Appreciating your growth experience is one thing, loving the illness is another

[firecat]

In the depression community people are talking about an article in The Independent entitled "Is depression actually good for you?".

I left a comment there, that I'm unpacking/editing somewhat here.

I have chronic anhedonia and mild depression. I think it has affected my personality in some positive ways (I can think outside the box, I'm somewhat compassionate, I'm interested more in intellectual pursuits than purely sensory or emotional pleasure pursuits because much of the time I don't experience sensory or emotional pleasure very strongly [the last couple of months somewhat to the contrary]).

But it has sure also affected my life in negative ways.

There's a general trend these days to conflate an illness with the learning experiences that come with having an illness, and then to say "The illness is good!" Fuck that. Learning to be a better human being is good, but there are plenty of ways to do that without having an illness.

I noticed this tendency before, but since reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided, which discusses it at great length, I notice it more often. I used to belong to an Alzheimer's forum (my Mom had Alzheimer's). I was sort of appalled to see a thread entitled "I love this disease". I actually could relate to the content of the thread—people feeling like they became closer to their loved ones who had dementia, changed their views about what was important in life, learned that they could do things they didn't know they could do. OK, fine. But (with all due respect to YKIOK) saying that because of this, you love the disease? That doesn't make sense to me.

Comments

[laughingrat]

It's all so complicated, and so personal. It seems ridiculous for anyone, especially some random columnist, to try to tell people living with an illness how to feel about that illness.

For me, in a way, I do "love" the depression/anxiety/PTSD/etc. because I've spent my whole life being told how bad and horrible I am, and then being told how bad and horrible I am because I developed responses to being told that the first go-round (that is, I became ill as a result of living with constant emotional abuse from a young age), and so now, with things having gone on as long as they have, and developed for the reasons they did, it's actually anti-therapeutic for me to Other the illness and hate it.

But that doesn't mean it's made my life better, necessarily, and it doesn't mean someone else in the same set of circumstances is obligated to feel the same way I do. And that sure doesn't mean I want some columnist, not even a columnist who is dealing with similar stuff, to tell me what to feel about my own experiences. That's just Not On. 0_o

[firecat]

it's actually anti-therapeutic for me to Other the illness and hate it.

That makes LOADS of sense.

[laughingrat]

And yet for some people, that would be the worst possible approach! Really, the multiplicity of human wossname is amazing. :-D

[shehasathree]

I feel much the same way about my own history of self-injury.