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

Taking Depression Apart

Posted by JohnD Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

I run a race with depression that keeps me on edge. The stakes are high because we race to take each other apart. I intend to keep the lead. For years, I’d hit the wall and lose the bare will to win. But somehow I got back not just the energy to move but a belief in myself that had long been lost. I can separate myself from depression, understand it’s a condition to be dealt with and so gain the inner strength not to give up anymore. Of course, in this race I never quite get to the finish line. There is no ending.

You can’t live with depression for fifty years, as I have, and fall for easy answers or mental tricks or chemical doses as ways to escape the problem and get on with your life. Bill Wilson once wrote an essay in The Language of the Heart that told his history with this problem. He couldn’t understand how the breakthroughs of the 12-step method could work with alcoholism but not with depression.

Posted in Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags 12, attention, Bill Wilson, cycle, depressionsymptoms, focus, obsessivethinking, recovering, step, Therese Borchard, treatment, will | 14 comments

Requiem: Religious Belief and Mental Illness

Posted by JohnD Sat, 17 May 2008 22:16:00 GMT

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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.

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

Lincoln's Adaptation to Depression

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.

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

How One Man Fights Depression - 2

Posted by JohnD Sun, 27 Jan 2008 21:56:00 GMT

Some Right Reserved by Dimitry Kichenco

The storm passed. The huge trees fell beside our house. My angry, blaming depression spent itself in a fury of hard work cutting up the fallen timber, hauling branches into heaps, lifting and shoving back in place every wind-strewn planter and potted tree that had rolled away under the force of a 60 mph north wind. And then for a couple of weeks, the other side of depression emerged, imposing its quieter and more destructive character. I was full of bleak thoughts, hurting inside, carrying around a weight in my chest that was trying to pull me down into some dark lost place in a hidden underworld. My mind stopped working, settled into a fog of slow motion thought where every intention to do anything emerged only dimly in the mist. Life comes close to a standstill.

What can you do in the midst of that fog?

Posted in What Depression Can Do, Surviving at Work, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags action, ADD, adderall, depression, emsam, exercise, focus, medication, men, paralysis, treatment, writing | 4 comments