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.

I’ve had many dreams that symbolize depression as a wandering through dark and threatening rooms of a vast building. This particular dream, one of several like this that I’ve had over a period of years, used the same building symbol but cast the experience in a positive light. I had this some years ago and recently looked back at the original journal description. A group of friends and I were searching for a way out of a huge sprawling school. What we were really looking for was a way to spiritual salvation.

We searched through a series of dizzying hallways, opening door after door but finding nothing. Finally we realized that we had come to the last room in the building. When we entered, though, a bearded man in a robe told us that we could not get out that way. There was another door to open from that last room, and I suddenly knew, despite what the man was telling us, that our search through the building had somehow given us the power to unlock this door. I pulled it open and we could see a “bloody paradise” as I said after getting a glimpse. It looked like Colorado mountains in the distance but nestled high up was a beautiful area of intense colors swirling about that clearly marked our destination. To get there we had to tromp through a dense wall of green growth with straight, high almost blade-like leaves. As I carefully pushed them aside to go through, I stepped into ever denser clusters of them and realized how dangerous this was. We had to stop, go back into the building and try to take a different route.

Back in the building we went from room to room again, and it turned out that each of us (I had two companions, a man and a woman, though I didn’t know exactly who they were) had to find our unique ways to get out of there. I got to one room where I could enter a kind of fluid in what looked like a glass container, and as I did so my body started to disappear, though its outlines remained visible and I was still conscious of everything. A voice I heard was explaining that I was not yet ready for that stage of spirituality and had to first go through other experiences. I realized that for me this meant having to re-enact something like the experiences of a MacBeth or Othello – and that filled me with sorrow.

I seemed able to enter only so far into the spiritual stages I was seeking. That “school” building turned out to be a strange training ground or introduction to higher levels of being. I knew I could get a certain way into the spiritual transformation I was seeking, but then had to go back. Each time, as before, my body started to disappear, or become translucent until it occurred to me this was not the real thing, just a sort of practice, and I would resume my normal appearance. The man and the woman with me also had this experience. At times when I was in the most advanced “practice” state I was no longer in the building but among the bare hills of the Jordan River Valley, that is, the holy land. I woke up in the midst of this going back and forth from one state to another. I felt wonderful, as if the dream had been a great breakthrough in my life, as many other dreams had been. But I could not understand at the time why I felt so good when the dream itself seemed inconclusive with all this testing but without getting me where I wanted to go.

Now that dream makes more sense in the context of trying to find a link between the suffering of depression (the endless wandering through dark buildings with no way out) and the spiritual insight and fulfillment of my nature – the process of integration or individuation that Jung describes. Part of me could recognize on a feeling level the breakthrough that making this connection represented – and that part felt deeply happy and resolved. But the rest of me (intellect, will?) was still too isolated to start working with this insight.

In Speaking of Sadness, David Karp talks about the ability of people with long-term illnesses to “refashion the meaning of their pain.” He points to the success of the 12-step program in AA as partly due to the ability of alcoholics to adopt a different perspective on life, a new identity. They recognize the role of a higher power and bring about a “symbolic transformation” of the meaning of the problem. He found that some of the depression sufferers he interviewed came to achieve an adaptation in which they saw a deepening of spiritual knowledge through depression. Or some saw the illness as the price they paid for reaching a place of spiritual understanding.

That is beginning to make more sense to me, not just as part of a potentially useful adaptation to depression, but as a way of connecting to an inner process that’s been going on for some time. Have you had that experience of suddenly catching up consciously to inner learning that’s been going on for a long time just below the surface of your awareness?

Some Rights Reserved by Karo666 at Flickr

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.

Karp detects a pattern in responses to depression among the fifty people he interviewed, patterns that resonated with his own long experience of living with the condition. The pattern begins with an effort either to deny that depression will interfere with normal life or to seek diversion or escape from pain though intense involvement in other activities. When those strategies failed the people in his interviews, they tried hard to fix the problem by getting help from therapists and medication or alternative remedies. Sooner or later, they were forced to realize that these methods could only alleviate but never cure the problem. Faced with the reality that depression was not going to disappear, they set about finding strategies of coping and adapting to a life lived on different terms. What Karp found most often was that this last stage led people to see an advantage in their condition, either a special sensitivity to life, a creativity or a deeper spiritual awareness that non-depressed people seemed to lack. This is exactly what I have not found, or at least I have never imagined my experience in this way. Perhaps imagination is the key.

