On the lack of humanity in our community.

[YukariOro]

You're confusing depression (a medical condition) with sadness (an emotion).

So you're saying I'm not feeling an emotion when I feel depressed, and because I have a medical condition that can affect my moods, that I can't feel depressed over other things, or experience the emotion? Just because I have a medical condition that affects my emotions doesn't mean I lack emotion, and specifically that emotion, which is what you are seeming to imply. Therefore, I'm sorry, but your logic is flawed.

Dear gods, calm down.
Pretty much every psychiatrist/psychologist would disagree with you.
Including my own.

Depression is a horrible affliction that can destroy people's lives and take them away.

It is the purest incarnation of 'bad'.

You're completely misunderstanding what I was saying. What you're calling bad is the impact the emotion if not properly dealt with can have. We are talking about two different things entirely. You talking about the effects and actions of someone how someone who is depressed behaves, while I am talking about the trigger, the initial feeling depression, long before any action, good or bad, is taken. Cause and effect; two entirely different things.

I have bipolar type II, which is mainly depression 90% of the time, with maybe 10% hypomania. I spend most of my time depressed, I know very well the negative impact that depression can have on someone as a result, as it has greatly affected and limited my life at times. What you're not understanding about my comment however, is that I'm saying the emotion itself is not bad. How one copes with the emotion, or fails to cope with the emotion, however can be bad. That I definitely am not arguing with, and have experienced it within myself and have worked to adjust and improve.

It's all about coping skills, but labeling something so subjective bad or good, I've found does more harm than good. I used to start feeling bad because I was depressed. How dare I be depressed, I must be a horrid, bad person to feel such an awful emotion, I must get rid of the emotion. Once I grew to accept that it was just an emotion I had to express and deal with and learn to cope with better, that in of itself the emotion wasn't bad, but how I acted because of that emotion that mattered more, well it made a huge difference and I stopped beating myself upside the head because of feeling a so-called negative emotion. What was so much more damaging to me, wasn't the feeling of depression, but the feeling that I should be ashamed for feeling depressed to begin with. I didn't like that and ever since I adopted this approach and outlook on depression, I find feeling depressed much easier to cope with.

Emotions themselves are neutral, neither good nor bad. It's when and how we act out those emotions or don't act them out, that determines how good, bad, or evil they are.

And yes, I'm aware that the Western medical field field views depression as something bad, but I gotta tell you, it was reading up and researching how some Eastern cultures deal with depression and learning how they don't treat the emotion itself as something bad, that changed my impression of depression. Those that view depression in this more neutral way seem to be able to better cope with it at a result and that made me come accept that it was okay to feel depressed sometimes.

Feeling depressed didn't and doesn't make me a bad person, and that was the message I was getting from Western medicine. And that message was that if I was depressed I was doing something bad, and can really wreck havoc on someone's self-esteem, let me tell you. I'm already feeling bad, because I feel depressed, and now I'm being told I'm bad to feel depressed at that, which made me even more depressed. What a double-whammy.

So, just because Western Medicine doesn't agree with my outlook, doesn't make them right. At one point Western medicine insisted bleeding people made them better too. Things change, and Western medicine sometimes is wrong.

Anyhow, arguing whether depression is bad or good was not the original intent of this thread, and I'd hate to see the subject matter get any further off-track. I've had my say, so I'm going to stop talking about depression, good or bad. =)