Experiences
During depression, there are a number of things people experience that are common as well as unique to the experience of students in India.
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Learned helplessness
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One of the psychological factors that affect depression is the emotional assault on oneself, according to Kumar. He said that when someone with depression doesn't have a positive attitude toward themselves or a healthy personality, they end up being unable to find a meaningful way out of their situation. They develop learned helplessness. They end up feeling helpless to the extent that they find it threatening to make any kind of change to their lives and get over their depression.
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“They feel it is better to suffer than to struggle and then survive later,” Kumar said.
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Sayee Kumar
Psychologist Martin Seligman suggested that people become anxious and depressed when they decide that they have no control over the stress in their lives, leading to the development of the learned helplessness theory of depression.
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For such people, Kumar says that learned helplessness becomes more of a coping mechanism and is one of the important psychological factors contributing to depression.
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Double depression
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What's more, he said that this can even result in double depression sometimes, which is when a person has persistent depressive disorder, and then has major depressive episodes occur on top of that.
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To put it into perspective, Kumar explained that it's like having a fever, and then diabetes at the same time.
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According to Kendra Cherry on Very Well Mind, learned helplessness can worsen depression, anxiety and loneliness.
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Loneliness: being avoided
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Hariharan already said loneliness contributed to the beginning of her depression. Loneliness also played a role in her experience.
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Besides the fact that she said she had no friends in her class, people also avoided her like the plague.
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“Having someone to talk to would have been nice,” Hariharan said. “And people knowing that it's not some illness or something, it's not a communicable disease or something - I wish they would have known. I wish my friends knew that it's not some disease or something like that. They avoided me like I had some malaria or something.”
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Hariharan said that even when a handful of people, including her best friend, tried to talk to her, they didn't seem to know how to help her. All they could do was make small talk. She felt like there was no one she could really reach out to, mentioning frequently that she didn't have anyone to talk to when I interviewed her.
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Shruthilaya Hariharan
Wanting to keep sleeping
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Hariharan also said she didn't want to leave her bed when she was experiencing depression. She said she just wanted to keep sleeping because she didn't want to talk to people or interact with anyone.
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Prabha, who is undergoing treatment for her clinically diagnosed depression, also experienced the same thing and had copious amounts of sleep.
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“I spent hours sleeping,” she said. “And it wasn't the kind of fulfilling sleep, it was just sleeping because I didn't want to do anything else.”
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Crying and being unable to reach out to her parents
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Hariharan also said that she noticed she spent a lot of time crying without knowing the reason.
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“I was crying half the time and I didn't know why,” she said.
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Hariharan described how her parents chalked all her behaviors up to just a teenage phase. But whenever someone said that she'd get over it soon, Hariharan said she got more stressed out, wondering what would happen if she actually doesn't get over her depression.
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Whenever Hariharan did try to talk to her parents, they talked more about the effects of her behavior on her academics than her general well-being.
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Ravichandran said he didn't even try talking to his parents about it because he didn't want them to worry or get stressed out about him.
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“My parents,” he said, “all they wanted was me to get good marks. So I didn't want them to get stressed by saying that I am depressed. I just kept it to myself.”
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Ravichandran also recalled that he didn't even talk about it with his older brother, who he said he's normally comfortable with. He just kept thinking it'll get over soon and didn't talk to anyone about it.
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Only talking about it when it finally went away
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It was only a couple years later when Ravichandran started college that he finally opened up about his depression. He said that by that time, he didn't feel depressed anymore.
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“After 12th, when I started meeting new people in college, I started talking about that I was depressed and, I don't know, I felt comfortable after I came out of the depression,” Ravichandran said. “Because I crossed that, so I felt that now talking about depression might make me feel even more better.”
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He said he feels that talking about his depression from the point of someone who has dealt with it might give people comfort and hope to have the willpower within them to fight it.
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Functional when busy, but not when she had free time
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For Prabha, college was the turning point in her experience with depression.
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High functioning depression is a kind of depressive disorder described in the fifth and current version of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, popularly known as the DSM-5. The DSM-5 is used by psychologists in the United States to diagnose psychological disorders (internationally, psychologists use the ICD-10). As the name suggests, it is a form of depression where the person is still able to carry out their day-to-day activities without much effect from the depression.
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Prabha said that in school she was functional to a certain level. It didn’t stop her from going to school or performing well in exams. School kept her busy.
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“But college, it took a really weird turn,” she said. “Because I had a lot of time on my hands and I didn't know what to do and like I actually started feeling things.”
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Comorbidity with anxiety and a toll on her functionality
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Another thing Prabha experienced was anxiety.
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Due to the similar nature of the symptoms for depression and anxiety in the DSM-5, there is a lot of comorbidity, or the presence of two psychological diseases at the same time in a person.
