020: Introducing DePro - Depression as a Service

Depression sucks.

It doesn’t suck in a very obvious way like being told you only have 6 months to live. It is more like discovering you’ve been subscribed to a service that you never wanted.

If it were a subscription service, it would have a short and catchy name. I’m thinking, simply: DePro. As any subscription service it would come with a free trial. These are often issued in your youth when you realise your art works from sixth grade will never amount to a Van Gogh, or when the blue-eyed blonde with the perfect curls actually likes the boy with thxe mohawk and perfect rugby dive pass.

I’m well versed in a few variations of the lower paid tier of this service – I like to call it DeProLite. DeProLite comes with many variants – some to be discussed shortly. If you exhaust your usage on this tier, you might find that you’ve been upgraded to DeProMax. Luckily, I’ve only ever had a short subscription to DeProMax.

Other features of DePro is that it doesn’t necessarily keep to one generation in a family. It can easily be that you find yourself part of the hereditary Premium Family Plan – signed up for life without giving prior consent. It also comes with bespoke Expansion Packs that affect part of your psyche and physiology in profoundly disturbing ways that no-one else will ever understand.

Some variants of the DePro service come with a very hated and ominous Auto-renewal. Specific times of the year might trigger surprise upgrades. And don’t get me started on the cancellation policies. They’re maddeningly opaque. If they were written on paper, they could only be used as kindling. KIndling for the dumpster fire that your life feels like when the DePro service has you right where it wants you – stuck, sad and subscribed.

DeproLite Variant #1 – SAD

In this blog post, I wrote about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). If you’re not Afrikaans, here’s the TL;DR for the post: I hate South African winters. Trying to warm yourself in these dour months, you end up heated unevenly like a microwave lasagna.

SAD is kickstarted when days become shorter and less natural light hits you in the eyeballs. This disrupts your circadian rhythm (internal body clock). This means that production of melatonin – your body’s night-time signal – is mistimed, aggravating the feeling of sleepy sluggishness. Activity of serotonin – a chemical in your brain involved in regulation of mood (among other things) – appears to decrease. This leads to a lower mood. Combining these factors, with the miserable act of trying to dress in ice cold clothes that could stand up on their own without your frame to support them, people who are subscribed to the SAD variant of DePro often feel like their battery never quite gets back to 100%.

Luckily, symptoms tend to decrease once daylight increases (or you are synthetically exposed to light through light therapy). Your brain then synchronises and symptoms slowly improve.

The effect of this is that SAD is a DePro variant with a pretty reliable auto-renewal policy. Once the leaves and quicksilver start to drop, so does your mood.

And I know that it comes for me. Every year. Very reliably. And I end up being an unevenly heated microwave lasagna.

DeProLite Variant #2 – PPPD

Paternal Postpartum Depression (PPPD) is the daddy variant of Postpartum Depression that many moms experience when their babies are born. When my first son was born, many things happened that are beyond the scope of this blog post. It suffices to say that life was hard in 2024. When my wife and I were sitting in the hospital with our second son, about to leave with our new bundle of joy, we had a surprise visit from a psychologist who shared a pamphlet with things to look out for in the first few months of parenthood.

As an experienced toddler dad, I thought,

As I turned the pamphlet, though, I saw the letters:

P. P. P. D.

There followed a description of typical symptoms dad’s experience in the first few months:

• chronic sleep deprivation affects mood regulation,

• stress hormones (like cortisol) stay elevated,

• new fathers can also experience shifts in hormones like prolactin and oxytocin that support caregiving,

• identity shifts are also a big part of parenting.

  
  

Unlike maternal postpartum depression, PPPD isn’t driven by a single, incredible hormonal event, but by many small factors stacking on top of each other into a hot mess.

As I perused the pamphlet, I had a glass shattering moment in my mind like the scene from How I Met Your Mother with every symptom that I read.

After the glass had done its shattering, I finally had a term to define what I had experienced when my first boy was born. It was such a relief to leave the hospital and know what was coming for me.

(Side bar - I'm busy reading a newly published book called Dad Brain that explores the ways that father's brains change in and around the period of pregnancy. Many of the findings align with what I've written here. If you're a fellow dad who's interested in this topic, check it out.)

Make no mistake, though, knowing that it’s coming doesn’t make it easier when it hits you. A few weeks into our second son’s newborn phase, I looked at my wife and she said “Your eyes look dead.” And all I could say was, “I feel dead”. All while the most beautiful boy was nestled in my arms making the loveliest cooing sounds. I knew that I loved him, his brother and their mother more than life itself – but my brain somehow couldn’t quite click over into happiness. Instead of trying to solve it, this time around, I just sat with the emotions, focused my attention on being useful to my family and slowly the emotions took care of themselves.

