Guilt, Grief and Regeneration

Posted by JohnD Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:12:00 GMT

Some Rights Reserved by Memotions at Flickr

A breakthrough to healing can come at the most unexpected time. The other night I was trying to divert myself by watching a mystery episode from an old British series. Instead of taking my mind off things, this story pushed me into a past history I had long kept at a safe distance.

The film built its story around a soldier haunted by his experience of violent death in Bosnia, especially the sight of a basement floor piled deep with the corpses of women and children. Much later, after his return to civilian life, the shock of another act of violence brings back the Bosnian memories and plunges him into such an intense guilt that he loses his power of speech. A minister, he somehow internalizes guilt for such horrors that have nothing to do with his own actions and is even driven to seek atonement for them. And so he tries to find punishment by confessing to a killing he did not commit. It’s based in part on Pat Barker’s fine novel, Regeneration, about a World War I combat veteran slowly brought back to health through the efforts of a gifted psychiatrist. These stories bring to life the hard work of recovery.

Certain dramatic scenes often have powerful resonance for me, often triggering grief and tears, but I have never been able to understand what was going on. Why should such powerful feelings fill me in response to fiction? I could see reasons for such reactions when brought on by the real-life stories of veterans suffering complete collapse from the traumas of combat. However, I thought of that more as empathy for their suffering rather than as response to my own far less violent family disturbances. The other night, though, things began to get clearer.

Depression and Imagination

Posted by JohnD Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:27:00 GMT

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.

Creativity and Depression - 3

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.

Treatment: The Depression Policy

Posted by JohnD Fri, 07 Dec 2007 04:09:00 GMT

Photo Credit – JesterArts – Stockxpert

One of my wake-up moments arrived decades ago when I read a New York Review of Books essay on a government practice known as “channeling.” This was during the Vietnam draft era, and the term referred to the decisions that young men were forced to make about their lives because of the prospect of compulsory military service. There was plenty of stress to go around as I and every guy I knew tried to figure this one out. You could defer service if you went to college, then on to grad school (until they took that option away) or divinity school (a number of surprising conversions there) or became a conscientious objector or even leave the country. And there were many who wanted to serve, to let the draft take them or get a jump on the system and enlist – and they had the prospect of hot combat before them. The draft was always there to keep the pressure on.

The point of the article was that the draft had been designed to do more than just fill up slots in the army. Its unrelenting pressure and your personal stress were instruments of national policy to “channel” the better-off kids into college and graduate education or into training as military officers, while the working-class kids, with fewer options, would become the rank and file of the armed forces. That way, everybody would conform to the prevailing ideas of how society ought to work. That knowledge radicalized me on the spot. Government was getting its hands inside my mind and my deepest feelings! The hell with that, I thought, we’ve got to change this rotten system!

As it turned out, I was at that same time having my first adventures with psychotherapy. What I didn’t know until recently, however, was that psychiatrists of that period had their own policy about the treatment of depression that was to have even more long-lasting effects on my inner life than the temporary problem of dealing with military service.

Explanations - 1: Finding a Guide

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.

Writing to Recover Life from Depression

Guilt, Grief and Regeneration

Depression and Imagination

Creativity and Depression - 3

Treatment: The Depression Policy

Explanations - 1: Finding a Guide

About

Categories

Recent Comments

From My Library

Experience Project

Tags

Top Posts

Helpful Blogs

Copyright

Archives