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Staying well for the people watching
What viewers tell him
Gary Gulman made a special about living with depression, and many people have told him how much it resonated. One of the best things he can hear is that someone watched it with a family member who then understood better what depression is like.
The gap in describing it
That matters because describing what is going on inside is the most frustrating part of depression. A special that lets people share how they're feeling gives them a way across that gap.
Why he stays vigilant
For him, something beyond feeling well for himself is tied up in being vigilant about it: he is concerned about letting certain people down and doesn't want anyone to feel there was no hope for them. It also fulfills a long-held fantasy that his own suffering could make other people feel a little better, the way other people's had made him feel.
Why is depression so hard to describe?
An inner state cannot be shown to anyone else, so it has to be translated into words that never quite fit. In her 1926 essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf wrote that English has plenty of words for love and jealousy but almost none for physical pain. Clinicians ran into the same gap, and in 1975 the researcher Ronald Melzack built the McGill Pain Questionnaire around a list of descriptive words so patients could point to the ones that fit.
Why do shared stories help people feel less alone?
The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom named universality as one of the therapeutic factors in group therapy in his 1970 textbook on the subject. It is the discovery that other people have had the same thoughts and feelings. Isolation tends to fall when people hear their own experience described by someone else. Support groups for many conditions are built on this effect.
Why can family members miss what depression feels like?
Much of depression happens inside a person, while what others see is withdrawal, tiredness, and lost interest. Those outward signs can look like mood or laziness to someone who has never felt the condition. The DSM-5 lists depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure as the two core symptoms, and a diagnosis requires at least one of them.