The fog of depression is beginning to lift from my life, and I am starting to enjoy small pleasures again: drinking a steaming mug of coffee, listening to the trill of birds in the park. Over the last week, I’ve also had several friendly interactions with strangers: a chat with the shopkeeper, a smile exchanged with the bus driver, a moment spent patting the dog of a fellow customer in a café.
When it comes to mental health progress, engaging in casual chit-chat might seem like a whole load of nothing. But, actually, it is a step change in the right direction. This is because it marks the reversal of one of the cognitive mechanisms that maintains depression as an illness: a negative social bias. Various studies have found that depressed people tend to view ambiguous social cues as negative, meaning they may interpret a neutral facial expression as sad.
Over the past few months, I found that wherever I went, people were annoyed with me. Their anger did not reveal itself in explicit criticism or vocal displays of rage, but in quiet hostility. Strangers on the street often glared at me, and, on one occasion, I was sure that two people were even whispering about me.
When I met up with my friends and family, the same story played out. The people I loved seemed irritated by my attempts at conversation, and I struggled to surf what felt like constant undercurrents of disapproval. At home, alone, when I felt sad, I feared that reaching out to others would only compound my problems, because I would then also have to contend with their negative opinions of me.
It is difficult to overstate how much trouble this negative social bias can cause. Once you feel suspicious of other people, it is so easy to slide into the rabbit hole of your maddest thoughts and delusions. The more I descended into depression, the more I would have benefitted from interactions with other people, but the fewer other people I saw.
Scientists believe that nudging this negative social bias back to neutral may be one of the ways in which anti-depressant medications help some patients. Reading about this—oh, who am I kidding, watching a TikTok about it—made me reflect on what had helped to shift the dial on my own social bias.
Undoubtedly, for me, formal treatment, including therapy, was what kicked me back towards a more normal social perception. But I was aided along the way by small acts of generosity from the people around me.
When I was at rock bottom, at the beginning of March, I dropped my phone on the floor and it broke. I felt that this was a challenge I simply couldn’t overcome, and it led me to spend most of the next day in bed, crying. Eventually, in the afternoon, half-crazed and oddly dressed, I dragged myself out of the flat to get the phone fixed. Wearing a long puffy coat over short shorts, my legs were bare against a bitterly cold wind.
I waited forlornly to get the bus into town with three other people, two of whom I was convinced were laughing at me—and based on my attire, they would have had good reason to be. The wrong bus came, and, confused, I almost got on.
A man opened his mouth to talk to me, in what I was sure would be a jeer at my incompetence. Instead, he asked me where I needed to go, and my three fellow passengers began debating the merits of the various phone shops in the area. One of them—a man in his sixties and my guardian angel—boarded the correct bus with me and walked me all the way to the shop.
So clouded by my fog of sadness and suspicion, I was deeply surprised by this small, ordinary act of kindness. For a moment, it punctured my illusion that other people were to be feared. Next time you offer directions, or hold the door, or smile at a stranger, you might be giving a tiny dose of antidepressant to someone who really needs it.
