I’ve been undergoing a slow process of insight into my own psychology these past few months – it’s a work in progress, but I think I achieved some concrete understanding today.
I have a genetic predisposition to depression. Both my maternal grandparents suffered from it, as does my mother (and from looking at photos of my great grandparents, it looks like they were pretty dour folk, at least on the odd occasion when a photographer popped a flash bulb in their direction). As an adult I’ve had regular tussles with the black dog, but until recently they were isolated incidents – periods of weeks or occasionally months of awfulness punctuated by much lengthier periods of ‘normality’.
This past year has been different though. A succession of bad things has happened to me (redundancy, death of a family member, illness of a family member, money worries, other things) and, although there are times when I have felt pretty desperate I have somehow managed to avoid falling into the grip of a profound clinical depression as in the past. Instead, what I have felt is a kind of background depression: a cushion of sadness and weariness that is seldom far away. It’s not pleasant, but the key thing about it is that it is manageable. Unlike in the past where I’ve been signed off work or spent vast amounts of time staring into the abyss, I’ve (mostly) been able to get on with life, be of use to other people, laugh at jokes, feel ‘normal’. My depression (if that’s still an appropriate word for it) seems to be a part of me now, rather than something that I suppress most of the time until it rises up and overwhelms me.
It’s very hard for me to unpick exactly what has brought this about – perhaps its part of ageing (very interesting article in today’s Guardian about why mental maturity means the best free divers are in their thirties, rather than their twenties), perhaps its simply that I’m better at vocalising my anguish and therefore receiving better advice and support from others, or maybe its because I’ve taken up a sport and am getting regular exercise. Partly, I think, it’s that I’ve stopped treating depression as though it weren’t an inevitable part of my psyche. In the past I kidded myself that it was possible to be happy all or most of the time. I still think happiness is a worthwhile end in itself, but it’s perhaps easier to accomplish if one is not expending massive amounts of energy in order to avoid all misery.
My mother has a stomach condition that occasionally causes her a lot of pain. The pain in turn causes emotional distress, such that she starts to feel like she will ‘never be well’. My advice to her recently has been to try and accept that sometimes she won’t feel well, but that most of the time she’ll be fine, and not to let the bad stuff be predominant in her mind at all times. She doesn’t listen. Like me she wants perfection: to be well and happy all the time. Are we, as a society, starting to feel entitled to constant good health and happiness, now that medicine makes these things theoretically possible, and is this sense of entitlement robbing us of the chance to live well despite our defects? (To be clear, I am very much pro-medication. My question is more related to how we cope with long-term conditions that can’t be eradicated through treatment.)
Living with depression
Too much choice, too many images of idealised lifestyles, too many stories of people who seem to have more than us, too much pressure to consume stuff that will make our lives perfect.
I read a book by psychologist Viktor Frankl who noted from first hand experience that even in concentration camps it was possible for people to stay positive, because happiness is relative to your circumstances. For the prisoners, a few extra scraps of bread with their meal, or being put to work with a guard who was known to be more forgiving than the others, gave them just as much happiness as anything that could have happened to them when they were free men.
Um… I’m rambling. Exercise, eat right, read good books, spend time with people you like, ignore people you don’t. There’s not much else you can do.
I’m too busy to spend time commenting on blogs today, but your writing is so well measured and sincere that I can’t not.
Douglas Coupland wrote that as we get older sincerity ceases to feel pornographic. I think this is very profound – being mature enough to realise that the benefits of 100% sincerity outweigh the perceived risks.
I’m sure that your ability to talk and write about this stuff in the pubic domain will help.
When our kids first started at school all the parents at the school gate, including ourselves, were preoccupied with projecting a universally positive image of how family life and parenthood was progressing. As it happens this was, to varying degrees, an exercise in deception or self-delusion for all concerned, including ourselves. Thinking that everyone else was doing fine made us feel worse about our own situation and simultaneously less able to talk about it.
Fortunately that situation changed as we got to know other parents better. Something that initially made us feel worse has now turned into a valuable support network.
