Misery is like climbing mount Everest

Sadness is a feeling that every person feels at some point.

Sadness is a phenomena found in every human being for at least one day of their life. A feeling of great despair everyday is considered a serious illness. With this emotion there is no real trigger for it kind of like when you roll out of bed and automatically try to spread some sunshine into the room by opening the blinds. ( Did I mention I hate morning?) We feel it when a loved one is passing, a failing grade appears on a test, break ups, betrayals, and sometimes its just one of those days for us.

When you feel this type of sad eventually it will fade as happy events occur to combatant it. Naturally that’s how its supposed to work. However, Depression is like a feeling that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders to no end. It lingers no matter the happy events, and tends to drag the weight of a thousand pounds on your shoulder.

The Stigma

A stigma in misery is that it is mainly a feeling that only adolescents or young adults struggle with. A lie that we consistently see fed to us by our society. The truth is children, elderly, and adults tend to have recurrent depressive flights like an addict goes into A mass shooting in Connecticut happened by a man who went to an elementary school and took out his emotions on innocent lives.

The age stigma makes people feel like as they grow older this oppressive sadness being carried in their hearts will go away. I think its a little biased as today on the news a famous male singer just hung himself.

Misery is that feeling you are forever climbing Mount Everest with no hope in sight

Biological depression is considered a level above this where your hopelessness is not just life throwing lemons at your but in your DNA like a pre-made handicap at life. However, this is not the actual case with biological depression because the gene itself is nonexistent, the actual triggers for depression are external, and antidepressants are the drug of choice against it.

It’s a myth much like how we believe in Santa Clause as children. Misery is the corresponding feeling that makes depression carry such a myth. What exactly is such an oppressive feeling that makes one end their life? “Depression is a syndrome that involves sadness, pessimism, a loss of motivation, and the ability to experience enjoyment.” (Carver 2002)

A person who has lost everything, or any motivation to succeed tends to fall into a darkness. One of emptiness like a shell. Studies have shown depression having “attributing mental disorders with prognostic which is a belief that men that mental health problems are relatively permanent and difficult to cure or treat effectively” ( Leobwitz 2013)

It is a philosophical view that depression has its own gene. Just like how there should be a gene for happiness. (Jk..JK…)

Pessimism is always having your life half full

“Pessimism is a trait generalized of negative outcomes in certain situations: hopelessness conveys a similar sense of anticipating bad outcomes.” (Carver 2002) A caricature of pessimism we are all familiar with is Charlie Brown. He is constantly depressed, and the society around him continues to enable his mistreatment. His pessimistic outlook on life created a permanent caricature on depression, and how society perceives people who have fallen into depression.

A real person affected by depression feels a lot like Charlie Brown because they can only focus on all the negatives in their lives drowning in sorrows. Some use illegal substances to create a false sense of euphoria and happiness to try to slide the sadness away. To justify this feeling of eternal sadness an association of despair where “mental disorders have immutable ( E.G genes and neurology) assumptions known as genetic essentialism.” (Lebowitz, 2013)

Basically its a way of making up a gene that causes depression as a way of saying its an impossible emotion to fix. Charlie Brown has this misconception of depression because no one in the comic takes a stand to make him happy. They all just accept his pessimism as final.

Teenagers are the most susceptible to depression due to no one understanding them, nothing can make the future better, and that by ending their life it ends the sadness creating a stigma of selfishness when you commit to death. On top of that never ending feeling of hopelessness “Neuroplasticity in the human brain continues even past adulthood and is important for recovery from mental disorders including depression.” ( Lebowitz 2013)

It is thought to be defined as neural pathways and synapses based on changes in behaviors, thinking, and emotions. “Despite significant heritability there is no gene” for any psychiatric illness. ( Lebowitz, 2013) So, inevitably there is no biological disorder for depression just a chronic emotion we can’t get rid of. External issues are fixable but they are often the reason people feel they can not move out of depression.

Thus, Depression or any other psychiatric illness that a person has is made up by society. By claiming despair is an internal disease and not a societal pressure the disease becomes an excuse. Charlie Brown proves that a society that sees him as biologically depressed have no intention of fixing him. He’s continuously climbing Mount Everest to be a decent person but society pushes the idea there is no hope for the boy. His caricature is representative of a person who can’t figure out what the real reason for their depression is.

Miserableness is a feeling that nothing, no one, and life doesn’t get better.

“Depression is a disorder of thought.” (Rotenberg,2001) External stresses happen because they are forces a person can not control themselves. The phrase the glass is half full is an optimists out look on life while a negative outlook is saying that same glass is half empty. Pessimism leads to “giving up and this can be seen in excessive alcohol use, and other drugs as an escape route from external stresses.”( Craver, 2002)

We have so much alcohol abuse from people who find it either the socially cool thing to do or to escape being empty for a bit. People that are miserable “typically think negatively about themselves believing they are useless, deficient, and unattractive as a person.”(Rotenberg, 2001) Negative thoughts are created by the pressures of society, family, and environment a person is raised in.

