Showing posts with label sleeping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sleeping. Show all posts

Monday 26 October 2015

Depression - what is it that anyone means by this word ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 October (Tweets added, 1 December)

Dunno what it - the word 'depression' - might mean to you...




One thing is that you could be unable to sleep, or conversely - which is my experience - sleeping all the time (or wanting to sleep), but the thing that links us is this word (and the use of this word) :

The reason being that the sleeplessness is not positive or sparky or creative in the way that being unable to rest / stay asleep might be with mania or psychosis or paranoia (at the beginning, at least), but just an inability to get away, into sleep (or stay there), from what feels bad or wrong or uneasy at some level, maybe because of recriminatory or accusatory thoughts or guilt or some deep feeling of guilt or doom or despair - or of worthlessness and nothing mattering, even the people or things who did matter before, irrespective of knowing that they should matter.

For those who can - generally - sleep at such times, it is just that the sleeping feels a whole lot better than all of those alarming and frightening thoughts and feelings / absences of feeling, and so the experience of those who cannot sleep / stay asleep are mirrored - if I stay asleep, I might feel safe, and I can pretend to myself that those things are not there (unless they come crashing in, and I cannot sleep).





For some, a word to cane others for being (without, probably, knowing what it is) - the irony being that one can be depressed without being aware that that is what one is experiencing, because it is a highly inapt, non-descriptive word...






For others, something that they - rightly or wrongly - think that they see in others, and offer advice that might be trite, might be the right thing at the wrong time, whereas comfort, kindness and - above all - not 'concern', but the care that the other asks for, are better ways of being a friend or relative to the person whom you say that you like or love.










Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)