DEPRESSION: The Valley of Shit vs. the Pit of Despair (and why it’s important to know the difference)

I have a number of friends who are facing some project, personal and mental-health challenges at the moment, so I thought I’d write a post about the Valley of Shit and the Pit of Despair.

The Valley of Shit is something everyone will go through during their PhD.  It’s been blogged about several times here and elsewhere around the internets (most notably here).  It’s that frustrating time where nothing goes right and everything is slow and difficult and you don’t seem to go anywhere.  Add a good dose of Imposter Syndrome and you can feel like you’re wading through an endless pile of excrement. 

Which brings me to the Pit of Despair.  The Pit of Despair is what mental health professionals would call depression and anxiety.  There is a subtle but important distinction between the Valley of Shit and the Pit of Despair.

In the Valley of Shit, the way to get out is to keep trudging along.  It may not be the most productive time of your PhD (and you’ll likely hate every minute of it) but by continuing to work, you’ll find your way out of it.  Feeling awful in the Valley of Shit is a normal reaction to a shitty situation.  You are not supposed to be happy about being in a valley that is full of poo.

Feeling depressed or anxious all the time, and for no particular reason is not normal.  (There are many excellent, eloquent and well-written articles about what it is like living with depression, this one is my favourite).  Unlike the Valley of Shit,  working hard will not get you out of the Pit of Despair and (to extend the metaphor) the more you dig, the deeper you’ll get.  Encouragement from peers and supervisors, which can help you through the Valley of Shit does not translate to the Pit of Despair.  Putting pressure on yourself when you’re suffering from a mental illness will make things worse. Fact.

The problem is that the Pit of Despair can look and feel a lot like the Valley of Shit.  So it’s hard to know whether you should persevere or give yourself a break.  It was probably obvious to everyone else but even during some of my darkest days I didn’t know if I was feeling depressed because I was stressed about my PhD or because I was unwell.  It was only when I took time off from uni to concentrate on getting well that I knew for sure that what I was experiencing was a severe bout of depression.

The good news is that several things will help with both.  Talking to a friend, councillor, peer, mentor, can help you feel better.  My own experience (and that of my friends who are struggling with depression and anxiety) is that people tend to be incredibly supportive and understanding.  Talking can also provide some clarity you need to figure out if you’re in the Valley of Shit or the Pit of Despair.  Also, get outside and exercise.  There is a whole lot of evidence to suggest that exercise helps to relieve stress as well as alleviate the symptoms of depression and anxiety.

This last one is most important: be kind to yourself; don’t kick yourself when you’re down.  That shit ain’t helpful.

If you want to know more or are worried that you or someone you know is experiencing depression or anxiety,  here are some useful links:

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Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything. 

At first, though, the invulnerability that accompanied the detachment was exhilarating. At least as exhilarating as something can be without involving real emotions. 

The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief.  I had always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a weakness — annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn’t have to feel them anymore.

But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there’s a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don’t feel very different.

Which leads to horrible, soul-decaying boredom.

I tried to get out more, but most fun activities just left me existentially confused or frustrated with my inability to enjoy them.

At first, I’d try to explain that it’s not really negativity or sadness anymore, it’s more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can’t feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you’re horribly bored and lonely, but since you’ve lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you’re stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is. 

But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they’ll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you’re having this weird argument where you’re trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they’ll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself. 

And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something — it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing. You can’t fill it up. You can’t cover it. It’s just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.

It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared. 

I started spending more time alone. 

Perhaps it was because I lacked the emotional depth necessary to panic, or maybe my predicament didn’t feel dramatic enough to make me suspicious, but I somehow managed to convince myself that everything was still under my control right up until I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn’t feel obligated to keep existing. 

It’s a strange moment when you realize that you don’t want to be alive anymore. If I had feelings, I’m sure I would have felt surprised. I have spent the vast majority of my life actively attempting to survive. Ever since my most distant single-celled ancestor squiggled into existence, there has been an unbroken chain of things that wanted to stick around. 

Yet there I was, casually wishing that I could stop existing in the same way you’d want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive noise. 

That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst part was deciding to keep going.

When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should clarify that I don’t mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and — far in the distance — I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I’d be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I’d have to turn around and walk back the other way. 

Soon afterward, I discovered that there’s no tactful or comfortable way to inform other people that you might be suicidal. And there’s definitely no way to ask for help casually.

My feelings did start to return eventually. But not all of them came back, and they didn’t arrive symmetrically. 

I had not been able to care for a very long time, and when I finally started being able to care about things again, I HATED them. But hatred is technically a feeling, and my brain latched onto it like a child learning a new word. 

Hating everything made all the positivity and hope feel even more unpalatable. The syrupy, over-simplified optimism started to feel almost offensive.

Thankfully, I rediscovered crying just before I got sick of hating things.  I call this emotion “crying” and not “sadness” because that’s all it really was. Just crying for the sake of crying. My brain had partially learned how to be sad again, but it took the feeling out for a joy ride before it had learned how to use the brakes or steer.

But when you’re concerned that the miserable, boring wasteland in front of you might stretch all the way into forever, not knowing feels strangely hope-like.