Depression alone is not a disorder but the disorder is formulated over time like how a rose grows. A person will start to feel miserable over circumstances in life, and this misery causes a prolonged sense of despair. Society is a grave stress on a person. We shape our lives according to society.

The potential for sadness is everywhere from looking on the television to see advertisements of things you don’t have, to someone turning you down as a lover, to your job, and many other daily issues we come upon. This potential becomes great as a person’s family pushes values on a person such as college, marriage, and children. (I call this your standard trap to unhappiness.)

If an environment is not particularly set to make a person happy than despair can often be the only solution for a person. But it doesn’t always work that way. The home environment can be a happy one but a person’s core society can break them into despair as well. “Sometimes people give up not just on specific goals, but on all their goals that define them, and commit suicide.” (Craver, 2002)

Cognitive Depression

We witness issues like this with Athletes, musicians, and anyone that just can’t stand to wake up the next day on any day. Which creates the theory of cognitive depression. Cognitive theory of depression is formulated from Aaron Beck. His theory hypothesizes that “individuals who experience loss, or adversity in childhood develop a set of negative expectancy, or schema concerning loss, failure, or abandonment.” (Rotenberg, 2001)

An example of the way this theory can be enforced is when a drunk beats a child repeatedly throughout childhood. By being raised this way a schema is created that “serves as a filter through which events in their environment are perceived, evaluated, attended to, and remembered as negative.” ( Rotenberg, 2001) The child will find anything happy and turn it into a negative thought.

“Beck believes that these negative schemas characterize not only currently depressed people, but also not depressed people who are at a high risk for developing depression in the future.”(Rotenberg,2001) A child being bullied for the majority of his life may incur a massive amount of depression, and could become aggravated at society for depression. Which is why we preach about not bullying or being the bully.

Antidepressants are said to be made as a cure for depression, so to speak.

Treatments for depression vary like flavors of ice cream. By using drugs psychologists hope to bring a person from despair into being a functionally stable human being.(Hillhouse, 2015) The drugs facilitate a depressed person into being a happier person.

“The downside to treatment for this depression is that patients that do respond to currently available antidepressant drugs have a delayed onset of 4–12 weeks before adequate symptom remission is achieved.” (Hillhouse, 2015 ) The likelihood of suicide becomes higher in the first few weeks of taking drugs like this.

However, there are plenty of other treatments for depression with antidepressants “because of their pharmacological similarity, it is not surprising that only subtle differences in the clinical profiles of these drugs exist, and that antidepressants are consequently chosen by physicians according to their safety and tolerability profiles, provided their choice is not deterred by the higher costs in countries where reimbursement is limited.” ( Holsboer, 2002)

Thus, people can get plenty of treatments for their depression, but often the person would opt first for suicide because their pessimism tends to be so bad that they can not understand the world with hope. Charlie Brown who is a holiday figure, tend to prove that society sometimes helps deliver this feeling of hopelessness in children, or even when there are treatments, parents can’t see it right away. In the end, antidepressants only work if treatment in psychotherapy is being used.

Or if you want a more current viewing of depression and how society treats is you can look at thirteen reasons why which is getting so much backlash because it states a truth that schools don’t want to admit. Which is that they are not often open to helping students as they say, and that students can be told they are lying. Truth be told this is why our society suppresses itself.

In conclusion, depression will always have the risk of suicide with it.

No one can rule out that depression is a leading cause to ending one’s life. The feeling that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders is not a biologically inherent feeling. It is a feeling developed based on external stressors that never go away. Charlie Brown will always be depressed because of the society the characters lives in. Due to the depiction that the story has of charlie brown people just assume he has biological depression, not just depression. In the Halloween episode, adults just hand him rocks in his bag, only furthering his sense of hopelessness. Biological depression has no specific gene, and thus it can’t be the trigger for a person’s depression. It might be the lack of monoamines that make a person happy which cause depression. This can form the false illusion that depression can be biological…in a world where everyone blames anything, and everything, but the actual issue. Depression is formed by external stressors. No one is born depressed. A one year old can fathom sadness, but it is not sad because it was born that genetically. Misery is made based on society, and the mental stress placed on an individual. Society can make a person feel like they are climbing a hopeless battle to get to the top of Mount Everest as an avalanche comes crushing down a person’s progress.

http://www.diaryoffantasticdiscoveries.com/2016/02/13/misery-is-like-climbing-mount-everest/