There are elements of our mental and emotional experience we want to disown, others we want to claim. When I am in a creative mode, I’m truly experiencing things in a different way than I usually do – it is part of my soul I want to cultivate, own, prize. When I am in depressed mode, I’m also experiencing things in a different way from “normal” life or thinking or feeling, yet I want to fight, disown, expel it. In this blog, I’ve often imagined depression as a person I fight in anger, sometimes as a pair I have to stumble around with, always as a presence I am trying to get rid of. My creativity is part of the real me, depression is a diseased burden I’m trying to cut out.

This way of imagining and feeling about depression has been a powerful tool in keeping me functional, and it’s been an adaptation that has generally worked. But the question I am asking myself, given the differing experiences of others, is: Could I come up with another strategy based on a different way of imagining what’s going on in my psyche, mind, emotions, soul?

One aspect of my current adaptation is that I live in cycles with highs of intense creativity and lows of intense despair with normal functionality on the way up and the way down. I feel the highs and relatively normal periods as the real me and the lows as an alien personality that is stealing my place in the world.

Is it possible to imagine and really experience all this not as an opposition of forces, a constant battle, but rather as a unified psyche through which different forces flow at different times? Is it possible that it’s neither “creativity” nor “depression” that I’m reacting to and experiencing but an underlying power of life that wants to push itself into the world? A power that sometimes terrifies and paralyzes me, even when I recognize it as creativity?

I don’t know, but I’m exploring the possibilities. What do you think?

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.

Jane Chin, for example, has written an extended and inspired defense of her creativity as intrinsic to her, not a product of her depression. Peter Kramer devoted a third of his book, Against Depression, to reviewing the history of the close association between the emotions of depression and artistic imagination. He suggests that changing our view of depression by seeing it as an illness with physical causes could also change the experience of emotions in our culture, pushing us away from glorifying melancholy, despair and alienation and toward focusing more on the strong, worldly directed passions of anger, excitement, joy or grief.

On the other hand, Philip Dawdy has written in the post, Is Depression a Mental Illness? (November 6, 2007), “Besides, there are some positive aspects to depression. It’s a great source of artistic inspiration – trust me on this one.” Dawdy also discussed an essay by Tim Bugansky (author of Anywhere but Here) called I Miss Depression, a recollection of his experiences before having depression symptoms relieved by medication. Bugansky writes that when depressed, though isolated within himself, he felt more intensely alive, completely connected to the world and more creative. He says he doesn’t want to glorify depression, realizes that without his meds he could have become much worse, but nevertheless misses “the brilliant sadness” of his former depressed state.

Siroj Sorajjakool writes in a typically sensitive post about the challenge of living with depression. This is a remarkable reflection on connection and disconnection. He finds that depression, the sense of being wrong in who you are, pushes you to the edge in negative thinking about yourself. This results for him in a very high level of consciousness. In a comment on a post of mine, he writes: “I have been amazed at what depression has done for me and, in a way, I would not have been where I am now if not because of my struggle with depression. Pain is always there but like you said, there is something more, a deeper sense of meaning and satisfaction.” The post he was responding to discusses what getting well is all about. I write there that depression has always been part of my life and linked with the self-discovery that some call individuation or salvation. In that sense, I agree with Siroj. The illness tests me almost every day and pushes me to invent some new way to fight its effects and regain a sense of comfort with who I am, balance in my thinking and renewed energy.

In my experience, depression destroys creativity because it destroys my ability to think, imagine, will. I see these two as opposite psychic forces. It is the creative core of a so far resilient self, holding an outpost never quite overrun by depression, that enables me to fight back. It is imagination working with a remaining spark of life that helps me avoid self-destruction and lets my mind and feelings come alive again. After pushing off the depression, I can be myself instead of that deadly negative monster the illness wants me to accept as who I am.

This brings me back to Patrick and the idea that his creative imagination is not helpful when it generates the “cascading of depression and negative thoughts.” The better side of his creativity reveals positive states that he can imagine and move toward. He says these imaginings come not from abstract theories but from physical experiences that are free, if I’m reading him accurately, of the engineered constraints that try to contain the spontaneity of life. I’m with him there – depression tends to submerge the vital form of creativity. If I’m lucky, enough of the good stuff remains to help me imagine a way out.