Ep #382: Widows and Depression

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 382: Widows and Depression.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today we’re talking about widows and depression. I wanted to do this episode because I think there can be a lot of confusion here and it’s something that I’ve been asked about quite often.

So maybe you find yourself wondering, am I depressed or am I grieving? Is this normal? How long am I supposed to feel like this? Should I be worried? Do I need help? Sometimes other people are wondering those things for us. Maybe someone has told you, “I think you’re depressed.” Maybe someone has asked you about it. Maybe you’ve taken one of those depression screenings and thought, well, of course I’m checking these boxes. My person died, right?

So today I want to help you understand a little bit about the relationship between grief and depression, some of the ways they can look similar, some of the ways they can be different, and when it might be worth getting some support.

Before we go any further, I want to be really clear about something. I am not qualified to diagnose depression or any mental health condition. And so this podcast should not be a substitute for an evaluation from a qualified healthcare or mental health professional, all right? I am a coach. I’m going to give you some helpful information that I hope helps you better understand your experience and advocate for yourself. So if you’re concerned that you might be depressed, please talk to someone who is qualified to evaluate and diagnose, because that is not me. Podcasts can be a great start, but it should be the beginning of a conversation, okay?

Okay, let’s talk about it. So first, grief and depression are not the same thing, right? Grief by itself is not a mental health disorder. It is the natural human response to a perceived loss. Depression is a mental health condition. It is something that is diagnosable. They can look very similar from the outside. Think about some of the things that can happen after your person dies. You might have very little energy. You might not be interested in the things that you used to enjoy. You might have trouble concentrating, your sleep might be a mess, your appetite might change. You might withdraw from people, cry a lot, right, have trouble getting yourself to do basic things. You might think about death more than you ever did before.

If you just read that list without telling you that we were talking about grief, you might think, “Oh, that sounds like depression.” And you would be right because there is overlap. So similar symptoms don’t necessarily mean we’re dealing with the same experience though, and that’s why I don’t want you trying to diagnose yourself, because there can be some differences. There are some patterns that qualified professionals may consider when they are evaluating grief and depression that we might not often know to do, right?

For example, grief often comes in waves. You can be absolutely devastated one moment and then laugh at something silly that your dog does 10 minutes later. You might have a pretty decent morning, and then you hear a song at the grocery store and suddenly you’re crying in the cereal aisle. You might go out and have a nice dinner with a friend and then feel enormous sadness or loneliness when you get home to an empty house. Grief, of course, can contain lots of emotions, some of them that we think of—sadness, anger, fear, love, longing—some of them maybe that we don’t—relief, joy. All of it can be part of grief, and all of it sometimes in the same day.

Depression involves typically more persistent emptiness, more persistent low mood across situations. So pleasure can be harder to access. Motivation can become very difficult. There can be a sense of hopelessness that goes beyond specifically missing your person. Another thing a qualified professional might consider is what’s happening with your thoughts about yourself. In grief, the thoughts often center around the loss. So, “I miss them so much. I can’t believe they’re gone. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this without them. I want my old life back.” Depression, though, can sometimes involve more global negative beliefs about yourself. So, “I’m worthless. I’m a failure. Nothing will ever get better. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t matter.”

Again, please don’t take what I just said and turn it into a diagnostic checklist. I would say humans are much messier than that and again, I’m not qualified to create that checklist. But these are general distinctions that can help us understand why grief and depression aren’t exactly the same thing and yet can overlap. So, we don’t want to use them as a way to diagnose. You can also experience grief and depression, which I think is important to notice, right? We don’t need to decide that everything we’re experiencing is either grief or depression, because a person can be grieving and also experience a depressive disorder. One doesn’t cancel out the other. It’s not only one or only the other. And of course, losing a spouse is an enormous life stressor. So if you’re diagnosed with depression after your person dies, it doesn’t mean anything about your grief at all. And we tend to judge ourselves for how we’re doing or what someone tells us about how we’re doing.

So what it really though means is that something’s happening in your system that deserves appropriate support. There was actually a time when the diagnostic criteria for depression treated bereavement differently. So in the DSM, the diagnostic and statistic manual that people who are qualified to diagnose use, people were generally discouraged from diagnosing major depression very soon after someone had experienced the death of a loved one. That has changed. So bereavement exclusion used to be in the DSM and then was removed in the DSM-5. But bereavement also doesn’t make someone immune to depression. So sometimes people who are grieving also have depression and need appropriate treatment.

So here’s what I think happens and here’s where we get stuck. I think we sometimes become so concerned with whether something is normal grief that we miss the more useful question. So instead of only asking, “Is this normal?” we can also ask, “Is this something I could use support with?” Because normal has such a huge range when we’re talking about grief. There’s so many things that fall under the umbrella of normal. But we can also notice, “I’d like some support. I’m struggling,” and then we can talk with someone who’s qualified to help us figure out what kind of support makes sense.

So sadness is definitely not a problem we need to eliminate. This is another place where I want us to be really careful. We live in a culture that is often very uncomfortable with sadness. We live in a culture that has told us that the goal of life is to be happy. So when we are experiencing a lot of sadness or prolonged sadness, sometimes people don’t understand that. Eventually, they start wanting to see signs that you aren’t sad anymore. And maybe we want to see that in ourselves and we start monitoring ourselves. “Why am I still crying? I shouldn’t be crying so much. Why do I miss them so much? I should be further along in my grief. Why am I not happier? Why does this day still bother me? Why am I not back to normal?” And we take the sadness that’s already there and so common in grief, and then we make it harder on ourselves by piling judgment on top of it.

