OzOz

Well, I for one have to say that I think the OP's points 1-7 are pretty much self-evident, and I fully accept point 8. That being said, I think the OP's generalisation that "If you are depressed, you are a failure" is asinine. I also take issue with JinnKai's use of sneer quotes in what seems to be such a dismissive fashion.

One wonders if JinnKai has any real conception of what "bad" parents can be like up close and personal? I do. I've been there.

My father's parenting philosophy as applied to me (but NOT to my brother, five years younger than I am) was based around the following observations:
- 'Sympathy' is just a word in the dictionary between 'shit' and 'syphilis'.
- There are millions of other people out there who are worse off than you are, so why should I waste my time on you?

I was constantly told:
- "You're an embarrassment to us."
- "We're ashamed to have a son like you."
- "Walk so far behind us that no-one will know we have anything to do with you."
- "I'm so sick to death of your whingeing" (which was usually about the favouritism shown to my younger brother) "that if I see you crying about anything, I'll just save myself the effort and give you a hiding on the spot." (He would sometimes add: "And then if it's your lucky day I might bother to ask what was wrong - BUT YOU'D BETTER HAVE A BLOODY GOOD EXCUSE!!!")
- For years, about the only praise I got was: "Gee, you've been pretty well-behaved lately. You haven't needed a hiding in a while. Perhaps I'd better give you another taste of the belt" - my father's favourite bashing implement - "just so you don't forget what it's like."
- "If I find that you've wasted anyone else's time with your stupid problems then I'll give you a damn good hiding." (THAT has been an EXTREMELY costly lesson to unlearn. I still have trouble accepting that it is OK for me to ask people when I need help.)
- "You should be thankful that I care enough to even bother giving you a hiding."

Punishment usually consisted of being given several lashes with the belt in my parents' bedroom - sometimes with the buckle - then being made to grovel on the floor to avoid an immediate second helping (as I was such an ungrateful little shit that I cried after the first helping), and finally being literally kicked out the door into the hallway. I would then be given fifteen minutes to stop crying, pull myself together and rejoin the family, all bright and cheerful. (Crying was the chief thing that made me an "embarrassment", and thus eligible for another immediate bashing.)

On one occasion, when I was six years old, I was picked up so that I was eye-to-eye with my father, run across the room and the back of my head was smashed against a brick wall three times, following which my father, still holding me up there, shook me and yelled in my face demanding to know how I could be such a pig to my brother. He then proceeded to tell me that that didn't hurt and that if I didn't stop crying by the time he counted to five I'd get more. Of course, I got more - another two blows, head against wall. My crime? I had been reading an article in a newspaper on the floor, which my brother (then eighteen months old) had been crawling across. I had been repeatedly lifting him off it so that I could keep reading and telling him not to crawl across it, and after having to keep doing this, eventually I had gotten fed up and pushed him off, whereupon he rolled on his side without hitting his head on the floor and started crying. (My parents had long before expressly forbidden me to even politely ask my brother not to annoy me, even if he was doing things like pulling my hair.) My father didn't see any of this, as he was at the other end of the house at the time. He merely acted on my mother's report that, "He's being a pig to his brother again." She hadn't actually been watching, either, but cooking in the next room.

Favouritism towards my brother was so extreme that my parents repeatedly told me that any arguments between us were obviously my fault and therefore to save their time and effort I would be the one punished. This was applied so consistently that my brother caught on and started making the most of it - when he was three years old. One night, not long after his fourth birthday, not long after we had both gone to bed, my brother was taunting me about the fact that he could do whatever he liked to me or to my toys and if I didn't like it, he could get his way by just pretending to start crying, because I'd be hit for it. I just quietly snapped, and it was lucky that one of my parents looked in on us just a minute later, because by then I was holding a pillow down firmly over my brother's face. They must have been really shaken by that, because I actually didn't get physically punished. They just threatened to tell my teacher, who I idolised. Of course, they didn't bother asking why I had done it or what was wrong either - they never did in any circumstances.

I suffered constant bullying at school - it wasn't good being an academic in a sports-mad town - but despite this, I repeatedly had to hide under the house for hours after coming home so that my parents couldn't see that I'd been crying. (Crying = embarrassment to parents = instant bashing, no questions asked.)

On top of that, I simply never knew when my father would simply take something I'd said, twist it completely out of context and throw it back at me in a way designed to make me feel like a worthless, selfish, ungrateful little shit. He would make snide remarks about just about anything - particularly my religion - and then run and hide behind the threat of another bashing if I got upset.

Oh, he eventually did start on my brother after I left home as well. One morning, just hours after I got home from college for Christmas, one year before my brother finished high school, Dad gave him a pep talk about his academic performance. (My brother and I are both very bright, but whereas I'm better with the sciences, my brother is more artistically inclined - actually he's excellent at that sort of thing.) I didn't know about it until Mum appeared in front of me, in tears, and told me about it. I found my brother curled up on his bed in the corner of his room, shaking and in tears. Great way to encourage someone who is already lacking in confidence, Dad!

What's the effect of all this? I've been in situations in which "buck up" is appropriate and doable - I'm in one now, having just lost both my job (retrenchments) and fiancee within a couple of weeks of each other - and I've been in situations in which "buck up" would have been appropriate, but I just didn't have the psychological foundation there to be able to do it if I wanted to. Hey, that's what happens if you've been told all your life up to that point that if anything goes wrong, it's automatically your fault and you're going to get your head smashed in for it. First time this happened at work, after I accidentally deleted some programming work that had taken me a week to complete, I just completely fell to pieces. Despite my colleagues' assurances that they could recover the files, I ran out of the building in a state of mental collapse. The others in my team spent an hour wandering the streets trying to find me and make sure that I didn't simply tie a block of concrete to my ankles and jump in the local river. (No exaggeration.) I took two days off work before I was in any state to go back.

Am I depressed? I certainly have been, to the point where suicide really did look like an attractive option. (At one point, the only thing that kept me going was a completely irrational belief that things might get better if I stayed alive.) Not having a lot of fun right now either. Am I a failure? Despite constant bullying right through school which continued right up to and during my end-of-school exams, and with no support from my parents or schools worth speaking of to help me cope with it, I won an academic scholarship to one of the more prestigious Oz schools and came fifth in my year of 125 students. I've also come first in my state in academic competitions, in one case despite having a severe headache when I sat the exam. (To my father, I was still an idiot though.) In my most recent job I've been flown to my company's global head office in the US three times in six years for a total of nearly ten months, so presumably I must have been doing something right somewhere if they were going to sink that kind of money into me. However, I do still have great difficulty in believing that I'm worth much, that my opinions might be worth voicing, that my hobbies and interests are at all worthwhile, or even that that girl over there might actually get a laugh out of talking to me.

Sure, there are times when "buck up" IS the appropriate response to someone else's mood. But if someone thinks that it's ALWAYS appropriate for another person who isn't doing well, then that isn't a sign to me that they have received some deep, profound lesson from the School Of Life. It's a sign to me that, like my father, they are simply too lazy to care.

__________________
Maybe you should put some shorts on or something, if you wanna keep fighting evil today.