Hopefully social media will work in the same way for you. I was interested in your post about your changing attitude to Twitter. I’ve always liked your candid approach to micro-blogging and thought it would be a shame if you moved away from that. A positive effect of this “ambient awareness” thing is that, even though I hardly know you, I care enough to write this when I don’t really have the time.
I have suffered something similar for many years, and only recently (past year) have I managed to dig myself out. I attribute it to a few things, one being a recognition of the problem, which came about by chance. I went to see Lewis Wolpert’s talk on science and religion, and ended up buying and reading his book Malignant Sadness and realizing “oh, I recognize that.”
Since then I’ve tried to exercise a lot more too, “do anything” when I feel I’m heading downhill, and build a network of friends that can help me “do” something, including eating more awesome food (good food + company = lovely time for me).
I’ve also tried to eliminate things from my life that bring me sadness (as much as possible, you can’t completely succeed here), and learn how to cope with stuff better (I find CBT pretty interesting, and an approach that helps me).
On your point of medicine, the BBC had a fantastic radio program not too long ago called “The Medicalisation of Normality”. A wonderful title. The presenter pointed out that there is a bell curve of normality. Not everyone *should* be happy all the time, have energy all the time, be bright and optimistic. There is a spectrum of normality, some are on one side, some are on the other, but for the most part they are *all* “normal” – and medicalising just to be closer to the average doesn’t always make sense…
Jon
Thanks for the thoughtful comments:
LC: Your list is spot on: the only thing I’d add to it is ‘keep busy’. At least in my case, torpor seems fatal to my mood.
Phil: Gosh, I hadn’t really thought about kids in that way. Not having any myself, i suppose I thought they kind of cushioned you from other people, rather than creating an additional requirement to appear ‘successful’. But I guess it’s completely logical. When one person in my family gets depressed, the rest of us tend to follow – perhaps because we see it as a personal failure. Food for thought. And ‘yes’ to the ambient awareness thing. There are days when its clear that a particular person on Twitter is having an ‘off day’, and its nice to be able to reach out a little. Mind you, you pointed out yesterday that you hoped the designer I was berating wasn’t on Twitter. The fact is that I’m not linked to any of my clients or colleagues on Twitter, and if I were, or if I wanted to work in social media, for example, I’d probably be a lot less candid.
Jon: Thanks for the book suggestion – I’m ordering it from the library. Both you and LC mentioned surrounding yourself with positive people and I think that’s key. I’m in the Highlands at the moment, where rates of depression are high, and couch surfing is a way of life for many. I have one good friend up here and we try to get out and eat cake, go rock climbing and chase dogs along the beach. Simple things.
make use of those around you
melancholia
i found tango to be a good place to express the intimacy and the isolation that is part of our condition
as phil says
you have a well measured writing style
this is borne from deep experience
and conscious integration
thank you
Sometimes you make a measure of peace with the black dog by letting him sleep just outside your bedroom door. He’s not on your bed choking you to death, and you can’t banish him, but you know where he is and just how much power he can or can’t have in your life.
I’ve had poor health my whole life, and have struggled with my attitude about it, ranging from despair to denial. At the moment I’ve got some sense of balance, probably for similar reasons to those you suggest to your mom — I’ve found a mental space where I recognize that I’m dealing with some misery right now, but that not every moment is misery, and that I can enjoy some of my time. And though it’s not what I want, it’s enough to keep me from the abyss. For now.
Refreshingly honest post. I look forward to these but I’m stuck on this question: “Is this sense of entitlement robbing us of the chance to live well despite our defects?”
I think so. Malpractice suits in the US have castrated doctors. People expect cures that don’t leave scars, come in a bottle, and have immediate results. We hide our own problems so well but for whatever reason don’t recognize that others do the same and expect their standard of “health and normalcy.”
On the other end I wonder about the new defects. Are they new and why? The panic attacks, peanut allergies, online addictions…sometimes it feels like the number of possible ailments is so great in order to dissuade us from caring about one lest we care about them all.
HSU: You’re just too damn happy to keep up with sometimes
But yeah, I’ve been throwing a lot of my frustrations into skating and it really works. Today I should be skating right now, but I can’t because I’m revising – perhaps that’s the root cause of my original post!
