The Bright Sides of Depression: Its Benefits and Its Relationship to Social Media

Can Diseases Have Benefits?

We must have heard of sickle cell disease. It is a disease that affects erythrocytes as a result of a genetic defect in the heredity responsible for the shape of this blood, so its shape becomes like a sickle when exposed to severe situations, leading to clots forming. Recent studies say that sickle-cell disease reduces the average human life by twenty to forty years.

However, this disease carries with it some benefits. Doctors confirm that sickle cell patients do not get malaria because malaria, as it is known, needs to settle in the erythrocytes in one of its phases to complete its life cycle, which is difficult to achieve in sickle cell disease because of the sickle cell shape.

What Are the Positive Qualities of a Person with Depression?

1. Whoever has experienced the pain of depression and all the devastation that accompanies it will have a kind of indifference about many things that are not of great importance, while those around them tend to exaggerate these things.
2. Psychology experts found that those with depression have a greater ability to properly analyze situations, thoughts, and actions because one of the reasons why they get depression is the careful analysis of everything that happens around them.
3. Those Who suffer from depression are more stalled in dealing with and solving problems and difficulties simply because they are small things compared to the internal disasters they have experienced in their life, so they deal with problems in cold blood and this is the key to the solution; That is, to occupy the mind and extinguish feelings and emotions.
4. Depressed people are better able to make sound decisions because they see reality with the mind, analysis, and lack of fear, and they put aside their feelings.
5. People with depression are more able than others to understand life and to reach meaning and sense; This is because the depressed eye contains a lot of logical and rational filters that others do not have.

What Are the General Benefits of Depression?

1. Depression is the best way to know the truth about people and friends in your life. Do they love you for who you are? Or do they just love the way they feel when they're sitting next to you? That's what a depressive episode will tell you. It will reveal to you the truth of everything.
2. Depression is one of the most important situations that makes you able to understand yourself and determine exactly how you feel at a given moment. Ask yourself what led me to this feeling? Nothing is more important than understanding yourself in this life.
3. Depression helps analyze the situations that a person goes through psychologically. This helps them understand the psychology of the people around them and their way of thinking, as well as understand the meaning and sense of life.
4. Psychologists have found that many people with depression take an inventory of all their thoughts, beliefs, and of everything that happened in their memory, and they review all of these things. Therefore, they are more likely to change their beliefs, ideas, as well as the environment around them as well. All of this happens in the direction of positive aspects in most cases.
5. Most people may have some behavior, thoughts, or even an entire lifestyle. They practice it only to please one person or a group of people. After going through the experience of depression, this person learns to live only for themselves and learns not to live the lives of others.

What Are the Benefits of a Severe Depressive Episode?

1. Feeling depressed sends you a message that you are not doing well as if it were an alarm bell warning you of something. This prompts you to change your situation in a way that does not cause harm. It may send you a message that you are very tired at work, and you should take a time off to rest a little bit of work pressure.
2. A severe depressive episode in itself is like a notification message that the battery is about to run out, and we all know that if the battery is completely emptied, its life span is greatly reduced, and the same principle applies to human psychology.
3. After coming out of a severe depressive episode, you come back to your life stronger and with a more aware look, for you are filtering those around you. You keep whoever brings you benefit and inner peace, and you give up whoever does otherwise.

Why Should a Person Rejoice in the Event of Depression?

This may seem stupid or naive at first sight, but when you are in a bout of depression, you reach the bottom point and reach the bottom in all bad feelings and states of destruction and collapse. Yes, you should smile because after this trough, there is a peak of success and a peak that you will reach after the end of the depression.

You can review the biographies of celebrities, stars, and successful people. They all went through these rock bottom points, and all of them thought that the bottom they had reached in their depression would last for a very long time and perhaps they might remain for the rest of their lives in this state of misery. However, that did not happen, as it was followed by success, brilliance, and excellence. All those who experienced depression, and even those with some kind of chronic depression worked to develop and charge themselves with new energy, motivated by depression itself.

How Should a Person Act During the Depression?

1. People must always tell themselves that they are not the only ones affected by this disease, but many people share the same feelings of despair and sadness. This is what brings them some comfort because they are not alone.
2. The depressed must accustom themselves to thinking in a positive way, even with losses and bad things, and if they lose something, many other things may come that may be better than it.
3. It is helpful to be convinced that some things appear to be good and useful, but sometimes they may be bad, and otherwise it is true that no matter how bad and harmful the event appears to be, as it can carry a lot of benefits within it.
4. If you wake up in the morning and you're in a bad mood, that's okay. Remember well that no person in the world lives all their days in a state of happiness and joy, so it is very important to accept that not all days are happy and rosy, nor are they all black.

Why Was Depression Less Common in the Past?

In the past, humans lived in widely separated areas, and there was no crowding, as well as the immunity that they acquired as a result of eating all the products that nature gives them helped reduce their infection with various germs, viruses, parasites, and infections.

As for the progress of human life, man has resorted to living in close groups, and this has increased their infection, and their resort to animal domestication. Breeding has also caused them to infect many germs, parasites, and other pathogens.

This is what doctors and scientists consider as a hypothesis that the reason for the increase in cases of depression in the current era is the spread of infections in contrast to what was in ancient times, as the immunity was stronger and the infections were less.

Recent studies have found that the factors secreted by inflammation, such as interleukin, cytokine, and others have many psychological effects that are similar to the symptoms of depression. We can observe this relationship through influenza, in which we notice many symptoms similar to the symptoms of depression, such as fatigue, tiredness, pessimism, laziness, and loss of interest in the things that we cared for in the past.

Scientists have observed the induction of depressive symptoms when inflammatory mediators such as interleukin and interferon are injected, as well as obesity associated with depressive manifestations because the obese person has a high percentage of cytokines and other inflammatory manifestations.

Is There a Relationship Between Depression and Social Media?

Many psychologists point out that there is an important relationship between depression and the use of social media. Instagram ranked first in incitement of depression because it contains a lot of pictures, and the vast majority of them take the character of a luxurious lifestyle of elegant clothes, luxury cars, cosmetics, trips, and pictures of delicious foods in the most expensive restaurants. This makes the one who sees all these manifestations of luxury feel that their lives are not worth anything and that all the blessings that surround them are meaningless.

YouTube is one of the most protective sites against depression and other psychiatric disorders because most of the content is educational, recreational, social, cultural, self-development methods, and other materials that strengthen people's information, broaden their thinking, and contribute to shaping their awareness and culture.

In Conclusion:

What we meant in this article by the term "depression" is a psychiatric illness, which is diagnosed based on specific criteria, and it is diagnosed by a specialized psychiatrist, and we did not mean by depression that normal sadness that we may have at any time.