Posted by JohnD
Mon, 26 May 2008 04:15:00 GMT
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In the midst of writing about moments of spiritual insight, I realized I had to draw the other half of that picture. The lost side of spirit is emptiness. I don’t mean the emptying that can be a stage in recovery and spiritual growth. That kind of emptiness is a good thing. It means the stopping of daily noise, the frenetic pace or the addictions that keep me riding on the surface of things and avoiding whatever I can’t face. The good emptiness drains all that out of my system. Once rid of the mind-buzz and the anxiety that goes with it, I can participate in an active silence, and things become clearer.
No, I’m talking about the opposite of that rich experience. It is the empty feeling that leads to panic and what I’d have to call dread. It comes in a flash of perverse insight when I feel again at one with the world around me, but everything in that world, including me, seems false, an empty shell about to crack open, revealing a void. And I’m going to drop in a free fall as the ground cracks under me. That used to be a regular part of my life before I could grasp that it was one face of depression.
When the panic used to strike, I’d have to react fast and leap into any activity that filled the emptiness with crowds, or, better yet, helped me believe for a time that I had never been empty to begin with. I had to hold onto a structure, a purpose, a job, something that sealed the cracking world up again and filled my days with action that was useful and important. That took me completely out of my inner self and whatever I may have really wanted and put me securely in a role or function that had value in the eyes of the world. That is how in the past I ran from the dread of emptiness and the fear of breaking and falling like part of an earthquake-stricken city.
The remarkable TV series, Mad Men
begins with an animation that captures just that sense of living in a world that could at any time break apart and drop you into free fall.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Growing Up with Depression, Men and Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags breaking, dread, emptiness, esteem, Fear, healing, i, Mad, men, Panic, purpose, recovery, self, spirituality | 5 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:34:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Spigoo at Flickr.
Does recovery ever happen this way for you? Something quietly takes you out of yourself?
My room at the inn on the Olympic Peninsula coast looked out broadly on the foggy beach, an early morning panorama grayed out by the ground-level cloud. I tried to discern outlines through that broken mass rolling in from the Pacific. I was struggling to reach through a confused depression to find any clear thing to connect with, something out there, on the shore, apart from me yet a link to the surviving stirrings of life that could bring me out of this dark mood.
I stared at the gray drizzling morning, light wind gently gusting – the water white, waves breaking a hundred yards out, their shallow ripples foaming toward the exposed flats. I had heard there was a record low tide, opening the huge, wet sand-apron of the beach. The mists kept roiling in and out, dissolving the scene for a time, then revealing the great muddy flat again. All at once, I saw dark figures moving about, first just a few, then in the sudden clearing, many small clusters of people. Who or what were they? Barely emerging from the grays of mist, the glistening shore, gray rain, these people weren’t just strolling about – they had purpose. Then I realized they must be out there for the great razor clams buried in the sand, available now because of the low tide.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression | Tags depression, fog, life, mystery, ocean, Pacific, purpose, recovery | 7 comments
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.
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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
