What triggers depression in Aspies

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Hi,

For those of you who have suffered depression (enough to seek counselling) what seems to have triggered it? Was is your own propensity for depression or was it due to school environment/work environment/family/social environment?

If you had had a better time in middle/high school , would you have had a better self image? were issues at school the defining moments of your life?

Frustration with never really understanding why the results of my actions were never what I hoped or expected.

Yeah, this. I've set out to do many things, but very few of them were ever accomplished. Usually I hit limits I couldn't perceive before I hit them, and then I spent more time blaming myself than anything. Depression ensues.

So, basically you are saying that you can't anticipate why what you say or do causes NTs to take offense/behave illogically. If you do indeed have depression , it is triggered by responses from the external world then...

I was constantly bullied at school and neglected and abused at home. I was misunderstood by most people and I struggled a lot socially and had no idea why. I had a lot of medical problems (both physical and mental, including Asperger's syndrome) that were left undiagnosed and untreated into adulthood despite repeated attempts of seeking help for the problems they were causing me.

All of this together made me pretty miserable and I became very depressed and struggled with depression for years, until things finally started getting better in my mid-twenties.

Well personally for myself for many years I looked and analyzed mistakes I've made leading to crying/depression and such. Also it didn't help that my parents would constantly point out don't do this/that (ANOTHER mistake!) After reading Guide to Asperger's by Tony Attwood I broke into tears I emotionally cracked. I'm trying my hardest to blow off family views/comments as if they aren't a big deal. I'm an Aspie and that's who I am. I have to accept my faults and traits related to being an Aspie and I can finally be myself.

My father passing away triggered a huge depression for me that lasted for years. Changes, unpredictability, instability <- Those things are very hard for me to deal with and they cause anxiety and being anxious all the time leads me to becoming depressed. I need structure, stability, and a stable environment to be happy.

That's not specifically what I was thinking of when I agreed with wavefreak58. I also meant that executive function difficulties meant that I had a hard time in work and school and thus a hard time achieving goals that were (and are) important to me.

Social difficulties are a big issue as well, since NTs seem to hold back until the "final straw" and then cut loose with a ton of resentment over things that I had no idea about.

I would also add an abusive parent, an abusive partner, and harsh bullying until the 10th grade, coupled with a lack of sympathy from adults about the bullying.

But yes, I consider my depression to be triggered by my interactions with the world.

For me, I think a number of things triggered it:

I lost my most loved thing in my life, my cat Toby, a few years ago. He was hit by a car .

My brother and his girlfriend had a baby, who lived with us for a few months, screaming everyday (they returned to our house for half a year, later on because they had house-buying complications).

I was pressured to do so much work in school, as I was in the last year and I was doing GCSE work. I failed nearly all of my exams.

When me and my friends went to learn different courses at college, they gained new friends, but I forgot how to make new ones. Seriously.

I can't talk to girls. I've never had a female friend, and it so hard when puberty makes you incredibly interested in them but you don't understand what is blocking you from talking to them.

I was sort-of bullied in my first year of college, not by people in my class, but completely random people. Someone spat on me from a window above, someone urinated on me from the toilet cubicle next to me, and then a pigeon pooed on me when I was walking home. All on the same day. Christ.

I spend nearly all of my time off college just sitting on my own at the computer, without a clue what to do.

I have absolutely no idea what to do with my life. I learned I.T, I didn't like that, I'm learning Animal Care now which also isn't that great, but certainly not as worse as last year.

I don't have special interests any more. I think the depression has made me go off obsessions with things. I crave to be interested in something, but I just can't feel it.

I don't like modern music at all; it makes me so sad that I wasn't alive for my favourite band, The Beatles. And what do we have now? J***** B*****.

My social skills are worse than ever. And I'm not extremely intelligent. So I don't have intelligence instead of social skills, I just have neither.


I'm taking medication now and I'm glad to say I haven't cried since last year! I get upset a lot but I'm just trying to grit my teeth and get past these dreadful teenage years, with the thoughts "Simon, you don't like your life right now, but you will make it one day!"

