Link: High Functioning Depression on Reddit

Just googled for "High Functioning Depression" and three of the top four links were to my posts on Depressed Academics on the topic.  (Though our overlords Google knew it was me searching so maybe they bias the results.)   In a sense this is dispiriting: it would be better if there was lots of great information on the topic instead of these few posts.  

This is the top link: a thread on reddit.  

http://www.reddit.com/r/depression/comments/19e4gh/high_functioning_depression/

Something leapt out at me as a description of what high functioning depression can be like: "for example, I can work hard all day long, write complex documents, provide legal advice etc. then I come home and I am almost crying because I just cant face doing the dishes."

Also while I'm here, it might be worth mentioning the subreddit (if that phrase means something to you) /r/depression.  It comes with a lot of caveats but does seem to be quite active.

High Functioning Depressive (4)

One of the dispiritingly low number of hits you get on depression in academia when you search is this thread at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

And it is dispiriting to read it... here's a sample from one of the comments:

"In my professional experiences before returning to school, I found that people - friends, employers - don't understand  depression and sometimes don't care to. At my last job, I had a major episode that could have got me fired, so I had to disclose something of my condition to my employers in order to hang onto my job at that moment. The way I was treated after that was unbelievable, bordering on offensive. Before any of this happened to me, I'm not sure I would have even quite understood depression as an illness."

This makes me think how lucky I am.  I've never had a major depressive episode which has disabled me so I need time off work, or seriously impeded my ability to do the fundamental parts of my job. And so I haven't had to reveal my problems in an environment I'm not comfortable with doing so. And (maybe as a result) I haven't had any offensive treatment.

Brings me back to the topic of High Functioning Depressive, a theme of many recent posts.

Roughly speaking, everyone in academia is high functioning.  Many are depressive.  But when I've been talking about high functioning depressive, I've been mainly thinking about people who can do their job at a high level (or at least high enough) when experiencing depression.

It's obvious that this doesn't apply to everyone by any means.   Many people might be high functioning, whether depressive or not, and then be literally disabled by a major episode.  As for the commenter above, they have no choice but to inform employers and colleagues, even if their supervisor or line manager is not supportive.   They have the very real worry of facing both discrimination as a result, and of working day to day in a culture which is still not fully supportive.

I already knew I was incredibly lucky to be a straight white male: "the lowest difficulty setting there is" in the game of life.   I hadn't realised until very recently that even in my depression I'm lucky that my form of it is much less likely to lead to discrimination and offensive treatment.

High Functioning Depressive (3)

Functioning well as an academic is about having a brain that does stuff well.   It's certainly not just about being clever, but there's no question that intellectual activity is the day to day activity of academia.

I wonder if that's a major reason depression is almost taboo in academia.  Having depression is having a brain that doesn't work well in a significant way.  Having your brain not working is not something you want to advertise if it's also what earns your income and respect.

I don't know if this is true or relevant.  But I wonder.

High Functioning Depressive (2)

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If you are depressed and nobody else knows it, does your depression make any difference?

What if you are depressed and you don't know it?

The second one happened to me.  I was diagnosed with depression when I went to the doctor about something else.  So I had been depressed without knowing it.  Not that I thought I was happy, it just didn't occur to me I had an illness called depression.

The first one happened to me at least in this sense.  I only recently told my children about me being depressed, and even though it had been going on most of their lives, they told me they had no idea it had been happening.  Overall I think that's a good thing, especially since I had worked half time to parent them.   On the other hand, if family members don't know you are ill they can't help you.

Let's drag this post back to academia, and maybe even to high functioning.

What if you are depressed, but functioning at a high level in academia?   Does your depression make any difference?

There is a strong feeling that depression in academia is almost a taboo: indeed that is the main reason for starting Depressed Academics.  Somewhere we can talk about it, and be anonymous and private if we want to be.  So many people in academia are depressed and their colleagues don't know it.

If your colleagues don't know you are depressed, and they also think you are doing a good job as a researcher or teacher, or being a good student, does your depression make any difference?  


For some people, it may literally make no difference to them or their colleagues in an academic sense.

