Name Your Troubles

I tend to struggle around this time of year. I suspect it’s a bit of Seasonal Affective Disorder, brought on by the time change and season making it get dark early. It’s been especially bad recently, because my wife has had to travel a lot for work, so I’ve been lonely, and my job has been exceptionally stressful, leaving me mentally exhausted. 

While normally my depression is kept under control by medication, lately the medication hasn’t been enough. You may have noticed that the output on my blog has fallen. And maybe I’m being a bit self-critical because of the depression, but I feel like the quality has fallen somewhat as well. (That’s also borne out by semi-objective measures of quality, such as conversations sparked, reshares, Facebook Likes, etc.)

I believe it’s important to destigmatize mental health problems. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to admit that I had the flu, and I shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit that my depression has been hitting me hard lately. It’s especially important to destigmatize mental health troubles because help from family and friends is often necessary to improve the problems, and you can’t get that if you hold the primitive belief that you ought to hide your suffering.

One thing that helps is to recognize that this is a disease that is causing these feelings, and to treat it as an outside force. Just knowing this happens every year as a result of the time and seasons makes it feel more like something that I can push back against.

There’s another piece of advice I’ve seen a few places, which I’ve decided to try: To give my mental health challenges names. 

I’m naming my depression “Debbie,” after the old Saturday Night Live character Debbie Downer.

Then whenever I’m feeling a particularly strong wave of depression, I can just say, “Shut up, Debbie.” Hopefully by giving the depressive thoughts and feelings a personification, it will be easier to not listen to them.

When things are work are particularly stressful, I often describe it as “drinking from the firehose.” There’s just so much volume of work coming at me and it’s too much to handle. “Drink from the firehose” is a reference to the movie UHF, said by the character Stanley Spadowski played by Michael Richards. 

But that character is a source of joy and fun in the movie, so I don’t feel like he would work as a personification of stress. Instead, I named my work stress “Bill,” after the Jim Carrey character Fire Marshall Bill, from the late 80s sketch comedy show In Living Color. 

Fire Marshall Bill sowed chaos and disaster wherever he went, so that seems apt for a personification of stress.

Anyway, I’ll have to see if this helps. It’s something you can try as well – not just with mental health problems, but with any negative emotions or sources of unhappiness in your life. I think it’s good to give them somewhat comical personifications, to take some of the bite out of them. And also it’s probably best to not personify them as someone you regularly interact with. (I do have a friend from college named Bill that I’m still Facebook friends with, but he’s perfectly pleasant and not at all a source of stress, so I don’t think there’s any danger of me thinking of him in any connection with stress-Bill.)

If any of you do this, please let me know how it works for you. And perhaps I’ll do a follow-up post with my results as well.

For now, I’ll tell Debbie and Bill to take a hike.