Depression, Identity and Hope

Posted by JohnD Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:08:00 GMT

Some Rights Reserved by jairo at Flickr

Marissa wrote a post at Wellsphere that made me pause. She was objecting to the idea found in Richard O’Connor’s book (Undoing Depression) that “I am not my depression.” She interpreted this as an evasion of accountability for one’s actions. The depressed behavior that harms relationships, for example, can’t be dismissed as something you’re not responsible for – it has a real impact because of your behavior, and you remain accountable for what you do. And so, in this sense, she insists: “I am my depression.”

I agree with the need to be accountable. I have hurt those around me by being emotionally absent, self-involved, unable to talk, irritable or in a rage, or behaving badly in any of the ways that are symptomatic of depression. But O’Connor’s intention with this formulation, I believe, isn’t aimed at releasing people from accountability. It’s a way of reminding those suffering from depression that they have an illness, that there is hope for recovery, that they should not confuse the symptoms with the totality of their human identities.

I think a better way of putting this, however, is another sentence that appears frequently in books about how to deal with this condition: “I am more than my depression.” In other words, my identity isn’t defined by behavior linked to the illness, but it also says that I am my depression, in part.

Posted in What Depression Can Do, Connecting, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags belief, depression, hope, identity, imagination, intention, marissa, recovery, richardoconnor, treatment | 10 comments

You Are So Beautiful

Posted by JohnD Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:28:00 GMT

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There is a powerful moment in the film, Tender Mercies, when the lead character, hearing of the death of someone close to him, says he hates happiness. “You can’t trust it.” I think I took in lessons like that when young and for a long time was fearful of a happiness that seemed to depend on being with someone. And that was the only happiness or fulfillment I could imagine since I felt then so empty on my own, so unworthy of any place in the world at all. But then it happened that I met that one who became my life partner. She kicked and poked at depressed thinking long and hard enough to help me start seeing around it, seeing myself in that state as someone I didn’t want to be.

I could begin to understand my down-staring face wasn’t all that I amounted to. And she could scream enough into my soul to get the message through that love was an offering that had to be taken in and returned, that it demanded to meet a responding energy and affection coming from that deep place. She helped wake me up to my own humanness and hence to the possibility of healing, of being filled with an awareness of a life so different from what I was used to, a life where inner peace could be found.

Posted in Partners to Depression, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags beauty, depression, healing, hope, life, love, Tender Mercies | 7 comments

Searching for a Way Out of Depression

Posted by JohnD Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:55:00 GMT

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In a previous post I started thinking aloud if my stance toward depression could change from hostility toward an invader to the acceptance of a primal force in my make-up, something that was giving me a message I was imperfectly grasping. I’ve found a remarkable book that helps me respond with new energy to this terrible condition. It is Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun. This series of essays by a prominent French psychoanalyst evokes the ways in which artists have portrayed states of depression in order to transcend the suffering of this condition. Though at times the language is dense with post-Freudian terminology, it is also beautifully evocative of the experiences of melancholy and depression and the powerful insights of creative minds in grappling with the problem of living with an illness that takes hold of the mind and feelings so pervasively.

The psychoanalytic theory that tries to explain all this is less important than the fact that it pushes my thinking in the here and now to a new understanding of the strange interplay of basic forces inside me. It helps me consider the dynamic of what I experience quite apart from explanations rooted in past family history. Though psychoanalytic theory is rooted in that history, Kristeva presents the dynamic within the psyche in symbolic terms that make it possible to separate the forces inherent in depression from the particular circumstances of loss or trauma that initially triggered them. Those circumstances, after all, cannot be changed – the family past is completely gone – but the immediate drives toward destruction or hope are the experiences I have to work with right now.

Posted in Explanations, Connecting, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags Black Sun, Dostoevsky, forgiveness, hope, Julia Kristeva, life, loss, love, Nerval, psychoanalysis, transformation | 3 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