Christina Bauer

Thanks for having me.

Well, I think it was really a personal experience with a friend of mine who's been going through depression and, you know, she just felt like really tired in the morning, couldn't get out of bed and like everything just felt like a lot more difficult than usual to her.

And I thought, and then, you know, when she talked about her experience, she also had like that kind of like negative lens on herself and be like, well, how can I just like, you know, this is so easy to everybody else.

And like, it's so difficult for me.

And how can I just be so, you know, why can't I just do that?

And so it just seemed like she saw herself as like a very weak person in that situation where I felt like, well...

If you're just feeling so tired and so fatigued because of the symptoms of depression and you still keep going and, you know, you're still managing to live your life.

I just felt like I really had a lot of respect for the way she was dealing with all of that.

And so...

I really just felt that mismatch between how she was seeing herself and how I perceived her from the outside and kind of felt like I wanted to make her see what I see.

And I was wondering if that could be helpful in any way to her because I've done similar things with exploring kind of those narratives with other populations.

And so that was kind of the starting point of the study.

Yeah, I mean, it's really, I mean, I think you've summarized the idea pretty well already, right?

That the goal is really to make people think about and reflect on the strength that they are showing in contending with depression as a challenging disease.

So just acknowledging that you are not depression, first of all, right?

Depression is a disease that you're contending with.

It's something that's really difficult and challenging to anyone who's experiencing it.

And then think about how you've been contending with it and the strength that it takes you to deal with it, right?

How maybe in the example before of my friend, right, that she feels so fatigued and tired and still she's trying, you know, help us to get up, to make it through the day, to go to work, to work on the things that are important to her.

And I think that's just evidence of a lot of strength.