The Silent Demons: The Words We Don’t Use for Depression

Hurt: “to feel or suffer bodily or mental pain or distress; to suffer want or need.”

I find that most anti-depressant commercials piss me off. I get that they’re 30–60 second spots to advertise a drug, not explain an illness. To me, though, they just seem to make the disease look wimpy. They lean on words like sad and hurt — simple, easy to digest, but ultimately meaningless.

Think about it.

Take the word sad. It’s a pretty generic word, used for everything from being sad about the death of a loved one to being sad the store was out of your favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor. The same goes for hurt — anything from being hurt by a partner’s betrayal to being hurt when you slam your elbow on a doorframe.

Sad: “affected by unhappiness or grief; sorrowful or mournful.”

Maybe that’s the point of using vague words like sad and hurt. Keep it fuzzy, and suddenly half the audience is wondering if they’re depressed. I mean, hurt and sad can be stretched a thousand ways. (This isn’t a pro- or anti-medication argument. I’ll leave that for the experts.) Vagueness might sell more drugs, but it doesn’t do much to help people understand what depression actually is.

What if, instead, advertisers used words that really show how depression feels?

From my own battles, let me offer future commercial makers some other words for their consideration:

Misery: “wretchedness of condition or circumstances; a cause or source of distress.” Depression drags misery in with it, making even the briefest moment of happiness feel impossible.

Anguish: “excruciating or acute distress, suffering or pain; the anguish of grief.” The anguish of depression isn’t just excruciating mental suffering, or the anguish of loss — it’s often the sense that you’ve lost something and can’t even put a name to it.

Agony: “extreme and prolonged pain; intense physical or mental suffering.” When depression really has you, each day, each hour, each minute, each second, each moment is agony.

Despair: “loss of hope; hopelessness.” Despair is when depression whispers that there’s no point. That the only way out is to give up hope altogether.

Torpor: “sluggish inactivity or inertia; lethargic indifference; apathy.” Torpor is when your body and brain both go slack. Every thought, every tiny action feels like work, and the only response left is who cares?

Abandoned: “forsaken or deserted.” Abandoned is lying there in torpor, fighting to move, knowing that hope and happiness have slipped out the back door — leaving only agony, despair, and misery behind.

I could go on. There are other words, violent words, words to describe what depression really does to your soul: torture, torment, maul, scar, lacerate, crucify, murder. You’ll never hear those words in a commercial for an anti-depressant. But anyone who truly suffers knows them. Not as metaphors. As lived reality.