Mental Health Awareness Month – Entry #5

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IMPORTANT NOTE: I am NOT a mental health professional. I’m just a person who loves you and has been through some things myself. If you need professional help, please start here.

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When most people picture depression, they picture sadness.

They picture someone who can’t get out of bed. Someone staring out a rain-streaked window. Someone crying for no reason, or for every reason, or for reasons they can’t explain. That’s the version we see in movies. That’s the version on the awareness posters. Sad. Withdrawn. Quiet.

That version is real. I’m not dismissing it.

But there’s another version that nobody talks about — and it nearly cost me some of the most important relationships in my life before I even understood what was happening.

Mine showed up as anger.

Not Sadness. Rage.

There were stretches of my life where I wasn’t sad. I was furious.

Not all the time, and not always in obvious ways. It wasn’t like I was walking around screaming at people. It was more like I had no buffer. Zero tolerance for things that should have been minor frustrations. A short fuse that I couldn’t find the end of, no matter how hard I looked.

Someone would say the wrong thing and I’d feel a flash of heat that was completely disproportionate to what just happened. Traffic would back up and I’d feel my jaw tighten in a way that had nothing to do with being late. A plan would fall through, a project would hit a snag, someone would drop the ball — and my reaction was always three sizes too big for the situation.

And the worst part? I could see it happening. I could watch myself react in ways that made no sense, ways that hurt people I loved, ways that I’d feel terrible about later. But in the moment I couldn’t stop it. It was like the circuit breaker that was supposed to kick in just… wasn’t there.

I told myself it was stress. I told myself it was being overworked, under-slept, stretched too thin. And some of that was true. But that wasn’t all of it.

What Nobody Told Me About Depression and Anger

Here’s what I didn’t know — and what I wish someone had told me much earlier:

In men especially, depression very often doesn’t look like sadness. It looks like irritability. It looks like a short fuse. It looks like being easily frustrated, quick to snap, impossible to please. It looks like someone who seems angry at everything without being able to explain why — because they don’t know why either.

The clinical term for it is “irritable mood” and it shows up in the diagnostic criteria, but nobody leads with that when they’re talking about depression publicly. The conversation is almost always centered around the sad, withdrawn version — which means a huge number of people, men in particular, are walking around with untreated depression that they’d never recognize because it doesn’t match the picture they have in their head.

I was one of those people for longer than I want to admit.

I wasn’t sad. I was angry. So I couldn’t possibly be depressed, right?

Wrong.

The Damage It Does

Anger as a symptom of depression is particularly destructive because it doesn’t just hurt you — it hurts the people around you. And unlike sadness, which tends to make people lean in with concern and compassion, anger pushes people away.

When you’re sad, people ask if you’re okay. When you’re angry, they walk on eggshells around you. They stop bringing you certain things. They start measuring their words. The people who love you most — the ones who are closest, the ones who have the most exposure — take the most shrapnel.

I think about some of the moments I’m least proud of. The times I said something sharp to someone who didn’t deserve it. The times I could see by the look on my kids’ faces — or someone else I loved — that my reaction was way out of proportion to what just happened.

Those moments don’t leave you. Even after you understand what was behind them, even after you’ve done the work, even after the people you hurt have forgiven you — you carry them. That’s part of the cost.

And the cruelest thing about it is that the anger often masked the real thing completely. On the surface I looked like someone who had a temper problem, or a stress problem, or an intensity problem. Underneath was someone who was struggling in ways I hadn’t found language for yet, taking it out on the world sideways because I didn’t know what else to do with it.

ADHD Adds Fuel to the Fire

I can’t write this post without talking about ADHD, because for me the two things were deeply tangled.

One of the less-discussed features of ADHD is something called emotional dysregulation — the inability to moderate emotional responses the way most people can. Neurotypical brains have a kind of natural damping system. Something frustrating happens, the emotion fires, and then the brain moderates it before it comes out. With ADHD, that moderation step is often missing or delayed.

So not only was I dealing with whatever depression was doing to my baseline mood — I also had a brain that, when provoked, went from zero to sixty with almost no in-between. The combination was brutal. And for years I just thought I had a bad temper. That it was a character flaw. Something I needed to control better through willpower.

Willpower, it turns out, is not actually how you treat a neurological condition.

The Moment I Started to Understand

I remember a specific conversation — I won’t get into all the details — where someone I trusted said something to me that stopped me cold. Not mean, not an accusation. Just an observation, said with genuine concern.

They told me that the anger I kept apologizing for seemed like it was coming from somewhere deeper. That they didn’t think I was actually an angry person. That something underneath it seemed like it was hurting.

I wanted to dismiss it. My first instinct was to defend myself — I’m fine, I’m just stressed, I’ll work on it.

But it landed. It landed because some part of me already knew it was true and had been waiting for someone to say it out loud.

That conversation didn’t fix anything by itself. But it cracked a door open that I’d kept shut for a long time. It started a series of honest conversations — with myself first, then with people I trusted, then eventually with a professional — that helped me start to understand what was actually going on underneath all that noise.

The anger didn’t disappear. But it got quieter. And more importantly, I stopped being blindsided by it. I started to recognize the early signs, to understand what was actually driving it, to catch myself before the circuit tripped.

That’s not a cure. But it’s a whole lot better than where I was.

If This Sounds Familiar

If you’re the person in your life who’s always been described as “intense” or “easily frustrated” or “hard to read” — I want to ask you something directly.

Is the anger actually about the things you’re angry about?

Or is it coming from somewhere else?

Because for a lot of people — men especially, though not exclusively — anger is the only emotion that feels safe enough to show. Sadness feels weak. Fear feels unacceptable. Vulnerability is out of the question. But anger? Anger feels powerful. Anger feels like control. So everything — the grief, the fear, the hurt, the exhaustion, the overwhelm — gets filtered through anger because that’s the only door that seems like it opens.

It’s not weak to look underneath the anger. It’s not soft. It’s actually the harder thing by far — because what you find under there is usually something that’s been waiting a long time to be seen.

If the anger has been costing you — relationships, opportunities, your own peace of mind — please don’t just write it off as your personality or your temperament or the way you’re wired.

Go a little deeper. Ask the harder question.

What’s it actually trying to tell you?

Before I Go

If any of this resonated and you’re not sure where to start, start small. Start with one honest conversation with one person you trust. Not about the anger — about what’s underneath it. What you’re actually carrying. The things you’ve been carrying that nobody knows about.

That conversation is the beginning of something. I know because I’ve had it.

It changes things.

–Evan