sindikat [he/him]
Mental illness gatekeeping is absolutely a thing. Dunno about “bipolar > depression”, but definitely see “my depression is real, yours is not” all the fucking time. It usually, though not always, comes from the “depression is just a chemical imbalance, bro” people.
This is one reason why I like CBT and specifically David Burns so much, even if they aren’t perfect. David Burns pretty much rejects DSM and defines depression not as a binary property “you need to be this fucked to have Major Depressive Disorder”, but as a scale. He asks you to self-report 5 characteristics on the scale from 0 to 4, and the bigger the total number you assign to them, the more depressed you are.
Sure, normal healthy people feel sad from time to time. In fact, if, say, your dog died, of course you should feel sad, it’s human. But if you systematically feel sad and/or hopeless and/or worthless and/or unmotivated and/or joyless, then something is going on, regardless of what you wanna call it.
This gatekeeping is a huge reason why depressed people don’t aggressively seek out therapy and instead waste their time on garbage superficial self-help. “I’m not depressed, there are people who deserve to have depression, I’m just a whiny bitch, who needs more self-discipline”.
Y’know what this reminds me of? When edgelords say that trans people can’t have PTSD, because only war veterans can have PTSD. I’ve heard that quite a few times in my life.
My take is that I’ll have empathy for any motherfucker who feels any of the negative emotions listed above, no matter how little they are, no matter how much you dismiss them, no matter how much you feel “other, more worthy people have depression, I’m just an objectively shitty person, I don’t have depression”. Your feelings are valid, and you are allowed to treat them like you would treat depression.
