Healing, Butterflies and Hawks

Posted by JohnD Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:19:00 GMT

Some Rights Reserved by zenera at Flickr

At times, emerging from depression seems like a gift. I’ve written before about a sudden shift, a kind of renewal, that occurred when crossing a shallow stream. In my experience, healing may come from a special place more effectively than from medication. I became sensitized to the power of certain places through years of work with Native American communities. Once a Tewa friend pointed out the number of locations in the West with the name devil, or some variant, attached. These were usually places sacred to native peoples but shunned by Christian missionaries as related to idolatry and paganism. They were all associated with strong spiritual power. Some of these were places of healing, and every now and then I have found such a place.

Posted in Connecting, Spirituality and Depression | Tags butterfly, depression, hawk, healing, migraine, place, power, recovery, spirituality, wellness | 8 comments

Depression Against Life

Posted by JohnD Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:25:00 GMT

Some Rights Reserved by xip at Flickr

WARNING: THIS POST HAS POSSIBLE TRIGGERS

Anon for Now recently commented on the sense of renewal in life that served as a deterrent to suicide. This struck me as capturing the most baffling aspect of the temptation to end life. For what does the evidence of life on earth point to but the endlessly inventive will to survive? There is no more fundamental drive than the will to adapt, change, reproduce one’s kind under any circumstances. Yet so many in the grip of major depression or bipolar depression act against that drive toward life and destroy themselves. As Kay Redfield Jamison points out in Night Falls Fast, the presence of mental illness and/or substance abuse, or worse, the two together, vastly increases the likelihood of suicide. It’s among the top five causes of death in the United States for men and women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four.

What I have seen and sorrowed at is the cool determination of more than one friend to plan and carry out his own destruction. Karl Menninger described the drive to suicide as taking many forms in his classic study, Man Against Himself. These included self-defeating behavior, dangerous addictions, certain types of self-mutilation, aggressive and violent outbursts, purposive accidents and many other variations. Some of these can lead directly to premature death; many set the stage in a person’s mind as justification for ending a life regarded as failed or too painful or destructive to others.

Posted in What Depression Can Do, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags alcoholism, contempt, depression, Karl Menninger, Kay Redfield Jamison, life, Man Against Himself, Night Falls Fast, self, shame, suicide | 4 comments

Depression and Suicide - Back from the Edge

Posted by JohnD Sun, 23 Mar 2008 04:06:00 GMT

Christos Georghiou – Fotolia.com_

WARNING – THIS POST HAS POSSIBLE TRIGGERS.

After a tough week with a lot of down time lost to pain of various sorts – as much mental as physical – I’ve been trying to draw on lessons friends have been sharing with me. They have been describing a deeper sense of who they are through each spell of this illness. And I can see what they mean. Coming out of depression is an experience of renewal, a sudden shift of perspective rendering all that was doomed and dying now reborn, all that was shadowy now brightly lit, all that was sinister now kind and inviting. This world is turned inside out but then comes right again. There is a richness to this experience, as my friends have been telling me, but still each depression is a bitter and savage attack on all I am and try to be. Call it a testing of the life energy.

I can’t relax about it, thinking of the reward of renewal after it is gone, for the simple reason that many I once knew did not pass this test. Some took their lives by overdosing on the very medication that was meant to help them, others used different means, drowning or a gun. Every time I hear of such a horror, I can’t help but feel the fear in myself that I might be seized by a crazed obsession too. I fight that, I have to fight it hard.

Posted in What Depression Can Do, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags faith, Fear, fighting depression, God, hope, renewal, spirits, spirituality, suicide, teenage depression | 7 comments | no trackbacks

Lincoln's Adaptation to Depression

Posted by JohnD Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:51:00 GMT

In January 1841, Abraham Lincoln, then a state legislator in Illinois, wrote to his law partner about securing a post for a physician who was then treating him for a nervous disorder called hypochondriasis, or hypo for short, a condition we would call major depression. “I have, within the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhibition of myself in the way of hypochondriaism and thereby got an impression that Dr. Henry is necessary to my existence. Unless he gets that place, he leaves Springfield. You therefore see how much I am interested in the matter.” And what was the treatment Lincoln was receiving?

As Joshua Shenk’s study, Lincoln’s Melancholy reports, he likely undertook some version of the accepted remedies used by most practitioners. These were drawn from the first textbook of mental diseases in the United States prepared by Dr. Benjamin Rush. This was the physician and political figure who became famous as a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the foremost medical expert of the time. Rush’s approach to “hypo” was to scourge the body with biblical fury and so shock the patient back to a state of normality. Bleeding out enormous quantities, more than was drawn for any physical disease, was the first step, followed by purgatives that would violently empty stomach and bowels (mercury, arsenic or strychnine were the favored agents), immersion in successive hot and cold baths, painful mustard rubs, stimulants that could set off more intestinal fireworks, a starvation diet, vigorous exercise – all of which usually reduced a patient to trembling weakness. That was the point – to shake the black bile out of the system and kick start it at more balanced mental rhythms.

Posted in Explanations, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags adaptation, Benjamin Rush, Civil War, depression, freedom, humor, hypochondriasis, Joshua Shenk, Lincoln, melancholy, mesmerism, poetry, purpose, slavery, suicide, transcendent, treatment | no comments | no trackbacks

Dreams, Depression & Spirituality - 2

Posted by JohnD Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:19:00 GMT

Some Rights Reserved by Elena Acin at Flickr

Insightful comments by Stephany and Jane are helping me get to another stage in dealing with depression. In a previous post I started wondering if there might be a very different way of imagining and experiencing this illness. Could there be a way of adapting that started with different assumptions about the condition than the purely negative ones I’ve always accepted? I wondered if depression, which I fight hard to get out of my life, and creativity, which I embrace and cultivate, might be different faces of a psychic force trying to take its place in my mind and the actions of my life? Jane mentioned Eckhart Tolle’s experience of depression as a step toward his experience of enlightenment, and Stephany wrote that “when we leave for a depression, I think we fear losing ourselves and not being able to return to what we considered good… .” She adds that we could look at this as a renewal process, that “we come back with more of ourself.” That’s a wonderful image of leaving for depression and returning with a sense of renewal, as if from a vacation.

So I’ve been asking myself: if I were less combative with depression, accepted it more like a step toward a higher knowledge of myself, would it make the whole experience of living with the condition something more positive? Could I come to see it, not like losing half my waking life, but like gaining ground on healing and spiritual insight? Like most people, I have had many powerful spiritual experiences, but I haven’t connected those with depression – until now. And in my typically associative way, these two things come together in a dream.

Posted in Explanations, Fighting Depression, Creativity, Spirituality and Depression | Tags adaptation, awareness, breakthrough, consciousness, David Karp, depression, dream, Jane Chin, learning, practice, spirituality, Stephany | 8 comments