Life

On Explaining Depression To My Mother

by Emma Cueto

Depression is a seriously awful disease, made all the worse by the difficulty people with depression can have explaining their experiences to their friends and family. It's a struggle that's captured brilliantly in Sabrina Benaim's "Explaining My Depression to My Mother" spoken word poem. Because some explanations don't come easy.

Getting people to take depression seriously is often an uphill battle, especially for young people. Like many mental disorders, people are prone to all sorts of misconceptions about depression, some of them strange, some of them harmful, some of them just bizarre. And this unfortunately means that depressed people have to deal with some pretty unhelpful, insensitive comments.

But despite the fact that some people apparently don't consider depression to be a "real disease" or know how to react when someone they know tells them they're depressed, depression has very real effects for both depressed people and their loved ones.

Considering that about 1 in 10 American adults have depression at any given time, it might be high time that we as a society became more aware of what depression is and how it operates — for instance, you can't just make it go away by going out and having fun. But until that day comes, trying to explain depression to your loved ones can be hard.

Image: Wikipedia Commons