Overcoming Feelings of Shame About Having Depression

The negative stigmas around mental health have been around for years. The good news is, they’re letting up, and compassion for mental illness is becoming more normalized.

We’ve trained ourselves to hide our mental health. While it’s reasonable to keep private things private, feeling like you have to conceal your depression often makes symptoms worse.

Feelings of shame about our depression are very real. Sometimes it’s because our symptoms interfere with daily responsibilities or we feel a social pressure to “be strong.” With some practice and patience, you can manage feelings of shame and embarrassment about mental illness.

Overcoming Shame About Having Depression

There are a few steps you can take to reduce your shame about your mental illness. These steps involve a great deal of self-awareness and compassion.

Learn the Difference Between Shame and Guilt

Shame is a toxic emotion and causes depression symptoms, like feelings of worthlessness, to worsen. If left unchecked, shame can become so toxic that it breaks down your self-esteem.

This differs from guilt because shame is an emotional response, not an intellectual response. Guilt is an intellectual response we feel when we have a negative opinion of our own behavior.

Guilt can actually be a powerful motivator for societal living. If we feel guilty, we acknowledge wrongdoing and, ideally, try to fix it. Shame, though, develops because of our opinions of ourselves. It leads us to believe that we cannot possibly change and that we are inherently wrong or bad.

Shame feeds the negative thoughts that depression already brings to the table. People who have experienced trauma or abuse are very susceptible to toxic shame.

Confront Your Own Prejudices

With all the social stigma surrounding mental illness, it’s difficult to avoid having preconceptions about it. Facing your own prejudices and beliefs about mental health is a great first step for overcoming shame.

This includes confronting stigmas like thinking of depression as something you can just turn off whenever you want. You can use these beliefs as motivation to research depression and better understand your condition.

Choosing to analyze the stigmas you believe means educating yourself and correcting them. Once you better understand how depression works and how it affects your life, you can start looking for the root.

The root of depression is usually based on a past experience that left us feeling bad about ourselves, like parental abuse, domestic abuse or bullying. Reconsidering how you think about your mental illness is a step toward self-compassion.

Practice Self-Compassion

How often are you harder on yourself than you are on others? If you think about it objectively, you’ll probably discover how lenient you are with your friends, family, and even complete strangers. Compare this to how you treat yourself and what your self-talk sounds like.

Acknowledging depression as an illness instead of something we should “just get over” is a huge part of overcoming shame. Listen to how you talk to yourself when confronting your symptoms. Take your negative self-talk and transform it into more positive self-talk.

For example, instead of, “I shouldn’t be depressed. I have it better than a lot of people,” say, “I’m grateful for what I have. It’s okay to feel grateful and depressed at the same time.”

Talk to a Professional

Overcoming the feelings of shame that often come about with depression is difficult, but possible. It’s reasonable to feel like this is a sensitive issue because it is. A professional therapist can help you build up the strength you need to move beyond your shame, and it’s absolutely private.

Research shows us that having a support network helps us fight symptoms of depression. When you’re talking with a professional about how you’re feeling, you can share as much or as little as you’re comfortable with and at your own pace. If you need help to find a mental health professional, ask your general practitioner for a reference.

Click here for more information about depression treatment.