Posted by JohnD
Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:27:00 GMT
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I’ve been looking back at the way I’ve thought about depression and my stance toward dealing with it, and I’ve started to wonder: Could I imagine and adopt in my life a different approach to this illness?
What starts me on this track is my encounter with the experiences of so many other thoughtful fellow-sufferers who have achieved a way of living with depression that finds some positive value where I find none. What are they seeing that I’m missing? As I’ve indicated repeatedly, I see depression as an intruder, a trespasser that steals the vital energy of creativity that is its opposite. My last post recognized that while others whom I respect may have very different experiences, I have always wound up cheering on a Jane Chin or Therese Borchard or Peter Kramer who see depression as a disease that is just as welcome in life as cancer. – Ah, cancer—well, that gives me pause. I find a similar tension in the experiences even of terminal cancer patients. Some kick at their condition in anger and bitterness while others find a transformative spiritual experience in what they have to endure. This has nothing to do with the fact that cancer is a disease; it has everything to do with adapting to the experience of living with a potentially deadly problem. My own experience with cancer brought out a fighting spirit that got me through and that persists in my stance toward depression. I firmly believe in the need for using all available treatment options in responding to depression -it is an illness that can kill me. What I’m thinking about now is the way I live my life with this condition as a permanent part of my mind, body and soul. Can or should I adapt to it in a different way?
I’ve been trying to pull together my own sense of how my imagination has brought about my current adaptation to illness with ideas from Donald Karp’s intriguing book, Speaking of Sadness
. The results are surprising.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Creativity | Tags adaptation, cancer, creativity, depression, Donald Karp, illness, imagination, Jane Chin, PeterKramer, psyche, soul, Therese Borchard | 8 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 10 Feb 2008 05:14:00 GMT
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Patrick has written a comment packed with ideas about his responses to depression. I’m especially interested in three points he makes about creativity and imagination. First, he notes that his years of experience of therapy led him to see it as a “misguided enterprise, that of creating and recreating ‘narratives’ to explain events of Mind.” His creative imagination “can spin yarns and unspin them and spin them again” without getting him anywhere. He has come to see depression as a physical problem since it has responded to intense exercise and intense Zen meditation much more than to therapy or medication. Because he now sees the condition as a distortion of thinking, rooted in physical causes, he rejects the idea that “the suffering caused by depression is somehow noble of that it provides special insight.” He has also found that he tends to “become what I consistently think about,” and this insight helps with “understanding the cascading of depression and negative thoughts.” This is not, he says, “a skillful use of creative imagination.”
My experience is close to what he’s saying about creativity and imagination, and I want to bring this out because I’ve encountered many online who see depression in just the opposite way, as a source of inspiration and creativity. Though such different interpretations often lead to bitter debates in this medium, I don’t see this variety of perspectives as a cause of dispute. I’m fascinated by the multiple ways that extremely thoughtful people experience and interpret the multi-faceted condition we call depression.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Creativity, Men and Depression | Tags connection, creativity, culture, depression, disconnection, emotions, imagination, Jane Chin, life, PeterKramer, Philip Dawdy, Siroj Sorajjakool, Tim Bugansky | 16 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:56:00 GMT
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Depression comes, depression goes, and I have no idea why. Sometimes, I suddenly break out of it through mysterious dreams that wake my whole spirit up. Those are the unexpected blessings, no more to be explained than the sudden recurrence of this illness.
There are frightening dreams as well when I may be wandering through dark halls and rooms of enormous houses, mansions or castle-like structures. Usually, I open doors in growing fear, sensing that I am about to come upon someone or something that will kill me. I may follow a stranger from room to room until he turns and stares at me with death in his eyes. I run from that, if I can, but never find a way out of the great buildings and wake in terror at the moment of my inevitable destruction. These are fitting images of being lost in depression, seeing nothing but darkness and always fearing the worst.
But occasionally a powerful dream will help me break out of that pattern and recover, at least for a time.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags awakening, depression, dreams, gift, mysterious, recovery, secrets, spirituality, treasure | 10 comments