People say that having a second child is easier, and I think this is one of the reasons. You know that when the DeProLite subscription kicks in, you at least know where it comes from. You also know that you have a pretty good shot at cancelling it when the first few weeks of broken sleep have passed and your “new normal” starts to take on a sustainable rhythm.

Crucially, it also makes it a lot easier to help the real hero of early parenthood – the momma – if you have your own life vest and oxygen mask secured.

DeProMax Sub

If 2024 was my toughest year as an adult so far, it still pales in comparison to 2012. That was the year where I actually became an adult. I wish I could say that it was a quick and painless DeProLite sub. What transpired, though, was a pretty drawn out renewal that devolved into a full-blown DeProMax upgrade.

As a top-performing matriculant, the transition from high school to university was supposed to be a breeze. Unfortunately, my Ambition got the better of me. I signed up for one of the hardest undergraduate courses (“because you’re one of the clever ones”, they said), and thought that it would be a cake walk similar to high school. Study hard. Get good grades. Live my best life. Easy.

To spice things up, I thought it wise to add a long distance relationship to the mix. I also transitioned fully from a home where literally everything was catered for me, to taking care of myself by living in a flat off-campus with my sister. And finally, being a fun-loving student with more hormones and bravado than common sense committed hard to extracurricular activities like University Choir and socials.

The first year, 2011, went pretty well, but towards the end of the hat year I had my first panic attack during a lecture and in early 2012 I could feel something break. It started with a few missed classes, a failed class test here and there and before I knew it, I was looking at failing 4 of my first 6 classes of my second year. I had dug myself into a pretty deep hole.

My parents, being the champions that they are, suggested that I move universities to be closer to the girlfriend – on the condition that I pass the last 3 classes of the year that I could still enter. Determined to make it work, I believed one of the biggest lies of the DePro service: the mind that got you into the mess can easily get you out of it.

So, I isolated. I studied harder than ever, but barely scraped passes. This led to more isolation. I would spend weeks holed up in the flat, skipping all my classes. Exhausted from all the studying, I had completely stopped running, and would only show my face in public for choir rehearsals. The more I tried, the more I failed. The more I failed, the more I believed my mind could make it right. Cue, doom cycle.

In the end, the relationship bombed out, I only passed one of the three classes and I decided to stay at my university and change study area completely to Music.

Things only started to turn when I shunned the isolation, asked for help and put myself back into the world – and luckily, switched from Actuarial Science to Mathematical Statistics instead. I haven’t looked back since.

It was a rough year and DeProMax had me for a good while.

As I said at the start, depression sucks. As a subscription service it’s a 0/10, would not recommend, rating from me. In a world of 5 star rating systems, I would invent 0 stars just for it.

Disclaimers:

Let’s not rank our suffering

A thing with DePro is that it is unbelievably bespoke. If we both download an app from the Play Store, we’ll get the same experience. With DePro, my DeProMax 2012 might be someone else’s free trial and a pretty decent year. For some who live in constant darkness, SAD could be much more salient than a short annual renewal. Other dads with less healthy kids, might have PPPD that lasts far beyond the resolving of the 4-6 month sleep regression (#iykyk).

That said, suffering isn’t a competition, and we all have different baselines.

Don’t pretend you can always get yourself unsubscribed

I have witnessed unstoppable friends ground to a halt by DeProMax. I have seen friends go through harrowing psychiatric medicine experiences. I have seen friends with seemingly perfect lives fight truly frightening inner demons.

I am now going to pivot to tactics to get us unsubscribed.

What I’m not giving, is professional advice, I have learned that unsubscribing sometimes requires customer support – professional help from psychological and psychiatric experts. If you’re at any stage of DePro where it’s too much for you, do it. Get help. Please.

Don’t surrender

My intention with my tactics is threefold:

1. Let’s laugh about this dark situation and hope that future humans evolve to a point where they don’t come with the same hardware (brain) that is compatible with such shoddy software (#DePro).

2. Let’s make the best of our current situation. Let’s move towards empathy and away from the shame that the DePro service makes us believe we should feel.

3. Don’t surrender. If you go through a thousand failed customer support calls, pick the phone up for the 1001st time and keep fighting.

Unsubscribing from DePro

DePro hates a moving target

Depression wants you to stop moving and make your world smaller.

