Positive thinking won't cure your depression

"Also, I was in possession of a positive outlook, which is just a trick whereby you convince yourself that the desolution of your world is a phase in your personal growth. The weird thing is it works." - Sam Lipsyte 'The Fun Parts'

I've just finished another self-help book that promises to hold the keys to findings happiness. And it got me thinking.

One of the most annoying and frequent things you hear when you have depression and anxiety is “Don’t be so negative.” Or maybe you hear “look on the Brightside.”

I get it; I’m not the most optimistic person on the planet. I don’t gush about making the most of all opportunities or finding the one good thing in a shitty situation. And I never will. I consider myself more of a realist if I’m honest.

Now I don’t know about you, but despite being told to be more positive on countless occasions and trying not to think that the worst may happen, I’m still depressed and anxious.

You see, I think positive thinking is overrated. It’s lauded as the saviour to mental health problems, when in reality it’s more like slapping a mentally ill person across the face with the false promise of the happiness they could have had if their brain was wired differently.

Positive thinking will not cure your mental illness. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have its benefits.

I did fall victim to the self-help cult of positivity. I thought that if I read enough books on the subject I would absorb at least a little bit of optimism and happiness. I can’t say I didn’t learn anything, but I certainly didn’t learn how to stop being depressed.

Over three years ago, when my depression first started to ease and I could smile and laugh and feel happiness again, I decided to start reading every self-help book I could get my hands on. I wanted this feeling to last, I wanted my mental illness to stay in ‘recovery’, not to be a daily struggle. So I read and tried to put what I read into practice.

I focused on building resilience. How to make myself stronger in the face of depression and anxiety. I was forging armour for the next time I had to go into battle with my mind.

I learned that I have negative thinking patterns, and spiralling thoughts. And I learned how to challenge negative intrusive thoughts. This is important and a huge skill. But self-help books are all too rarely written from the perspective of someone who has a mental illness. 

And often these skills fail you when you need them most.

When my depression returned to smother me, when I curled up in bed with a self-inflicted migraine and dreaded the next day - telling myself to 'think positively’ didn’t help. When I felt anxious and scratched myself enough to break the skin on my arms, I couldn’t challenge those negative thoughts. When I felt the weight of my mental illness on my shoulders, I felt guilty for not being the positive, happy person those self-help books were supposed to make me.

But yesterday when I was sitting in the canteen in work and thought, “Everyone here must hate me” I could challenge that thought and rationalise how illogical that EVERYONE hates me. Maybe one or two don’t like me, but they probably don’t care enough to hate me.

Positive thinking is something we should be doing every day - not only as a last resort. It’s one of the many coping skills you learn on the path to recovery. But we also should think twice about shoving positivity down the throats of people with mental illness. It’s not always helpful, and can cause more harm than good.

Until next time,

Are We Happy Yet? Another self-help book promising the keys to happiness

Are We Happy Yet? 8 Keys to a Joyful Life

I've just finished reading Are We Happy Yet? by Lisa Gypes Kamen, yet another self-help book that I thought could teach me the magic skill of rewiring my brain for happiness.

I had high hopes for Are We Happy Yet?. Gypes Kamen reveals early on in the book that she's had her own mental health battles. Self-help books from the perspective of someone who has battled depression are all too rare. I thought that finally, I had found a book written with mental illness and depression in mind. Finally a book that didn't say I should just think positively and think happy thoughts to be happy.

“As a reformed depressed person, I did not wander into my happy place. There was a personal evolution to my happiness revolution.”

The fact that she says 'reformed depressed person' should have been my warning sign that I was wrong.

While Gypes Kamen said she wanted to debunk the annoying yellow "smiley face" notion of happiness, the book does go there.

Apparently there are eight keys to living a joyful life. Who knew that I just had to do eight things to find happiness! In fact some of the tips contained within the eight keys are quite thought provoking. I particularly found the emphasis on not holding grudges and learning not to complain useful, because I am a serial complainer. It made me think about how I can improve my constant need to complain and whine.

But the book also delivers cheesy self-help jargon like - "Happy people are resilient people", or how you should choose to thrive rather than mainly survive.

I liked that the book was full of practical tools like journaling and writing prompts. Early on you're asked to define your happiness factor - you natural level of happiness - through 65 questions. Similar quizzes are evident throughout the book, but how these can be considered in anyway scientific isn't clear. Readers are also encouraged to build a happiness toolkit, another practical and useful activity.

What I didn't like however, was the notion that you can cultivate happiness by playing happy music (because listening to happy music apparently makes it impossible to feel sad).

