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Smiling Depression: Embarrassing Agony?

Atypical Depression: Silent Suffering

People can appear to be happy, while internally agonizing with serious depression. In fact, this kind of anguish is more common than the typical depression we know, where we visibly perceive sadness in the sufferer. The challenge is to understand that this is real and that we can do something about it. Typical or atypical depression is treatable. Depression is not a sin. It’s not a transmittable disease. Depression isn’t anybody’s fault.

Myth: Someone who is smiling cannot be actually depressed. Depression is all about sadness, crying, withdrawal and suicide.

Fact:Depressed people who are smiling may actually be sad from within. They have to struggle harder to hide their emotions.

Atypical Depression: Hard to See Through the Mask

It’s not surprising and not ordinarily expected either; that people would see through the mask worn by a person with atypical depression. They cover-up their feelings well and the “typical” signs of depression do not show. We find it easy to believe that a person is depressed when he or she is visibly sad, constantly crying, facing hardships in everyday life, is unable to work, doesn’t have family support, is possibly single, doesn’t have kids, may have lost his or her job, or maybe doesn’t have too many friends.

When we see someone with a normal life, we are not tuned to understand what they’re feeling. We like to believe what we see. If we do not sense distress, or imagine any reason for it, we’re inclined to think it’s non-existent. And if such a person says they’re not feeling good, we laugh it off assuming it’s a hysterical cry for attention. The truth is very different. Atypical depression symptoms do not present as classically as we imagine; simply because it’s NOT typical..

“I feel angry, bitter, broken, disfigured, miserable, powerless, and hopeless. I live in fright. I cannot see the light. But talking about it doesn’t seem right. Can you help?”

- Atypical Depression

Atypical Depression Symptoms

Some common threads run through all our weaving. Human emotional beliefs around depression have been researched, acknowledged, and affirmed. We people do not want to talk about our depression because we believe that if we are depressed, we lack. And it makes us incomplete. Here are some thoughts voiced by people who were depressed.

Irrational Beliefs

  • “I am a lesser human being”
  • “I am weak, fragile or inept”
  • “I will not live a normal life”
  • “It’ll be hard to retain my job”
  • “I can’t maintain relationships”
  • “I am like a criminal or villain”
  • “People will see me as a disease”
  • “My friends will abandon me”
  • “My family will ostracize me”
  • “Ignorance is bliss in this case”
  • “Depression will go away itself”
  • “I will get used to this feeling”
  • “Someday I will just kill myself”

Irrational Choices

  • “I will stay away from people”
  • “I will fake that I am strong”
  • “I won’t even try to get better”
  • “I just won’t bother working”
  • “I will stay away from people”
  • “I will punish and harm myself”
  • “I will just withdraw socially”
  • “I will avoid friends proactively”
  • “I’ll never ask for family’s help”
  • “I will just never talk about this”
  • “I will never seek treatment”
  • “I will get OK with being sad”
  • “Let me work on a suicide plan”

Have you ever thought like this or known someone who may be going through this kind of atypical depression? With these beliefs, the one who is depressed judges that normal people do not know how to deal with (any) typical or atypical depression. And that they will want to stay away, as if depression is a transmittable disease. And people don’t want to contract the “negative vibes” from glum people. Easy solution? Hide it.

Smiling Atypical Depression

“Happiness is not defined by the measure of the currency you hold. Happiness itself is the ultimate currency.”

- Shefali Batra

The Truth

Smiling depression isn’t a clinical term but is closely correlated and medically similar to atypical depression. Depression is prima facie characterized by sadness, and yet depression is more than only feeling sad. We all feel low, even miserable from time to time. But thinking that sadness will not get better, feeling low about yourself, being unable to cope with things, such that it begins to affect sleep, appetite and social relationships; tell-tale depression symptoms. What we need to understand is that depression can have non-conforming symptoms and signs too.

Atypical Depression: Still Painful

Atypical depression as the name suggests, is not typical. But it’s a real problem. Here we see more irritability than sadness, sleepiness over insomnia and bingeing instead of appetite loss. Such people are very reactive to events in their environment. They could feel very happy if something good happens – like a text from a friend or a positive work appraisal or maybe a relationship, marriage or child birth. All of these transiently make the mood better. But in a while the enduring sad feeling takes over again. But the show such people manage to put on, and how they make the world believe that they are flourishing and thriving, is dazing.

Typical Depression

  • Absence of enjoyment
  • Sadness or low mood
  • Restless rundown feeling
  • Fatigue or loss of energy
  • Feelings of hopelessness
  • Worthlessness and guilt
  • Inattention and indecision
  • Ideas of death or suicide

Atypical Depression

  • Frustrated > Depressed
  • Mood hyper-reactivity
  • Sensitive to rejection
  • Heaviness in the legs
  • Unusually more sleep
  • Premenstrual syndrome
  • Increase in the appetite
  • Frequently, weight gain

Stigma: Society’s Fault?

Depression has dual stigma. What society poses and what we internalize as our own self-stigma. Self-stigma appears to be a bigger evil. Even in advanced cultures, people believe that their own depression will be equated with weakness of character or a theatrical exaggeration of inadequacy and incapability. And so, they choose to hide the symptoms, to prevent being misunderstood, stigmatized or ostracized. This is what enhances atypical depression. Society has long engrained this negativism in people’s minds, and isn’t going away easily.

Intelligence, beauty, money, marriage, children, jobs, friends, family, fame or success; none offer protection from depression. You can have everything and still be depressed. And it’s not your fault. So, when you wake up tomorrow morning, open your eyes to what may not be obviously visible. See the sadness behind the smile, and do something about it. It could save your life. Or someone else’s

“What you can’t see, is usually more dangerous. It’s lurking, mocking, inspecting, gnawing and stealing from you. Watch out for it.”

- Shefali Batra

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