So, sadness is not automatically evidence of depression. Missing your person is not necessarily a symptom that anything has gone wrong or it’s not even something that we need to fix. We definitely aren’t served by deciding that crying is weakness or failure. Having a terrible day does not mean you’re going backward. A grief grenade surprising you does not mean that you’re not handling grief correctly. It’s just that grief hurts. It just does. We don’t need to pathologize that. We don’t need to treat painful emotions as a disorder. We don’t need to decide that because pain is part of grief, that someone should just suffer indefinitely without getting help either.

So what we want to do is pay attention to what’s happening in your life. Again, without trying to diagnose yourself, you can notice what’s going on. Are you able to care for yourself? Are you eating? How are you sleeping? Are you attending to basic hygiene? Are you able to take care of your children if they’re still dependent on you? Do you have the essential parts of your life handled? Has your ability to function started getting worse? Are you increasingly isolating yourself? Are you finding yourself less and less able to do things that really matter to you, or less and less motivated and more and more hopeless? Again, we’re not judging ourselves, we’re gathering information. And if what you’re noticing concerns you, trust that and take it to someone who is qualified to evaluate it.

And of course, please take any thoughts of self-harm seriously. And I get this in that it can be something we say flippantly. Sometimes we will say things like, “I wish I could be with them. I don’t want this life. If I just went to sleep and never woke up, that would be okay.” And that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are actually thinking about self-harm or making a plan for self-harm. But if you are having thoughts about self-harm, you are making plans to hurt yourself, you don’t believe you can keep yourself safe, or you’re concerned about where your thoughts are going, please treat that seriously. Tell someone. Reach out to a qualified mental health professional.

In the United States, you can call or text 988 and that will connect you to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. And of course, if you are in immediate danger, always call 911, go to the nearest emergency room. I’m not saying any of that to scare you. I’m just saying we want to take action where it’s appropriate. Please don’t rely on a podcast, a coach, or your own ability to reason your way through something that needs immediate professional support. And remember that treatment is not an admission that you’re doing anything wrong. Treatment doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with your character or you as a human. It just might mean that you need some support that you aren’t capable of giving yourself.

I also want to say something about medication and therapy. Sometimes it seems like widows resist getting evaluated by the appropriate professional because they just think, “Well, of course I’m sad. My person died. A pill isn’t going to bring them back, so why would that help?” And yes, a pill isn’t going to bring them back. Neither is therapy, neither is coaching, right? Nothing we do is going to change the circumstance that our person died. That’s just true. And the question is, is there support available that could make your experience more manageable? Is there support available that could make your quality of life better? And for some people, medication can be useful. For some people, therapy can be useful, coaching can be useful, support groups can be useful, right? There are so many things that can be useful. And some people benefit from a combination, different kinds of support, for sure. So different things can be useful at different times and to different people.

What I want you to hear is that getting professional help does not mean you are weak. It does not mean you are grieving incorrectly. It does not mean there is something wrong with you. I think getting help where it benefits you is just wise. It’s just smart. It’s how we take care of ourselves and how we advocate for ourselves. And you do not have to wait until it gets terrible. Sometimes I think we imagine that mental health support is for the moment, like we get to a place where we absolutely cannot function anymore, and then we raise our hand and ask for help. It doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to do that to ourselves. You can ask for help earlier.

You can tell your doctor or a qualified mental health professional, “Hey, I’m having a really hard time and I don’t know whether this is grief or depression or both.” That is enough. Right there, if you just said that, that could start such a valuable conversation. You don’t need to know anything about what it could be when you walk into an appointment. Let them figure it out. That’s their job. You just show up and tell the truth and you raise your hand. How are you sleeping? How are you eating? What are you thinking? How are you functioning? What’s going on for you? What are you worried about? Give them the information. Be honest. Let them help figure out what’s next and what kinds of support would help you.

And if you’re grieving and you’re not depressed, that’s okay too. Strangely, sometimes we judge ourselves for not being sad enough. And I just want you to know you can be deeply grieving and still experience happiness. You can laugh and have fun and look forward to things and be excited about something. You can enjoy a vacation and enjoy your kids, right? You can have long periods where you don’t cry. None of that tells us how much you loved your person. You do not need to stay miserable to prove that your relationship mattered. Sadness is not what connects you. So experiencing positive emotions doesn’t mean that you’re avoiding grief or doing grief wrong. Grief can coexist with a whole lot of living.

So if you’re wondering, “Am I depressed?” I cannot answer that question for you. I don’t want you expecting yourself to answer it either. That is a question for someone who is qualified to evaluate you. What you can do is pay attention. How am I feeling? How am I functioning? Am I able to experience moments of connection or pleasure? What am I believing about myself and my future? Is anything getting worse? Do I feel safe? Do I need more support than I’m currently getting? Do I want more support than I’m currently getting? And if you are concerned, reach out.

Trust yourself and reach out. We don’t need to be afraid of sadness. We don’t need to pathologize grief. We also don’t need to use grief as a reason to avoid getting professional help when we are struggling and deserve help. You deserve support for whatever the experience is that you are actually having, whatever we call it, all right? You deserve it. You’re worth it. Your quality of life matters. You know yourself better than anyone. So if you have an instinct that says, “This could be something that I would like support for,” then you raise your hand and you reach out, and you let someone help, okay?

That’s what I have for you this week. Remember, I love you. You’ve got this. Take care and I’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.