If You’ve Been Diagnosed With Depression, You Need To Hear These 5 Truths

Have you recently been diagnosed with depression and struggling with making peace with that diagnosis? Or perhaps have you lived with depression for a long time but you still haven't made peace with it and are having a hard time accepting it?

Don’t worry! When figuring out how to deal with clinical depression, you are not alone.

Every year, millions of people living with depression struggle to accept their diagnosis. In America, the stigma of living with mental illness is so great that the idea of accepting that you might perhaps be one of those millions struggling with this mental health issue is often just too much to bear.

While you feel like you could fight cancer in a moment, you think that sharing with your friends and family that you are depressed would be horrible. Embarrassing. A sign of weakness.

A really important part of living successfully with clincal depression is making peace with it. Accepting that chronic depression is a part of your life but knowing that you can live a full life nonetheless is how you will be able to do so.

Making peace with depression is difficult but important. So, if you don't know what to do when you're depressed, you need to adjust the way you approach your mental health.

Knowing these 5 truths will help you deal with chronic depression and accept it as part of your life.

1. Your depression is not your fault

For many of us, we blame ourselves for our depression. We think that perhaps if somebody just loved us, if we had a better job, were in better shape, or if our parents loved us more, then we just wouldn’t be depressed.

We believe that our depression is a personal failing. Every time that someone tells us to "just suck it up" and we can’t, we feel like we’re letting everybody else down.

The reality is is that mental illness is not the cause of some personal failing. Mental illness is usually caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, one that you had nothing to do with creating.

This chemical imbalance is often genetic, like mine, but it can also be caused by trauma. If you have recently been through some trauma, know that that trauma is in no way your fault and the resulting depression is most likely caused by chemical changes in your brain.

Your depression is not your fault. People who tell you to "just suck it up" don’t understand what depression is really like. So, you aren’t letting anybody down when you can’t suck it up because it’s just not possible to do so when you’re really depressed. People who live with depression know that.

2. Admitting you are depressed is not a sign of weakness

In order to make peace with your depression, you have to admit to yourself that, in fact, you are struggling.

Awareness is the starting point for dealing with pretty much everything in our lives. Being aware of why you’re feeling so sad after a broken heart is the first step towards mending it. Being aware of what is causing the pain in our neck helps us to figure out how to treat it.

Admitting to yourself that you’re living with depression is the first step to true acceptance which can then lead to healing. A person who admits to living with depression is not only not weak but very strong.

Depression is like a hundred-pound gorilla on your back. Life can be hard. Life is even harder when trying to live it with a hundred-pound pound gorilla on your back.

So, deep in your heart, know that making peace with your depression is not a sign of weakness but a sign of great strength because only someone with great strength would be willing to take on something as devastating as chronic depression.

3. People react the way they do because they don't know what to do

We call depression the "no casserole" disease. If you get cancer, people show up at your house with food. If you get depression, people tend to disappear.

Because of this, for myself, and for many of my clients, telling others that we are depressed is one of the hardest things we have ever have to do.

When I told my mom that I was struggling with depression, she immediately tried to fix it. She kept reminding me about how good my life was and how lucky I was to have all that I did and that it was very selfish of me to burden others with my sadness. She couldn't accept me for who I was — she wanted to fix me.

My mom’s reaction was devastating to me but I later learned that her father had struggled with depression and he had disappeared. I think my mother was petrified that the same would happen to me.

So, when somebody reacts badly when you tell them you are living with depression, know that it says a lot more about them than does about you. People react negatively for various reasons but most often it’s because we touch too close to the bone.

When I do speeches about living with depression, many people come up to me afterwards and share stories of people they love living with mental illness The hopelessness that they feel and describe because they can’t help their loved one is beyond description.

4. You are in the company of greatness

What most people don't know — until they start noticing — is that many famous people live with depression. Many very creative, intelligent, attractive, kind, and successful men and women live with depression and live, successfully.

A few of these famous people living with depression today include Catherine Zeta-Jones, Kanye West, Ellen DeGeneres, Cara DeLavigne, Harrison Ford, Lady Gaga, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Demi Lovato, among others.

You know each of them and now you know what someone looks like who was successful at making peace with their depression and is living a solid, happy life.

Abraham Lincoln, Georgia O’Keefe, Sigmund Freud, Siddhartha, and Franz Kafka were all brilliant people who made a difference in the world, all the while living with depression

So, if you believe that your depression makes you in any way less than, know that you’re surrounded by amazing people in this world who live and thrive with depression every day.

5. Making peace with it will actually make you better

Those of us who live with mental illness know that we were only able to start living with it successfully once we had accepted that it was a part of our life.

Only by fully accepting who we are and what we are living with can we begin the healing process.

For me, once I accepted that the feelings that I had lived with for 46 years were not a personal shortcoming but due to a chemical imbalance, I was able to learn how to live with it. I made it my life’s work to help educate people about mental illness, to support them, and to help reduce stigma.

I learned everything I could about my chemical imbalance, learned what medicine worked to keep my head above water, and developed coping skills that I practice every day. The combination of my knowledge and my practice has allowed me to help hundreds of women deal with depression, including myself.

I know that I would not be in the great place that I am today had I not accepted my illness.

So, if anything should really encourage you making peace with your depression, perhaps it can be the understanding that if you do make peace with it you might be able to begin to heal.

Making peace with your depression in a world where mental illness is still so stigmatized can be very challenging.

But if there was ever a challenge to take on, it would be making peace.

If you can work to understand that your depression is not your fault, that it is not a sign of weakness, why others react the way they do, and that you are in the company of greatness then you will be able to start living successfully with clincal depression.

Can you imagine what it would feel like, to wake up every morning, knowing that today your depression is no longer going to control you but that you will control it? That, at the end of the day, you will feel good about yourself and your place in the world because your depression is no longer in charge?

How awesome would that be? It is possible. You can do it!

Mitzi Bockmann is an NYC-based Certified Life Coach and mental health advocate. She works exclusively with women to help them to be all that they want to be in this crazy world in which we live. Email her to get started.