And speaking of conservatives who don’t understand shit that doesn’t effect them directly, I am about to lose another friend I’m afraid.

I was diagnosed a few years ago with clinical depression and anxiety. I cannot take meds for it, SSRIs especially, make things a lot worse. I’m the person who gets all those side effects they read off really fast in those commercials. I often post articles on my facebook page about the science-y side of the human brain, especially when it comes to autism, depression and anxiety. I do have things that work for me, exercise, CBT therapy tools from prior therapists, and forcing myself to engage with the world. Because I know my brain chemistry lies to me, a lot. It took YEARS of work to get here, believe me.

I posted something yesterday, a study that came out about the importance of friends and that while a good mood is contagious within a group, a person’s depression disorder is helped by a steady support group. We live in a culture that makes you feel like depression is your fault, that you’re feeling sorry for yourself, etc. Many people act like you have fucking leprosy and they withdraw support unless you have a fake smile plastered on your face every minute. This has been my experience and I have been in this battle pretty much alone from day one.

So my friend decides she will respond about how she and her boyfriend were just talking about depression and how some people seem to “shake it off quickly and others don’t”. Sigh. You can’t just shake off clinical depression by petting a puppy and dancing around to that obnoxious Pharrell Williams song. I pretty much told her there’s a damned difference between the two, and she might want to stop clucking about this because there’s a fair chance more than one of her circle of friends is suffering and will not talk to her about it because of the attitude she keeps projecting. What she doesn’t know is that her oldest daughter (same age as my son) is battling this and won’t talk to her about it any more because she keeps making depression into a character flaw and not an illness. I’ve already unfollowed her, I’m seriously considering just washing my hands of her. She used to be fairly liberal, now she’s a gun humping, bootstrap conservative, and it’s working my only nerve. I’ve known her for 30 years, we used to be close, but have drifted apart since our kids were little. She used to compare her kid’s development to mine (my son is autistic, so um, yeah, there’s going to be differences, jerk) and that kind of built a wall. She reached out to me last summer and I responded in kind, but this shit is just about making me want to dig a moat. Empathy, how does it work?