If you haven't read a lot of self-help books and want to dip your toe in, Are We Happy Yet? might be for you. It references lots of other books and authors, and the level of topics in there is like multiple self-help books rolled into one.

Are We Happy Yet? got me thinking about happiness in my own life.
Am I doing enough of what makes me happy? And what am I looking for when I read these self-help books promising happiness? But I can't say I feel happier having read it.

Until next time,

**I requested to review Are We Happy Yet? from Netgalley.**   

Depression is Quiet

This comic captures perfectly how I felt over Christmas. I'd been hiding my Depression for so long. Faining an 'I'm fine' while emotion after emotion were piling up unaddressed. And when I finally opened up and admitted that I wasn't okay I was greeted with support. It's incredible to think back to a time less than a month ago where everything felt different. I felt so alone. That nobody cared. And in reality I was surrounded by people who cared about me. I had just doubted how anybody could care when I couldn't even care for myself.

Self Care: Step One

You read my post Down. You know things have been tough for me. So what's next?
Well for me, Self Care is the first step to getting my mental health back on track.

So this is an update on my Self Care regime since the New Year (not just since I pressed 'publish' on that post):

Now I'm All Messed Up

Recovery is all about the little things.

Over the years I have had to find little ways of coping with my Depression; my mood swings, my anxiety, my stress.

I’ve already written about the relief I’ve found from crafting, scrapbooking and being creative. When I was in secondary school I wrote little poems and verses. Now, I blog.   

But there are also a lot of other little things I have found helpful for me throughout the years.

Self-help books

I never thought I would try self-help books. In my head I thought they were cheesy and ‘hippy’. But I happened to be in the Dublin Airport Easons a couple of years ago and I saw a book on the week’s Best-sellers list that I knew I had to have.

A few weeks later I finally bought Tony Bates’ ‘Coming Through Depression’. Very simply, the book helped me to better understand my mental illness. I never fully embraced the chapters on mindfulness and I glossed over the little tasks that the book set for readers. Nonetheless, I found comfort in how a book by a leading psychiatrist could so perfectly describe how I had been feeling.

‘Shoot The Damn Dog’ by Sally Brampton is a memoir of living with Depression by a British journalist. It’s not a self-help book, but I decided to add it into this section as it’s the only memoir like this I have read. The book is heartbreakingly honest, and often when reading it I found myself in tears over how relatable every emotion, every anxiety she felt was. Again, it was comforting to realise that I was not alone; that other people had felt the way I was feeling, and if they could get better, so too could I.

This year I bought ‘The Feeling Good Handbook’ by Dr. David Burns. It’s a massive, massive book (and having read Ulysses in under a week I don’t use the word ‘massive’ lightly).  Dr. Burns uses CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) Techniques, which I had briefly tried before and found particularly helpful. The book also includes exercises and techniques to help you deal with distorted thinking etc. The book encourages you to track your mood and helps you to identify triggers. I had never fully welcomed a book like this before. For once, I did the exercises, but more than that I started applying them.  I began to recognise the different types of distortive thoughts I was having and challenging them; such as discounting the positive and only focusing on the negative things that were said to me.

I mentioned the book was massive right? It’s pretty much a text book. Months later and I’m still not even half-way through it. Partly this is because I’ve abandoned it while I put into practice what I’ve already learned from it. When I’m ready to move on and learn more, I’ll get back into the book. 

Book of Gratitude

I always end up getting more than one Diary around Christmas time. Whether it be as presents, or I find the perfect one and buy it myself, there is always an abundance of them in my house. This year I had my own academic diary, but I also received a 2014 diary as a present. So on New Year’s Day I decided to use one of them as a little Book of Gratitude.

I am always upset to look back at how ungrateful I can be when I’m down. Being depressed can make you self-obsessed in some ways; you look only at the NEGATIVES, YOUR failures, the world is out to get YOU...

So since January 1^st I have taken time out every day to write down one thing that I’m thankful for. There have been a couple of bad days where I couldn’t think of anything to write, or a few times where I just completely forgot  – and they’ve been left blank. But every other day I have found something, no matter how big or small, to be grateful for. For example, last week while I was sick I was grateful for the hour long nap I got on the couch.

Finding one positive among a world of negative thoughts can be difficult, and there are times when I couldn’t. But this book is powerful. I read back through it and smile at the little things that bring me joy.  And I am really excited to be able to look back at it all at the end of the year.

These are but a sample of what works for me when I’m down. In future blog posts I’ll be elaborating on some more of them such as:

Exercise

Mindfulness

Music

An important part of recovery is to find what works for you. I’m a bit messed up, but there are a lot of little things I can do to find relief.