one fairly common experience of gifted children is wishing for pain. wishing you had some great big horrible thing in your past so that you can justify the pain you’re in, and so that you’ll deserve help. it’s exhausting and it fucks you up and to anyone out there who feels like they haven’t suffered enough to get help: you’re allowed to want help. you’re in enough pain. you deserve to feel better
holy shit yeah
is this one of those things that everyone actually does?? i just assumed i was a shitty person
Wait that’s normal?
It’s not “normal” as in “everybody feels this way so suck it up and quit whining”.
It’s “normal” as in “many people experience pain, loneliness, anxiety, self-hatred, and other symptoms of mental illness that feel like they ‘don’t count’ because there’s no real Thing they can point to to explain it, but their pain and suffering are real and ought to be taken seriously.”
However, when I say “many people” I actually mean “less than a quarter of the population”. The vast majority of people aren’t in massive internal pain most of the time. If this post resonates with you, I super recommend you look into mental health resources, because nobody deserves to feel this way, and there’s a very real hope that information, understanding, therapy, and/or medication can work together to help you feel better.
Fantasizing about being hurt or dying in some way so that everyone realizes how much pain you’re in isn’t a sign that you’re a terrible person. It’s a sign that YOU’RE IN A LOT OF PAIN. Pain that deserves help and that CAN be helped.
The notes on this post today make me wanna CRY.
…sorry, did you just say the vast majority of people aren’t in massive internal pain most of the time???? what
So here’s where I’m getting my statistics from:
One basic test of massive internal pain is a depression test. Here’s one such questionnaire, the PHQ-9. It lists nine symptoms of depression and asks people how much they have experienced them over the last few weeks. Among them are symptoms like, “Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless,” “Feeling bad about yourself – or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down,” and “Thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way.”
It’s scored by asking people to rate if they’ve experienced the thing: 0, not at all, 1, several days, 2, more than half the days, or 3, nearly every day. Then you get a total score by adding up the ranking of each of the nine symptoms listed. So the lowest possible score is 0 (never experienced any of the symptoms) and the highest possible is 27 (all the symptoms nearly every day). The PHQ-9 considers scores above 5 to indicate mild depression, above 10, moderate, and above 15, moderate to severe depression.
When you run thousands of people through the PHQ-9–for example, if you ask doctor’s offices to ask everyone seeing their doctor for any reason to take it–this is what the score distribution looks like:
Far and away, the most common score is 0. The vast majority of people experience no symptoms of depression in their daily lives. The vast majority of people do not feel hopeless, do not feel like failures, and do not think they would be better off if they were dead in their day-to-day lives.
Depression really is unusual, not the natural state of human existence, and, in the majority of cases, really truly treatable.