For other people, I think it does make a difference.  Even if you don't know you are depressed in a clinical sense, like I didn't.   I've always found that when I am confident I do better work, and I'm not usually confident when I'm depressed.  Well, maybe not so much confident actually, but happy to operate outside my comfort blanket of stuff I really know I can do.

This post again shows why I find it so difficult to write about high functioning depression. I can't draw conclusions, just raise questions.   But I have got a final question for you.  

Even if your depression makes no difference to your colleagues, it makes a difference to you.  Why not be a happy Socrates instead of a miserable one?  

Bipolar and work output

The other week I had a regularly scheduled developmental chat with my boss. It was surprisingly pleasant and good — I learned a lot about how she sees my role in the lab, my performance, and what she is doing to enhance my productivity, situation and activities.

I was surprised to hear that she really appreciates having me around.
That she thinks I'm doing a really good job.

I suspect the fact that I am so surprised is tied more to my depression worldview than to anything remotely similar to objective reality.

Aaaaaanyway.

The point I wanted to talk about was how my boss brought up how she's gotten herself to get used to how I tend to work in waves: I'll have a very low output for some time, and then work frantically for some time, producing immense amounts of work, and then have a down time again.

I wonder how tightly connected these habits are to my underlying bipolar issues? I know my paper writing episode last fall, when I produced most of “Sketches of a Platypus”, happened in what felt like an essentially dysphoric light hypomania. I was energized and had to get this thing written and done, and worked every waking hour at producing text, sleeping less than usual, and pushing onwards even though it often didn't feel very pleasant.

And my down times, my improductive times, usually come with a growing despair at how as much as I try to do work, I seem to only surf the web and play games. And do nothing but.

In the end, my improductive periods provide my bad self-esteem with enough fodder to feed the self-image of myself as lazy, unworthy and improductive that it drowns out my high output periods when I try to build my own self-image.

Vignette: Re-reading text

Consider this text about high-functioning depression:

So high functioning depression is cool, right: I can do my job?  Well, not so much. This year I have been much happier than for a while.  And in the first few weeks of the year, apart from starting this blog with Mikael, I've got involved in helping the community save the youth theatre group my kids take part in, and am winding up to launch onto an unsuspecting world the most ambitious project of my career so far.   All of these have seemed far easier than I expected, perhaps because I haven't been worrying about them, just either doing them or not.  Maybe of course that is overconfidence, but in the past I have noticed a high correlation between when I'm confident and when I do my best work: not necessarily by best work technically but my most ambitious work.    

Tidied up today, but basically written a few weeks ago: I've been wanting to write about this for a while and finding it hard to publish. 

Just at the minute I'm not so cheerful as I was when I wrote that.  It's interesting to me that I read it now and think negative thoughts automatically.  I'm not actually that miserable now, maybe a 2 on my 10 point scale.   But I read that text and think "I haven't been writing many posts for this blog, that's rubbish."   And "this project is probably rubbish and anyway I'm not the right person to do it."

It almost but not quite reads like text written by somebody else. 

High Functioning Depressive (1)

I've been wanting to write a post about people in academia functioning well while depressed, but I'm finding it really hard for several reasons.  Enough reasons that just writing about them is hard and would make a long boring post.  So I've decided to give up trying to write a post but to write smaller posts with parts of my thoughts on this.

First difficulty, I'm not sure "high functioning depressive" is a thing, or if it is out there, whether it should be.  The analogy is with "high functioning autism" but I think that might be a controversial term.

Somehow my working life is approximately insulated from my depression.  I mean that even when I am depressed and quite badly in my own terms, where I might be saying internally "I want to kill myself" every few minutes, I can teach and write and think.   On those days there's almost a sense of your game playing tricks with you.  It's saying "Ok I'll let you do your job but I won't let it make you happy, and just wait till you get home, then you'll be miserable."  

There's an old puzzle: do you want to be a miserable Socrates or a happy pig?  I think most of the times I think about this I decide rather be a miserable Socrates.   It's only just occurred to me that I should choose to reject the question's premise and be a happy Socrates!