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Meet Lucy
Both Lucy's parents have had bouts of depression and her GP says she has 'bipolar' tendencies. Her depression and self harm started young, and although she feels she will never be totally free from it she feels she can live a good life and not let it rule her... more >>Picture of Hiresh
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"It's amazing how differently your mind works when you're going through depression - you just can't judge how you are. You can't kind of see what's going. Sometimes you think you're acting normally and your friends will be like "No, that's really not normal!" When you're in the frame of mind where killing yourself feels like a perfectly valid and acceptable option, your sense of perspective is out the window; it's completely non-existent." Ben "Sometimes I think that being a little bit low is a good excuse to get up and treat yourself. Give yourself things to look forward to replace any bad memories or experiences with good ones. I look at ways of maintaining wellbeing now. I eat a lot better than I did and I try to sleep, but not too much. Sometimes I'm really good at balancing it and sometimes I'm not. I am more cautious in my relationships, more accountable about where and how I spend money. I try not to ignore what my body says. I really carefully examine my emotions about things." Tonya
Students Against Depression
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Not Good Enough
What kind of person do you believe yourself to be? How would you describe yourself? The way you habitually see yourself and the world is the outcome of your own unique life experiences and personal history (in the context of the culture you belong to), although these links are not always obvious to you. Some ways of seeing yourself make you vulnerable to depression.
If depression is affecting you, then your description will probably include a self-evaluation as, in some way, ‘not good enough’. Sometimes this belief will have arisen as a result of depression, but often it will have existed before and made you vulnerable - this habit of negative self-evaluation or self-bullying makes a very cosy home for depression.
So what has got you into the habit of seeing yourself as ‘not good enough’ in your own particular way? Difficult life experiences can commonly do it, but they don’t have to be dramatic. Sometimes it can be a host of many little things.
For some people, the reasons are obvious. People who have experienced being persistently badly treated often end up believing that they are deficient in some way and deserve the treatment they are given. This is particularly true if you have been badly treated as a child, when you are most vulnerable to believing that whatever happens to you is your fault.
For other people, reasons are less obvious. Sometimes growing up as a ‘high achiever’ can lead to the very tiring belief that you are only as good as your most recent good performance or achievement – rather than feeling ‘good enough’ without having to achieve. Sometimes the experience of being ‘different’, in a context where conforming to the norm is valued, leaves a person feeling less valuable or not good enough.
It is a basic human need to feel loved and accepted simply for being yourself. These are the ingredients for learning to see oneself as a ‘good enough’ person. Unfortunately, we live in a world where this need is often not sufficiently met. There are many social and cultural messages which conflict with this need, so feeling ‘not good enough’ is all too common (see depression sociology).
Depressive self-beliefs and thinking patterns interact with other factors to create vulnerability which can allow depression to take hold in a depression habit spiral. In other words, experiences from long ago and longstanding habits of thinking can eventually become too much for you, making it seem as if you have become depressed ‘for no reason’.
Whether your self-bullying habit is a long-standing and ingrained one, or whether it is a recent effect of depression, it is always possible to learn new habits! Self-bullying is part of the depressed thinking habits which fuel the depression habit spiral, and you can learn to put other more constructive habits in its place.