Posted by JohnD
Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:54:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by woodleywonderworks at Flickr
Have you heard it, felt it? In the sound of a human voice there may come a wave of healing. Of course, it could also be a scarring knife edge or shriek of pain that can hurt or terrify, but here I want to talk about the power of voice to restore lost harmony. Let’s put it as a question: in your experience can the human voice help move a depressed, disordered being closer to wellness?
The voice, after all, comes from deep sources. It finely carries the emotions, reflects the slightest change of feeling, broadcasts the intention of a speaker and can load the simplest words with complicated meanings. It is a big part of all the nonverbal bonds we form with people that are the real basis of relationships
Once I heard a speaker of the Dine (Navajo) Nation give a prayer and blessing to a conference room packed with almost one thousand people. He sent his prayer out slowly at first, the English words and separate phrases clear, much as you would hear in any invocation, but then he picked up the pace, building to a chant in the rapid rhythm and intonation of a ceremonial singer.
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Posted in Explanations, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags ceremony, chanting, culture, depression, dinenation, healing, prayer, soul, sound, vibration, wind | 14 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:14:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by wili_hybrid at Flickr
Reading old journals reminds me how full of twists and turns a recovery road can be. Along the way, I have encountered strong presences that restore a sense of balance – when I have let them. For years, though, I could not let them work within me for more than a few moments. I’ve edited a few journal entries that show the struggle. I was partly aware of the possibility of change, partly convinced I could not break the cycle I was in.
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Stress has a lot to do with depression, we’re told, and time has a lot to do with stress. And it’s true, my life is timed, and time runs out before I’ve done enough. Enough to prove my value, enough to quell the sharp-edged voice talking me toward nothingness, enough to win a race I mindlessly run. That’s all the stuff of stress. But I see another side to it. Staying within time is a protection as well. The sequence carries me from place to place, job to job and builds a structure to guide and shelter me, stressful and exhausting though it is. “Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back wherein he keeps alms for oblivion.” It can be a prison, time, but its walls shut out thought and feeling that carry me in dangerous directions. So there is tension and stress inside those walls, but fear of something worse on the outside. Can that change? Can I step outside this beating time without becoming lost?
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Posted in Surviving at Work, Connecting, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags culture, depression, Montana, mountains, Native American, New Mexico, prison, Pueblo, recovery, stress, tension, time, tradition | 5 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 17 May 2008 22:16:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Zenera at Flickr
In writing about heightened states of mind I’ve experienced, I keep wondering about what they mean, what they are. Are they signs of a spiritual reality pushing into the midst of the everyday world? Or are they artifacts of mental disorder? The first time I had such an experience, as a college student, I thought I was going crazy and even wrote a poem about this episode of “madness.” It was only six years later when I had a similar experience – which I accepted without doubt as spiritual – that the earlier one took on new meaning as having that same quality. I was no longer afraid of it and didn’t have to push it off as a bizarre and crazy moment. Instead I came to focus on such experiences as part of a way to find healing in the midst of depression as well as deeper insight into life. Spiritual experiences could be one more way to struggle through a chronic condition. But could the experience of depression be another force like spirituality that can terrify but also push me to new awareness? Could the sheer suffering of mental illness be experienced in a spiritual way?
That’s the question behind the quietly intense German film, Requiem
. It tells the story of a young woman who experiences seizures and hears strange voices. These have long terrified and confused her, but eventually she comes to interpret the suffering in purely religious terms.
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Posted in Explanations, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags belief, Catholic Church, culture, depression, exorcism, mental illness, religion, Requiem, society, spirituality, treatment | 6 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 10 Feb 2008 05:14:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by DerrickT at Flickr
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, 16 Sep 2007 19:53:00 GMT
I’d like to think of the search for the causes and treatments of depression as the tracking down of a killer, a good yarn like the fascinating medical mystery stories
The New Yorker publishes from time to time. But we’re a long way from the end of such a story, and those tales can only be written in retrospect, after it’s clear the great discovery has been made, the mystery solved. It looks more and more as if there is no single discovery to answer all the questions, only multiple lines of research leading to treatments of great promise. Those treatments add to the store of useful tools, but none of them quite gets the job done. The search continues, and we try to make do with what it yields.
One of the most interesting guides to this search and the recent history of treatment strategies is Dr. Peter Kramer. He is now so well known as a result of
Listening to Prozac
and his other writings and media work that it’s automatic to refer to his books in any list of helpful references. I’d like to comment on what it is in his writing that has been so important to me. It’s a continuing challenge to a lay person to sort through the vast amount of available material and get clarity about what it all means. It’s much easier to get hopelessly confused by conflicting claims and theories. I look for people I can trust for help, and Kramer is someone whose writing inspires that trust.
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Posted in Explanations, Connecting, Experience with Treatments | Tags behavior, culture, depression, disease, neurotransmitters, PeterKramer, prozac, self | no comments
