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Hosting Grief vs. Depression is Like Hosting
a Kitten vs. a Tiger
A
psychiatrist friend of mine sometimes says “just because a
dog has fleas doesn’t mean it can’t also have ticks.”
Meaning, you can have grief and depression. Double
trouble.
First of
all there are important differences between losing a parent
and losing a marriage.
The
former is expected, and generally in keeping with the course
of your life. It's usually less disruptive. The loss of a
marriage means the loss of an entire vision of your future
and a re-working of the structure of your life, which is put
into upheaval. It’s enough to make anyone feel they lost the
air in their lungs.
Back to
the two types of sadness. The
difference between grief and depression is hard for me to
understand, much less describe. How can we possibly draw a
clear line between the two? But if I think about it very
generally, stifling grief will tend to cause some trouble.
Crying about a loss is natural, expected, wholesome.
Entertaining the idea that it's problematic just adds
tension which compounds the matter. If grief was an animal,
it would grow quiet and satisfied as you feed it.
Depression on the other
hand would be a level of sadness and distress that is
somehow out of proportion to your events and circumstances.
It will thrive on distorted thinking (see Depressed
Thinking) and depressive behavior (withdrawing,
neglecting tasks, agitated or sluggish movement, changing
diet and sleep patterns, and so on). In this case, prolonged
crying, especially I think the gasping, spasmodic kind of
crying, might not feel like a good release; more exhausting
and out of control. If there is such a thing as a good cry,
it could have a counterpart evil twin, the bad cry. If
depression was an animal, feeding it would cause it to grow
big, aggressive and hungry. I have to stress that I'm being
general and speculative here. Readers should decide if parts
of this are true or not in their own case.
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