Dr. Don Wood explains high-functioning depression, where successful people hide unhappiness beneath achievement. He uses Mickey Mantle as an example of someone who self-medicated with alcohol while excelling professionally, showing how depression often stems from childhood resilience patterns and affects some life areas while leaving others intact.
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You could be actually functioning very well in your life. Could be business, it could be athletics. How many athletes who are high functioning are actually depressed? It will show up in signs because they'll probably start drinking a lot. Mickey Mantle was a guy that was dealing with depression and high functioning. He was one of the best baseball players of all time, but just constantly drank. And the drinking was really something he was doing to help with his depression. But it actually exaggerates it, it makes it even worse because alcohol is a depressant. High functioning doesn't mean that they're not accomplishing something because they have depression. In spite of the depression, they're still high functioning. And that's what throws people off because they think, well, this person's got everything. They've got success, they've got fame, they've got money, but they're not happy. That can happen based on a lot of times coming back to childhood. How resilient were they in childhood? They, depending on how they were growing up and their ability to cope and manage with stress as a child, would have an effect on the way that they're going to deal with depression in the future. So the depression could be coming from a particular aspect of their life, a particular area that they deal with. Their business is fine. They can function really well in their business because the depression's not coming from a business standpoint, is coming from a personal standpoint. How do they run their business so well? Because they're good at it. Depression is not related to their business, it's related to a personal issue where some people have depression as overall their whole life is not working out the way they wanted it to, so then they can't really do anything. Some people will deal really well because depression is not related to what they're doing.
