When You Don't Feel What You're Supposed To

There are certain occasions when it is socially expected that someone will feel a certain way. There are also major events that will have a strong impact throughout the world, and may end up forever etched in societal memory and consciousness. We may have flashbulb memories of where we were when we heard about a certain event. For example, many of us (including me) remember where we were and what we were doing when we found out about the 9/11 terror attacks. I remember feeling stunned and horrified.

Mental illness, in my case major depressive disorder, can get in the way of experiencing those types of events the way that society expects we "should." For me, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012 is also associated with flashbulb memories, but in quite a different way. I was a patient in the psychiatric emergency ward at a local hospital. In one small corner of the unit, there was a TV and a few seats, and I was sitting there hoping for the time to pass a little bit faster. The TV was tuned to a 24-hour news channel, and the coverage was all about Adam Lanza's shooting spree. I watched with a level of indifference that seems profoundly callous. I wished that I could be the victim instead of those kids, but that was about me wanting to die rather than caring that they died. I was more concerned about trying to pick tangled knots out of my hair than I was about the multiple deaths.

In this instance, perhaps my coldness seems a bit more defensible since I was in the hospital following a suicide attempt. But depression has taken away my ability to react empathically to an external event across a variety of tragic situations. From the bus crash that killed in the majority of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team in Saskatchewan, Canada, to the mass shooting of concertgoers in Las Vegas, to the devastation of natural disasters, my heart has been a piece of depression-hardened ice.

I am not normally a heartless person. I'm a health professional and my career is all about being empathic and helping people. On a one-to-one basis, I'm usually able to drum up that Nurse Ashley side of me even when my depression is quite bad. When it comes to events at a distance, though, I just can't seem to make myself care while depression has its hooks in me.

Although I accept that there's a reason I feel (or don't feel, as the case may be) this way, my lack of reaction makes me feel far removed from what is "normal" human response. Cognitively I'm able to grasp that something is a tragedy, but I just can't stir up the corresponding emotions.

It's pretty much inevitable that mental illness will affect the ways in which we interact with the outside world. It's often difficult to separate out what part is the illness-related response and what part comes from the genuine self. Sometimes things don't make sense. For me, it seems strange that I remember so much detail around how I heard about Sandy Hook despite the fact that it didn't trigger an emotional response.

Over time I've been able to be more accepting that this is what my depression does. My own pain becomes so overwhelming that there's no room to fit in pain related to people at a distance. This is not who I am as a person, but it's like I'm surrounded by a shell of illness that controls how things move in and out. Yet even though my responses are greatly affected by depression, I am still an adult and responsible for myself.

So maybe I need to accept that, at least for now, emotional reactions are only going to happen in response to the pain of people who are close up. Rather than beating myself up for not feeling pain in relation to people at a distance, I need to focus that energy on empathy towards the people around me. If that means sometimes I'm going to be cold and callous, so be it; I can only do the best I can with what life and my illness have dealt me.