Depressed…or Heartbroken?

Disclaimer: all thoughts and opinions are my own.

For Med and Alicia, friends for life.

Over the weekend, I had a text from a very good friend of mine.  This is what it said:

“What do you think?  If someone who hadn’t experienced depression was told it was like feeling heartbroken – would that help?”

I think Depression is an illness that is extremely hard to quantify, to describe in a language such that that non-sufferers will grasp exactly what it does to a person.

But heartbroken is not a word I’d use.  Heartbroken is an emotion.  There is (normally) a reason for it – grief, relationship breakups…it is a process that one might go through, a process of varying length and intensity, but a process.  A process with an end.

Depression is more like having your heart ripped from your chest, so that to be heartbroken would be impossible.  It’s like carrying an invisible, but heavy, load.  From my experience, you don’t even want to look at people, much less interact.  You feel dead inside, numb, unable to feel.  You notice nothing around you.  You can sit amongst people, seemingly belonging, you might see lips moving, but you will hear nothing; it will have a surreal quality to it  Further, you become apathetic, you just don’t care…about anything.

So, no, Depression is not the same as being heartbroken.  It may break the hearts of those around us, as they sit by and watch, helpless.  But those of us with Depression don’t have the capacity to be heartbroken.