Valerie: I admire you, I really do. I know you have sinus problems some of the time, and when I can’t breathe properly I honestly think I’m going to go insane – can’t sleep without nasty decongestant sprays, can’t lie down for fear that I’m going to suffocate. I guess you must have powerful methods of keeping yourself going under such circumstances.
Anonymous: I think in the UK targets and lack of time have castrated doctors (malpractice suits less scary over here because of strong public policy against defensive practice). I’ve noticed over the years that doctors tend to hand over pills and then send the patient away with the expectation that the pills will ‘cure’ them. They don’t mention that pills might not completely cure the problem, or that they have side effects of their own. Patients have to find this out themselves, rather than being prepped for it. We need to get better at giving bad news and dealing with it.
Some of cognitive behavioural therapy seems to concentrate on stopping people saying “should”
As in “I should be happy”, “she should have”, “this should”.
A turning point for me was reading Derren Brown’s book where he is talking about sickness and he comments that wellness is not our natural state. Sometimes we are sick, sometimes we are well.
Though, that said, depression is rubbish and I hope it lessens in your life.
I think that’s part of what I’m talking about. When I first got this ill I had a terror of falling asleep because of fear I’d suffocate in my sleep, and couldn’t figure out how I could sleep when I couldn’t breathe through my nose. Three months into the peak of this infection (it’s been 1.5 years now), I have gotten to some degree past the panic attacks (though I do sleep either sitting up or with four pillows), and I’ve learned to breathe through my mouth without panicking. Which is useful if I am every well enough to return to snorkeling
So I guess my point is that I learned to deal with things better than I thought I could. They don’t go away, but my ability to deal with them has changed. It sounds to me like you’re saying the same thing about yourself.
Kel: Which Derren Brown book is this? Sounds interesting. Funny how much my mood switches in a day. This morning I was watching my mother walk up the road outside my house and I burst into tears because I suddenly saw how much she has started to resemble her own mother (as in, she is an old lady now, rather than just ‘mum’). Put me in a very sombre mood for most of the day, and then some very sweet things happened and now I feel almost daft for being sad in the first place.
Valerie: I think/hope you are right. Guess only time will tell.
LC — My experience of depression doesn’t seem to have much to do with “too much pressure to consume stuff”, in fact it has very little relation to the outside world at all, in fact that’s part of the problem – it’s just a grey fog that descends over the world and muffles everything. Your description sounds like frustrated desire to achieve “more happiness”, but my depression has tended to be characterised by a complete absence of any kind of desire at all. In many ways, for me, depression doesn’t even relate very much to happiness – it just makes life feel like a swamp that has to be waded through with enormous effort, and simultaneously robs you of the ability or desire to make that effort.
I think that “depression” is probably a word that covers a wide and disparate collection of symptoms that are only all bundled together under one word because we don’t currently understand enough about them. Anyway – thank you Kirsten, you’re one of the bravest people I know.
Josh – a post-depression post? Sending you an ‘x’ through the blizzard of zeroes and ones.
The Derren Brown book was Tricks of the Mind and it is a throwaway comment, I think in the middle of a discussion about people not thinking scientifically…
I think he is talking about vitamin pills against colds?
It is a great book and I recommend it but that epiphany moment is buried under stuff about improving memory, magic, Derren’s late adolescence and a discussion about why the London Aquarium has Braille signs.
I always come to these entries late. But I did want to weigh in on this, just briefly. I can’t speak to depression, because I’m lucky enough not have been dealt that card. I think we might have chatted about this, but the person I live with does suffer from clinical depression, though she hasn’t had an episode for a number of years.
Somewhat like yourself, she’s come to the conclusion, perhaps subconsciously, that for her happiness isn’t a right, but something that she works at. Consequently, she’s developed coping mechanisms that allow her to take get that fucking dog to go chasing after a stick instead of sitting on her chest, licking her face. She’s pro-medication, but also she exercises – a lot – as this seems to really help. Her notion that happiness is process and her ability to do all of this and remain sanguine about it is one of the things that I love and admire about her.