Loving Someone with Depression
Speaking as a parent with a job and a small kid who has to do childcare, job, housework, cooking, everything while my partner lies in bed playing video games on their phone.... it is phenomenally frustrating.<p>What really sucks about depression is that it is functionally a very selfish disease from the perspective of the people providing support. The person won't do the bare minimum of their responsibilities, and will only exert effort, creativity, desire, and motivation to ... defend their depression and depressive activities.<p>My health suffers, my fitness suffers, my stress suffers, my job suffers, my kid suffers.<p>It's one of those mental "possessions/invasions" like addiction where communicating with a person about their specific problem becomes a strange otherworldly conversation with an isolated part of the brain specifically dedicated to perpetuating and defending that self-destructive cycle of behavior. It's basically like a disassociated alternate personality.<p>Part of the tendency of human mental conditions to try to inflict themselves upon other people is that I think profoundly deep trauma makes someone lonely, and only the expression of disorders or inflicting the same wound on others alleviates that lonliness in a perverse cycle, which inflicts the same trauma on others.<p>And thus there are classes of mental illness that I do think can be viewed as "infectious".