It creates inertia, or, a strong resistance to making any effort. Our bodies down regulate when we submit to inertia and make it much more difficult to get going. Ask anyone who has slept for 14 hours and still felt completely wrecked and unable to move.

Here’s what Seth Capehart has to say about our physiology when we stop moving in his YouTube video, Modern Life is a Disease:

Movement breaks that inertia. It signals to your brain,

Movement is a great first step (pun intended) to unsubscribe from DePro. But more importantly, it prevents DePro from getting what it wants: to get you to submit to inertia and make your world smaller.

In the DePro analogy, movement is like a person who constantly changes billing addresses. Everytime DePro tries to charge you, you’ve already jumped town. That’s why it hates a moving target.

This tactic isn’t about “exercise is good for you”. It’s about making your world bigger and giving DePro less of a chance to catch up to you.

Get out of your own head. That guy's a liar.

Don't automatically believe everything you think when you're at your lowest.

When I found myself in the doldrums with DeProMax in 2012, I was so convinced that my tactic of isolation was correct. Despite signs that I was failing on all fronts, I doubled down when hardships came. The phrase that kept going through my mind was,

“I’m one of the clever ones. I can figure this out.”

And so much of my personality was wrapped up in being intellectual, I couldn’t fathom giving that up by asking for help. That was DePro’s sales pitch and it upsold me very quickly.

When things are going well, I’m pretty confident that my gut feeling is right and that I can make large decisions with long timeframes based on intuition. The ordeal taught me that my internal narrator is – in times of DePro subscription – a really unreliable witness.

When DePro strikes, my confidence evaporates and I overthink everything with even the shortest timeframe.

Need to choose a shirt to wear? Nightmare.

Need to choose between two routes with a similar ETA on Google Maps? Death.

Need to make a large life decision? Hell. On. Earth.

I was humbled, because the answer lay in reducing my supposed intellectual self and asking for help. I am blessed that there was help to be found and I could get out of the funk.

I liken the internal narrator to the person who delivers the DePro service invoice. Sometimes he forgets that you exist, other times he hits you with three invoices and spams you with “free” upgrades.

Here’s the thing, though:

Ask for an opinion. Talk to someone. And please, don’t always believe the guy in your head. That guy can be a real liar.

There are people who want to hear from you – however shit you’re feeling.

Paddy Pimblett put it beautifully after winning a UFC fight days after a friend had killed himself:

This tactic isn’t about simply “getting help”. It’s about refusing to believe the lies that everything you think is true and that people don’t want to hear from you.

By getting someone else to “assess the sales pitch” from DePro you are malso aking yourself a moving target and actively fighting against DePro’s intention to make your world smaller.

Today isn't forever.

Finally, the biggest lie DePro tells is that the present is permanent.

The end-of-history fallacy is a trick our brain’s play on us that all the big decisions we’ll ever make have been made. This leads us to believe that our current state of mind will last forever. This is particularly true when you’re locked in on a Premium DeProMax plan.

The feeling of numbness doesn’t abate. The inertia cannot be overcome. No advice can help you. You’re stuck. End of story. The End.

In the DePro analogy, the belief that “this is my life now” is like a “vendor lock-in” – the concept where you cannot move between service providers. You are so tightly bound by Ts & Cs of the service, that you can’t move. However hard you might try to run away, there is always another loophole that causes the service to renew.

But remember what I said above, that guy can be a liar and you don’t have to pay his invoice.

Today isn’t forever.

Shorten the timeframe of your expectation for things to get better. Aim to make just today a little bit more tolerable and regain your confidence with small wins – helping someone else, talking kinder to yourself, asking for help with something that gives you a tight feeling in your chest. These are all worthwhile and celebration-worthy moments when you’re moving out of the darkness.

Building enough of these small wins, will mean that one day the DePro service payment cheque will silently bounce. After a few months you’ll check your statement and see that it hasn’t been paid for a while.

This tactic isn’t about false optimism. It’s about hope and a reminder that seasons end by moving out of them one day at a time.

In Conclusion

I say it again. Depression sucks.

The DePro service wants you to believe that there is no hope. It wants to keep you subscribed and it will try its best to get you to upgrade to more involved plans that are harder to unsubscribe.

Choose moving towards the hope and make yourself a moving target.

Choose not believing all the lies your inner narrator tells you by getting out of your own head.

Choose believing that the darker days will pass by giving today its due attention.

And when DePro wants you to pay up for a service you didn’t choose, remember: you don’t have to pay the bill.