Is it a good thing or a bad thing when a depressed person becomes angry?

When you’re depressed you experience feelings of hopelessness and, often times, despair.  So, it is very natural for someone who is depressed to become angry about how they’re feeling and the course their life is taking.

Unfortunately, what usually happens next is that well meaning friends and family members will label your anger as “inappropriate” and try to talk you out of your angry mood. If they are successful, the next logical step is for you to return to the depressed feelings of hopelessness and despair.

This happens because your family and friends get along with you better when you’re depressed than when you’re angry. So, their primary concern is actually a selfish one, although they aren’t consciously aware of it. They don’t realize that they are interfering with your progress. If asked, they would probably say (and actually believe) that you’re better off being depressed than angry.

However, what they don’t understand (because they’re not depressed) is that anger is actually an improvement in mood for someone who is depressed. At the very least, there is a feeling of regaining some of your life giving power in the emotion of anger and that certainly feels better than feeling depressed and totally hopeless.

By the way, this cycle of going from depression to anger and back to depression again can literally last for decades and is a primary cause of the feeling of “nothing ever changes in my life” that is so common in a state of clinical depression. So the next time someone tells you your anger is inappropriate, you can tell them that when you’re angry it feels better than being depressed.

But, you don’t want to get stuck in your anger any more than you want to stay depressed. The trick is in realizing that you are feeling incrementally better and that one improvement in mood can lead to another improvement. If you’re angry and look for a thought or activity that will give you a feeling of relief from your anger, you will be able to move out of anger without going back to feelings of depression. When you get the hang of this, you’ll be on your way to understanding how to beat depression for good.