There it is.

When the world treats you like sh*t all your life, its kind of hard not to get depressed. I think we should be commended if we aren't depressed constantly. It show tremendous intestinal fortitude and strength of character.

Hi there,

when i fell in love with some girl, i never new, if she loved me or not, i tried to analyze her behavior, but i was always so unsure, if she likes me or not. Once i was happy because i thought she loved me, a week later i was unhappy because my analyses said that she doesn't. This happened to often that i got lots of anxieties.

It was a big opening for me when i found out that eye contact helps in finding out if the other girl likes me or not. I just understood that at the age of 29!! This confusing and the problem that i didn't get together with a girl who i liked and who also liked me due to that eye contact problem caused me and still causes me a lot of depression for many years.

byebye,
anton

I am not sure exactly what started it, maybe it was nothing external......but I have been depressed ever since I can remember. But some things that added to it and made it worse include:
-Not being understood by people including family, because of this misunderstanding certain conflicts arised, for instance people in my family calling me selfish in the past...It was more like I did not know how to interact socially and the sensorary issues like extra light sensativity. I guess they assumed I did not care about anyone else because I had no social life and was complaining about stupid things like light being too bright.
-Students and teachers at school giving me hell certainly did not help
-My parents fought a lot one week they would get along then the next week they would hardly talk unless it was to yell at each other.
-My dad is alcoholic which added to a lot of the conflict, and my parents eventually got divorced
-Feeling isolated a lot of my life
-I am horrible at most physical activities, I personally dont care a whole lot but I've gotten more then enough crap for it.
just to name a few things, but yeah I have depression in general so there is a lot that makes it worse.

A lot of what I read in this thread (not all of it, mind, but a lot) seems to be about issues that people have had in the past. What growing up was like, what school was like, etc.

Well... Nietzsche thought it was impossible to go past those things, but I don't. Mostly because I've done it. I haven't completely let go of the past, but I have let go of most of what should trouble me.

The thing is this: If you hold on to the past, let if affect your present and your future, then your life will always suffer for it. In order to have the best life you can, right now and in the future, the past must hold no power over you. Live for the present. If nothing else, live for the future. The past is dead; it is not for the living.

@MrLoony: yeah Nietzsche said that the past has its right. What was the reason for it?

I think without past we wouldn't know what to do in the future, right? And we would do the same erors again...

byebye,
anton

The question didn't ask how I was currently coping, so I didn't explain. I abandoned attachments to blaming myself for most of these problems once I realized that I had neurological differences that helped set me up for failure. Instead of realizing I had them and thus accounting for them, I simply tried to brute force my way through them. I don't really blame myself for that at this point.

My depression, while still an issue, is much less of one than it had been before that point.

Edit: I want to add that generally speaking, depression is not a simple mechanism that can be resolved easily by adopting particular perspectives. It is not something you can turn on and off at will or with specific beliefs and attitudes. It is a chronic long-term condition that has a severe impact on quality of life, and itself promotes cognitive distortions that makes it difficult to view things in any way but a negative light. When my depression is in full bore, you can explain to me all day that I shouldn't logically feel that way and my attitudes about particular events in my past are themselves illogical, but the fact is that I don't really care and I will probably tune you out.

Now why that one particular idea changed my depression for the better? I don't know. My guess is that I had tied up so much of my self-concept in being a failure who sabotages myself for no reason, that finally having a reason and being able to see it really didn't have anything to do with my motivations (transparent or hidden to me) took out some of the underpinnings for said depression. But this is not something that I would have believed from anyone else.

You cannot solve mental illness with logic. You might be able to help if you understand the logic that defines a particular person's mental illness(es) and help them work through that, but there is no "one size fits all" solution.

Last edited by Verdandi on 16 Jan 2011, 5:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

They do that, the "last straw" thing. I've done it too, but I hope never to do it again I'm more direct now.