Would you, for a moment, entertain with me the possibility that depression is not “an illness”, so much as a perfectly natural response – or group of responses – to certain experiences or changes, or even to ‘good manners’? What if depression were a kind of ‘bad habit’ – a response to habitual behaviours?
Can we explore the idea that depression can be a kind of inside-out-repression symptom, a powerlessness where one needs power, a lack of control where one needs a sense of control? Or how about – a symptom of too much self-control, repressed anger? There is a wide variety of theories about depression – including the medical model of biological roots. It’s worth playing around with some of these ideas I think.
It must have been more than 30 years ago that I first heard the idea of depression as “anger turned inward”. I remember having a cynical reaction; I couldn’t see how this idea translated into the possibility of ending my own chronic depression. There was no handy “how to” that came with the theory. I couldn’t see how being polite, never showing sadness or anger – being controlled, being ‘nice’ — might all be contributing to depression.
While ‘doing all the right things’ enabled smooth sliding through life on the surface, it eliminated being spontaneous and open and real, expressing the many sides of myself in a crazy world that often deserved an angry or sad reaction rather than a smile. Yet I was ‘a smiler’.
Being homesick or anxious could be perfectly natural, totally understandable – not at all pathology – for a student who has just moved from a different environment or culture – or just far from home. Being angry at injustice is totally appropriate, but if you’ve been conditioned to believe such feelings show a lack of self-control or maturity, you may well suppress them — habitually. And not even be conscious of it. Suppressing them long-term can be paralyzing, robbing us of energy and creativity.
I think of this as a kind of low-grade depression. We’re barely conscious of it. And we are seldom conscious of the underlying repressed emotions. What we’re left with is what I call ‘the practice of depression’. If we are practicing depression, does it not stand to reason that we may be able to replace it with something more beneficial – for example – elation, or contentment. Imagine that!
From the memory of my ‘great leap forward’ – through a variety of modern, humanistic psychology therapies, I learned how to break down the physical attributes of both depression and elation: the feeling in my chest, in breathing, tension in my shoulders, set of my jaw, and so on. This made it possible to slip into the physical characteristics of elation and through practice, remain in that state. I also learned how to let anger fuel creativity – provide energy in self-expression.
All of this is not really new. It’s just surprising it’s not more acknowledged and used. I guess it sounds too simplistic. But (and this is my own opinion) it is not essential to understand the roots of our depression, in order to change it. (Nice if you can, but not necessary). We need to remind ourselves to “choose” the feeling we want, then slip into the physical characteristics of that mood. In a sense we are remembering, and bringing that memory into the here and now. And then, we can memorize: When we do it often enough, it gets easier to access, and can become predominant – instead of depression.
Long ago, Dale Carnegie taught this: “Act enthusiastic and you’ll feel enthusiastic”. And now, Amy Cuddy* has done a “TED Talk” about her research on how our body language impacts how we feel and behave. There’s a variety of relatively simple “tricks” out there, that can help us change how we feel, and how we interact with the world. We just need to bring them together and recognize them for what they are: a useful, non-medicated way of dealing with the self-defeat of depression.
It might be a little inconvenient for the pharmaceutical industry, which has dominated the public portrayal of mental health issues: but I haven’t needed anti-depressants for years. It is my life. And mostly, I love my life.
*http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are.html
Thinking and Dreaming 
Desperate need…
Like most moms, I love my children enough that I would probably die for them. I also enjoy their cousins and their friends, especially now that my kids are in their thirties, and the others have been coming around for a long time – to our dinners or parties. When they were younger, some hung out on our front porch.
I have loved these gatherings for many years, so I was surprised at the feelings that crept up on me the other night during another birthday celebration. Perhaps because we were only eight for dinner – a quieter one, perhaps less busy, more time to be aware and reflective.
Or perhaps because I was still feeling the impact of an event two days before. A young woman of 21 – really just a girl – talked to me about her life. Her life as it has been, as it is now. Her anguish, her fear, her hopes, her beliefs, her theories, her agonizing sensitivity to everything and everyone around her. It was almost as if she was missing skin and her experience of the world was completely unprotected by any barrier. It was easy to see and hear, in the tone of her voice, in her eyes, in the intense body language that accompanied her words.
She is living with a diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia’. She is living alone, on the usual too-low disability income, in what we would consider unlivable accommodation, far from potential emotional support because that is how she can survive financially.
Her words gradually painted a picture of the consequences of neglect and a painful relationship with her mother who was ‘never there’. Gabor Mate talks about the impact of a ‘failure of attachment’ between a child and a parent, and her description of childhood sounds like a textbook case. I remember two little kids – not more than three years of age – in my old neighbourhood. They played outdoors by themselves, without adult supervision. One was killed by a car. The other’s mother was said to be drunk or otherwise pre-occupied indoors. Back then, I had a hairdresser who would tell me of little twin boys he’d watch running everywhere unsupervised. I used to wonder what would happen to these waifs, unparented, untaught, unprotected.
And now here was this girl, a product of perhaps an even worse childhood, talking so passionately, with her deep unmet needs as visible as sunburn. I wanted to take her in my arms and rock her, like you would a baby crying with fever. I talked with her about how natural it was for her to feel this way, given that many of her basic needs had never been met. Of course she would have all kinds of intense, ‘unstable’, conflicted feelings, given the lifelong necessity of emotionally scrambling, in her effort to understand life, to make sense of it. That tremendous effort, to wring something out of nothing in a sense, had made her very smart, but also emotionally and mentally scattered and confused, left to her own interpretations of what was going on in the world around her.
My intuitive impulse was to take her home, take care of her. If she doesn’t end her life and instead lives on and on in that state, isolated, emotionally unsupported, forever misinterpreted and misunderstood, will my comfortable children have enough compassion to support her more generously through higher taxes? Or will they and their cousins, and their friends, resent helping this child, in her lonely isolation?
As I watched our little birthday celebration with its bounty of food and wine, its exquisite chocolate cake, its easy laughter, I thought about how lucky we all are, and how much they take for granted. I worried that I haven’t transmitted my values, or my passion for taking care, or my moral outrage at the injustice that surrounds us.
Or in fact, have I expressed too much, causing an opposite reaction in them, as often happens? We don’t get to do it over. Chances are, I’ll never know.
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