The Professor (@memestorm) kindly recommended Lewis Wolpert’s Malignant Sadness to me after a previous post on my battles with [...]]]> My life, which is typically quite eventful, has been in a state of unusual turmoil for some time now. I’ve been searching for reasons to explain this, and today I came across a couple of interesting ideas.

The Professor (@memestorm) kindly recommended Lewis Wolpert’s Malignant Sadness to me after a previous post on my battles with depression. It is the most scientific account of depression I have come across, and yet still manages to retain a human touch. It explains ideas that I’d encountered before but hadn’t fully grasped, such as Seligman’s Learned Helplessness model and Beck’s extremely persuasive ideas about negative cognitions. Wolpert discusses but is rather dismissive of evolutionary explanations of depression, but I found the idea that depression could be adaptive, in the sense that it encourages the depressed person to accept a subordinate position in a social hierarchy, quite compelling. But there are many other compelling ideas in this book, and I haven’t even reached the chapters that deal with treatment methods yet. The big punch in the jaw that I got from this book, however, was the thought that some of my recent life ‘choices’ have been driven by my biological clock, rather than something more rational and controllable.

Almost six months to the day after my twenty-ninth birthday, my biological clock switched on, just like that. For me this has been a very difficult thing to deal with. In my teens I assumed I would want a family one day, only to realise in my twenties that I really didn’t. After ten years of trying to justify this to my family, and getting pissed off with people saying to me ‘oh you’ll change your mind soon enough’ it was an awful disappointment to discover that those people were right, and that I did want a child even though none of my rational objections to the idea had changed one iota. Instead, some biological drive I have no control over just clicked into place, making me feel like an animal, like some kind of blind machine whose purpose is not after all to fill the world with love, light and magic, but just to reproduce.

It took me quite a while to adjust to this change – and to realise that a drive is just a drive, and actually we can control them. But what I hadn’t realised is that drives are sneaky things, and they affect us on subconscious levels. This particular drive has been making me cling to patterns of negative behaviour I wouldn’t normally have allowed. It’s not quite that simple, predictably. There are always multiple reasons why we do dumb things, but I think this has been a big one for me, and it helps to acknowledge it.

The second idea that made me stop in my tracks today came from my friend Amanda. We’d been comparing notes about the awful time we and numerous acquaintances of ours have had over the past year. She mentioned the concept of Saturn Return, which I’d never heard of before. It’s the idea that roughly every thirty years the planet Saturn returns to the position it occupied when we were born, bringing with it great upheavals. Now I take a passing interest in astrology, mostly because I enjoy the coincidences it throws up, but even if you think astrology is utter hokum, the concept of Saturn Return makes perfect sense for other reasons. Around the age of thirty things do shift a gear. Whether for social, biological or evolutionary reasons our priorities begin to alter; we are leaving youth behind. I certainly have started to feel that the time for experimenting has passed, and that I need to consolidate everything I have learned and start making more discernible progress in life. I built up quite a successful career for myself in my twenties, but for the last few years I have been stalled in the same position while I have watched my peers progress to enormously stressful managerial positions that I most definitely do not covet. Meanwhile I have picked up the interests in law and social justice that I abandoned after leaving university and am retraining as a lawyer and applying for volunteer positions with various advice agencies. This is a process I am ambivalent about. On the one hand I feel compelled to do it, and can see that it will reward me in ways that my current work no longer does. But the flipside is that I will have to assume ‘grown up’ responsibilities like working in an office, committing to long-term projects, getting up early in the mornings, dealing with the stress of personal interactions; all things I have very successfully avoided as a freelancer.

Cronus [Saturn] devouring his children, Francisco de Goya

At the same time I have been dealing with tremendous ambivalence about my personal life in almost every arena from where I live to how I relate to my family. I both crave and fear resolution to all these crises, as resolution would force me to move on with my life in new and unpredictable ways. The last few years have felt like a rather indulgent exercise in self-analysis. The concept of Saturn Return would have that this is an essential and ultimately fruitful process, but it is beginning to wear me down. I would love for the next stage of my life to be a productive one, in terms of my contributing something to the greater good, rather than simply learning painful lessons that further my personal development.

If you are interested in Saturn Return, this is a neat summary. Of everything I have read recently it encapsulates my life now, at the cusp of thirty-one, more precisely than anything else.

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 [...]]]> 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.)