yourself sleeping in even though you're starting to feel anxious because the day is going by and you feel like you need to do something to feel better but you just stay in bed because you don't see the point. You can know that things are good for you and know that things will help but it doesn't feel like it will. There's less positive emotion attributed to things that you can do to help yourself, it doesn't feel like they will help you. And for all intents and purposes it usually doesn't have a large effect and requires a lot of work and that's very counter-intuitive to how much it wrecks your motivation and your drive and your desire to live but you just can't seem to get yourself out of this hole, this black hole in the floor that's just sucking you in all the time. It feels like you're trying to carry a weight on your shoulders. Every little thing, every little task that you have to do is so much more difficult, so much harder to pull yourself to do it. You may take sick bays, you may procrastinate heavily even if it's something that you love. You'll never feel like people really get you. You'll feel like you're alone, even more alone when you're around people. Positive music will start to really grate on you, really annoy you, eat away at you, it'll make you feel worse, you don't understand how someone could feel good. It's usually the point at which people start to notice, you know, I'll have a lot less energy, I'll have a lot less desire to communicate and talk to people. The only real way that I can get myself out of these states is just to escape. It feels like your body's in pain, your mind's in pain, your existence is pain. I think I know that Rick and Morty t-shirt, but that's what it feels like. You just don't like anything, you don't want anything. Even the positives, no way near, match the negatives. There's not a lot of ways that you can deal with it on your own. And then in a lot of cases you need other people to lift you out of it and you need other people to support you. You can do it by yourself, but it's such an uphill struggle, it feels like you're pushing an iron ball up the side of a mountain. Every time you let it slip, you just fall hundreds of metres down the hill and get crushed by the boulder on the way down. You've got to keep on top of it and it's tiring. Severe depression. Now that sounds very much like people are taking you seriously in comparison to mild depression or moderate depression. Severe depression. The only way that I could describe it to other people is you're a zombie. You can't feel any positive thing. Some things that uplift you and bring you joy and make life worth it despite all the pain, you can't feel that anymore. When I'm teaching I can go into class and see those kids that bring joy to my day and make me feel like I'm helping them. Watching them smile and laugh, you don't feel anything from it. It destroys any positive emotion. You feel so numb and dissociated, like you just aren't there, nothing's real. You weren't even trying to escape, you'll just sit there and stare off into space. You can't function, you can't work, you can't interact with anybody. You feel like parts of your brain have just been taken out, your perception, your memory, you forget things. You can't, like the positive emotion with eating or anything like that is just so far removed that you don't want to eat. Because it doesn't give you any measurable pleasure, you might as well just not eat. It's like being in a comatose. You can injure yourself and look at it and it could be horrific and it could be a horrible injury but you'd still feel like it's not real, you'd still feel. You wouldn't feel anything from it, you'd be in pain but you'd be so far gone from the pain that it just doesn't seem as bad. You already feel like you're in the bottom of the black hole and there's so much force pushing down on you that you just can't get out of it. You're not to feel any anxiety when I'm in those states, you don't feel any hurry, you don't feel any importance on anything. You feel like each movement of your body is an effort, there's like lifting weights, life just is shut off from you. From the outside, severe depression looks a little bit like you're tired, really, really tired. People think that you're just not there, that you're half asleep all the time, that you're not the same person. You feel like someone's ripped out your heart, obviously in a metaphorical sense but you feel like it's black and it's covered in tar and you feel like it's ice cold. And to be honest the only things that stopped me from getting into those states are medication. It maybe puts me in the range of mild to moderate on a more regular basis. Severe depression, quite honestly, I'm trying not to be too horrible with my words but it feels like how you would feel if everyone that you knew and love have just gone. Every good thing in your life has gone. Your dreams, your hopes, your positive feelings from the little things during your day, the wonderful things that life has to offer, the things that can get you through your pain. You don't see any light in the end of the tunnel, it's just a black hole. I hope that my list, my account of how levels of depression feel for me of course has helped in some way. Maybe you can empathise with some of the things that I've said, some of the feelings and behaviours and thoughts and how you look from the outside. The only thing that I can do is explain and explain in words and give concepts and ideas but although I can give you ways of trying to understand it, there's no way that I can express what the pain of depression feels like. It's almost impossible. It's different for everybody but the only thing that you can do is ask questions, ask them how bad it is but just being open and just listening is the best way and it helps them as well. So that pretty much finishes the video. When I am in these moods, it sounds like a funny little, when I'm in one of those moods, I think it's very important to listen to other people and listen to their experiences rather than read upon symptoms and take tests. It's a lot about feelings and sometimes those tests don't reflect just how bad or good you feel. It's very subjective and it's not easily measurable. Keep pushing on, find a meaning, find a light in the end of the tunnel, no matter how hard it is and push forward and make steps towards that light and stay strong. As cheesy as that sounds, hope you guys are doing good and I'll see you in the next video. See you later.