Depression – Is it a choice?
When you’re feeling depressed, the last thing you might imagine is that you are choosing it. Surely that doesn’t make sense?
The notion of making choices in contemporary society is usually associated with conscious awareness – we are aware of certain options and then act after deciding which way to go. Choosing something like Depression – or any other labelled experience – is viewed differently from an existential perspective. Instead of choosing the actual experience, what if believing there is such a fixed reality as Depression was the choice?
f you adopt a perspective that Depression exists in a certain way that dictates the nature of the experience, the likely symptoms, the stages it takes or how to remove it, then it will limit the ways in which you examine your experience of it and what it means to you. When clients tell me they are depressed, I ask then ‘So what exactly is YOUR depression about?’ – this avoids jumping to conclusions and normalising the condition in ways that miss the uniquess of the person and their experience.
This is not to minimise the suffering of someone says they have Depression or have been given that interpretation. There do appear to be symptoms that are similar to the observer – however, when I work with clients, their experiences of the thing we all call Depression is profoundly different. I encourage people to be open to exploring what the unique language of their depression is – so that they truly choose consciously how they want to live. Your depression could be saving your life – I encourage you to look beyond narrowed defined interpretations to make sense of it.
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