I Thought I Had Depression, But It Was Something Else

My depression was a symptom of a bigger problem.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

I once spent three weeks straight in bed. I’d get up to shower occasionally, but mostly my biggest daily expenditure of energy was reaching over to the bedside table to get more Benadryl to make me sleep again. Being awake was hell on earth. I wasn’t bad enough to want to die, but I certainly didn’t want to be alive. I thought I was depressed. I was wrong. What I actually had was burnout.

Let me explain. I tried for many years to treat my depression. Medication after medication. Cognitive-behavioral therapy. Wine. Endless rounds of falling into the abyss, dragging myself out and to the doctor yet again, only to come out feeling that there was no hope and nothing would ever get any better for me. “Treatment-resistant depression,” is what it’s generally called.

I don’t know exactly when I realized my depression was actually a symptom of something else. I suppose eventually I became so frustrated by the inability of medical approaches to help me that I started looking for other answers. I just couldn’t believe that I was doomed to feel like shit for the rest of my life because of some inherent biochemical or psychological flaw. But if the problem wasn’t me, what was it? The answer was obvious once I took brain chemistry and mental illness out of the equation: it was the circumstances of my life. I was suffering from the effects of years of anxiety that came from trying to survive and thrive as an intuitive feeler, a gentle soul, in a world that is not made for such as us. I was burned out from it.

In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized burnout as a legitimate condition (a “syndrome”). Which is great, right? Not exactly. There is this major caveat: it is considered an “occupational phenomenon,” related only to the workplace context. Burnout comes from being overwhelmed and exhausted in one’s job. The standard treatment advice is to take a vacation, maybe change jobs. 

I think this is bullshit. Burnout is a whole-life condition, caused not just by a particular job but by the system that supports our work institutions. A system that prioritizes an individual’s productive and economic value for the organization they work for over their humanity. Take a look at the WHO’s list of burnout indicators:   

·     feelings of energy depletion and exhaustion;

·     increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and

·     reduced professional efficacy

Let that last one sink in. Reduced professional efficacy.

According to this, the true cost of your burnout is that you cease to be an efficacious member of your organization. You cost them money because your productivity decreases.

The irony is that this system of valuation is a root cause of burnout. Even when your job is ostensibly for something other than profit, like my previous work in academia, it still always comes down to what is good for the organization, not you. Any institution seeks first and foremost to survive, and your worth to it is based on whether or not you contribute to that. 

You’re probably thinking, well duh. That’s just the way our system works. And anyway, everyone’s got to earn a living. True and true. But for gentle souls, this system is particularly spirit-crushing. We are not primed for the competitive, impersonal nature of it. But it’s more than that. Many intuitive feelers find that the institutional/organizational context just doesn’t make sense. It is so fundamentally contrary to our own personal value system that we often can’t function within it anywhere near a level of competence that expresses our true talents and skills, even as we exhaust ourselves trying to fit in. And this is devastating. It can lead to feelings of futility and hopelessness.

What really turned things around for me was when I realized that my real problem was that I was allowing the societal values of productivity and money-seeking to lead my decisions. All along I was chasing things I don’t personally value. I began to reassess my life from my own perspective, rather than society’s. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do – it requires a real commitment to examining and throwing away some beliefs that are so ingrained it feels wrong to reject them. Like deciding to not pursue certain career opportunities you’ve spent years qualifying for, even when it impacts your personal bottom line in life-altering ways. Or deciding that you are going to start “wasting” more time – see, we don’t even have positive ways to talk about being unproductive in our language!

Clearing my own mind – working to eliminate the cultural brainwashing – was the first and honestly only really difficult step I needed to take to heal from burnout. Once I gained confidence in living my personal values, and in a way that prioritizes my own mental health at all times, everything else began to fall into place. I’m not saying this is the way for everyone. But for me, trusting myself and trusting my values made all the difference.