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“So it's just that one thing affects the other,” Prabha said. “So my anxiety could make my depression worse, and vice versa. So I realized that I was reacting badly to situations that really didn't warrant the reaction in the first place. And I spent hours sleeping. And it wasn't the kind of fulfilling sleep, it was just sleeping because I didn't want to do anything else. And I didn't shower, like my personal hygiene was really bad and I had to cut off my hair because I didn't wash my hair for weeks, stuff like that. It basically took a toll on my functionality.”
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Suicidal ideation
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One of the other major things Prabha experienced was having suicidal thoughts, although she said she didn’t try anything.
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According to Ishita Goeal from The Indian Express, depression is one of the leading causes of suicide in India.
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“I've had thoughts to a point where it's just, like, impossible for me to do anything else except think about that,” Prabha said. “And sure, thank God I didn't really have the courage to do something… whatever. But having the thoughts is really bad.”
Parent’s Reactions
Lack of appetite
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“Like I'll be eating and I'll be like, 'What if I don't eat for 10 days?’” Hariharan said, describing how she went through phases of losing her appetite and not eating when she experienced depression. “And then I'll actually do that because I just wanted to try it out.”
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When I asked her how her parents reacted to that, she said her parents talked to her about it, but in a way that emphasized the effect it would have on her ability to study well, which made it seem to her that her parents didn’t really care about her.
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“They'll be like, ‘If you're not eating well, you can't study,’” Hariharan said, “which will be like, ‘Okay, you don't care.’”
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Prabha too got away with not eating most days. She spent most of her day at school, so she had both breakfast and lunch outside of home, with no one to monitor whether she was eating or not. The only meal she had at home was dinner, which is generally a lighter meal for people in India.
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Prabha’s parents too noticed that she wasn’t eating, but they didn’t try to talk to her about it. Instead, they associated it with being just a teenage phase rather than a mental health issue.
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“I think they just thought it was something that kids do and something they have to put up with,” she said. “They thought I was exclusive from the whole mental health situation.”
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Self-harm
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Prabha also engaged in self-harm when she was in 10th standard.
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“I remember I was really really angry and helpless - I was super helpless,” Prabha said. “And for some reason I thought that harming myself would be a release of some sort, I guess? I don't know.”
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Self-harm involves purposely inflicting pain on oneself, and one of the most well-known methods is cutting with a blade or knife.
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Prabha said that people try self-harm for various reasons.
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For some, it is a coping mechanism. People who attempt self-harm have control over the pain they are inflicting on themselves, and that helps them regain a sense of control and predictability over their lives. Losing a sense of predictability actually causes a number of psychological disorders.
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Prabha also said that some use self-harm to compensate for a lack of attention. But for her, the reason was anger and pure impulsivity.
“For me, it was more like I was really really angry and I just wanted to like find a release,” she said. “And I know for a fact that like once I finished doing it, I regretted it. So it was like a very impulsive thing.”
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Divya Prabha
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I asked Prabha if she ever thought about the fact that she is causing herself more pain when she is slashing herself, to which she said no, she never thought about that.
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But did her parents notice?
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Prabha said it was pretty obvious that she had wounds on her hand, but her parents never said a word. They either didn't notice it, or they noticed and chose not to react to it.
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This leads to another problem Prabha still faces today: talking to her parents about depression.
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Talking about depression
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Prabha said that although she and her parents still function as a family, they aren’t actively supporting her and it’s still weird for her to have this conversation with them. Her parents make sure that she is comfortable and make sure they don’t do anything that make her feel bad, but depression is still an uncomfortable topic in her home.
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“We function as a family and everything,” she said, “but we never talk about this kind of personal stuff out open with each other.”
At Schools
No one to talk to
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Both Hariharan and Ravichandran described loneliness and having nobody to talk to at their school. They both said there were no counselors in their school they could open up to.
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“It's something like general knowledge,” Hariharan said. “Like, it's common, and if people are experiencing about it, they should come out and talk. And when people do come out and talk, we have to listen to them, because that's one thing we all want it. When I was depressed, I wanted someone to listen to me. And I realize that no one was there to listen to me, to my fears and everything. So it would be nice if someone was there.”
Shruthilaya Hariharan
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In Prabha’s school, the PT teacher was made the counselor, so although Prabha said his intentions were good, he was unable to provide professional help.
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Schools are unfamiliar with the concept of mental health and normalization
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“To be honest, most of the schools here, people aren't even familiar with the concept of mental health, let alone recognize the symptoms and provide help,” Prabha said, which prevented her from even being able to realize that she and her friends had problems when they were in school.
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Not knowing about mental health or what depression even is, the experiences and symptoms felt by Prabha, Hariharan, Ravichandran and Anton all tend to be normalized in schools, with students taking it as the norm, like Prabha described in her school. This is bad because it can prevent students from seeking out and getting the help they need.
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“Throughout my school life,” Prabha said, “I thought that I was normal, and I didn't have much of a problem.”