Thank you for acknowledging that this is a real thing. I wished when I first had depression I had been warned to never open up to friends about it. I got that advice a few years in when talking with a woman at a support group who went on to become a successful actress: never tell anyone you know. Although to this day I still wonder whether she was depressed or method acting.

Friends would genuinely care at first, say “Just try going out more” or something that I wasn’t capable of, and then when I would explain why I couldn’t, I could see the annoyance on their face.

Then, when the topic changed and they were talking, I could sense the annoyance when I wasn’t giving normal social feedback to some trivial story. Like, I would get a “my boss is such a bitch” story and instead of laughing or smiling during appropriate moments, which are things people often do voluntarily to feign social enhancement, I just lacked the ability to respond in a normal emotional way.

Such an interaction would almost always result in later calls going unreturned.

That’s why tweets like this are so bad. If you have depression, the best advice is really keep that shit to yourself and jog and get better over time if you can and if it’s severe lean on professionals or join a support group. Your absolute closest friend(s) may be willing to tolerate it, like your bestie may stick around, but good friends won’t and acquaintances absolutely won’t.

And the people who ghost after discussing depression with you will never think of it in terms of what is is. The ghosting person doesn’t go “Man that shit bummed me out, he’s not depressed just lazy. His responses to my stories made me feel bummed out.” Instead, they just will suddenly not have time when they did before, thinking “Yeah, I want to be there but I’m just so busy. I’ll call in a few weeks” and then they will conveniently forget.

That’s why when you see someone like Selena Gomez proudly declaring her mental health issues and being open and transparent and the importance of living your truth etc, it’s really about making her feel good because she’s a sexy celebrity with a line of people angling to know her because of fame and if one person leaves the line there are others right behind that person. That is almost never true for anyone else dealing with mental health and openness and transparency are often terribly hurtful to those with these issues, however, it makes people feel good and look good to say “Be transparent and open” because they are selfish or naive and the truth “Lie about your mental health and stfu” doesn’t look good. This is even worse in corporate and institutional settings where the entire point is to look good. Never has there been a corporate mental health slogan "It’s okay to lie about your depression. We get it if you need to be out sick for ‘mono’ " because dishonesty is something people don’t like. It has never been about the depressed person, it’s always about people already happy. This is not meant to disparage Selena Gomez and she may not actually say everyone should be open and just be trying to show that real people have these issues, but she is just an example of someone very transparent when that transparency may be extremely unwise for others. The push for transparency in mental health is often really destructive in some ways to people who naively believe its benefit and these values and tweets tends to align more with government institutional and societal goals more than anything.

It’s way better for a depressed person to pretend to be super busy, then reappear when able to be the fun friend rather than permanently damaging the social connections they have. For this tweet, it’s like inviting depressed people into shark infested waters for a nice swim. Most people with these issues figure this out along the way, and then you get accidental gas lighting tweets like that in response.

So much of mental health is what makes non-depressed people feel better about themselves and what society would like to be effective, but makes things worse for people who suffer.