Brother D
Is depression a spiritual problem?
When my brother died suddenly in 2008, I was shocked and bereaved, but what I didn’t see at the time was that my state of mind had opened up a giant crack though which a deep depression slipped and built its nest. Feeling badly gave way to doing badly and until I was able to admit to myself that I was seriously ill I thought I was going senile, or mad. Before the airplane of my psyche crashed into the mountain (a mountain that at one point I was aiming for) I pulled back hard on the stick, just missing it (and luckier than my brother, who had drunk himself to death.)
Sick as I was, being a modern man I reasonably expected to be entirely cured. After all, when I had had my appendix out or had had the flu, I had recovered profoundly and completely. The drugs I took (and I was taking a lot) and the therapy I underwent arrested my tailspin. Since a sense of health (I find) is a matter of one state relative to another, the new strength and energy I felt exhilarated me. I became very productive. Even better, I found it to be very easy to be the kind of person I wanted to be with others. This “ease” infused my spirituality. I can almost say that it was like recapturing the state of mind that I had known when I had had my conversion experience. Being a modern man, I saw this as progress towards a new peaceful maturity.
I relapsed about five months ago and once again it took me by surprise. This time my psychiatrist had to almost double the drugs that I had since stopped taking; it took a lot of chemistry this time to get my undivided attention. These drugs, of course, came with significant side effects that would themselves become a problem when my current wave of depression and anxiety had passed.
My depression did pass and with its passing came my usual spurt of creative energy. Yet something had changed. I could no longer rely on the contrast between the “sick” before and the “well” after. While my confusion, madness, and self-destructiveness was not as deep as it had been before in early 2009, I have to come to terms with a new fact. I could no longer consider myself either well or sick. The contrast between these perceived states would now come moment to moment. I could no longer think in terms of a general state of being.
My therapy had taught me to bracket out my depressed feelings and to just let them wash over me like waves of nausea until they passed. But I also now knew that I could no longer expect this enemy to ever go away for good. Brother D would always be in the neighborhood, just out of sight, waiting to slap me on the back and resume our conversation. Since he was never going to go away, was there a way I could embrace him as a friend?
Depression is a spiritual problem for me, ironically because it causes me to have to fight using pure reason. There is a faith behind this reason, in that I believe that I can and should use reason to oppose the emotions that my depression makes me feel. But everything must now be sorted and weighed. Gone (for now at least) is the buoyant feeling of love that I thought I could just float in. It’s all focus all the time now and I have to now radically discount my desire to crawl away from the world. In a sense I find myself back in my undeveloped childhood again fighting between impulses and rules. My old friend Brother D forces me to live in the present. Not in some Zen way of “be here now”, but in a more primitive way of always arm wrestling with the devil.
And behind all of this my faith has changed. Being a modern man, I want to believe that attitudes precede action. In our culture, this applies to faith, creativity, and to happiness; all will be well if we can just get our mind right (first). Having done this our actions will then flow out naturally in righteous spontaneity. But Brother D causes me to focus on the now. There is no time to get my mind right first. And although he is an exhausting friend to have, like a big dog that never sleeps and always wants to play, I find that at least a little, and a little more each day, I am finding myself blessed to have him around.
Interesting post that struck some chords with me. I come from a family of depressives, and have had bouts of depression at least the age of five.
Warning: Long personal anecdote follows. I’m not looking for sympathy, and I already know that many people view depressives as merely self-indulgent and self-absorbed, so please don’t write me off-line about it.
There are, in my experience, two types of depression/anxiety: Depression that is caused by external events, and a predisposition to be periodically unhappy without any discernible outside reason or for reasons that may be deeply buried and embedded in your personality as you grow up. Or it may be that not all of us get to have perfect mental health, just as some of us inherit physical genetic disorders.
If someone close to you dies, you get depressed because you’re sad, i.e., a situation outside your control caused it. It’s called grief. Often it doesn’t go away, but diminishes over time. However, it can profoundly change your outlook about the meaning of life, God, and other people. This is often part of growing closer to God.
If you have a predisposition to depression, i.e., depression for no reason, you may have periods of depression that last up to several months, and these bouts are often unpredictable. These can be mild, and you can work through them and hide them fairly easily from others. Or they can be debilitating to the point of interfering with work and activities.
Meds are a mixed bag. Some studies suggest they work no better than placebos for some people. They also don’t work the same for everyone. I found that drugs in the Prozac family made me very calm, numb, and prone to thinking about suicide, something I could fight in a non-drugged state. I found this was typical for about a third of my fellow depressants who tried such drugs. Others were helped to varying degrees.
I found fast-acting anti-anxiety meds much more useful in staving off the most crippling symptoms of depression.
Depression, whatever its origins, exacerbates a host of other problems: Sleep deprivation, lowering of the immune system, doing a poor job at work, isolating from family and friends, overeating/undereating, etc.
Depression is accompanied by a good deal of guilt, particularly among those who are religious, and this can make it more difficult to face depression. It goes something like this: If God really loved you–or you truly loved God the right way, prayed more, did the right devotions–you wouldn’t be depressed. Also, if you can’t face going to Mass b/c of depression, you feel even more guilty about what a bad Catholic you are.
On the other hand, I have also found finding a “saint friend” as a kind of spiritual guide. Writing letters or having conversations with said friend is extremely useful. Saying the rosary, if only as a way to keep the bad thoughts out of your mind, can also be useful, though I’m not sure that as devotion and prayer it is efficacious for anything other than taking up space in your head that the depression would.
Unagidon and Jean, thank you for having the courage and grace to make yourselves vulnerable by sharing these very personal experiences.
I just think that depression is almost impossible to convey to someone who hasn’t experienced it, so that they really “get it”.
If I were to rank the top health issues of our time, depression and its little sister anxiety would certainly be in the top 5.
There are no magic bullets as far as I know. Trying to find the right balance of meds, therapy and self-management is what we can do.
“I just think that depression is almost impossible to convey to someone who hasn’t experienced it, so that they really ‘get it’.”
Yes, it ruins a lot of relationships. People try to understand it, but describing it just scares them off. I asked Raber to to think of the saddest things he possibly could, and then to imagine someone playing those images over and over in his head while he was expected to carry on with life as normal. It just ends up sounding like implausible science fiction, and people really don’t believe you.
Perhaps unagidon can speak more to this, but during remissions of depression many depressives experience a heightened sensitivity in which they pick up on mood, feeling, and the “subtext” of others. This kind of sensitivity is almost as distracting as active depression, though someone with a more privileged spiritual life than me might see it as a gift. At times this has helped me intervene before someone else was about to blow emotionally. However, it is intrusive, and I often wish I were just a happy clod.
Talking about depression with the family doctor is something that is a double-edged sword. You will likely get a lot of drugs that may help–or not. Occasionally a doctor will suggest “talk therapy,” which I have found the most fast-acting and helpful–also the most expensive and often not covered by insurance. But the doctor may also start attributing all your other complaints and ailments to your mental state.
If you’re depressed AND menopausal, you can expect not to be taken seriously by anybody in the health profession. A close friend with lifelong depression complained constantly about fatigue and other symptoms that were waved off. When she started having unexplained bruising and was so tired she couldn’t work, I insisted on taking her to see a specialist. Turned out she had a rare form of leukemia and died six weeks later.
Maybe it is easier to describe what it’s like to not be depressed. For example, occasionally waking up in the morning filled with a sense of hope and looking forward to the day. How is depression like a spiritual problem or like a friend? Is it that it makes one go through the drudgery of daily life like saints in the dark night of the soul, forcing oneself forward by sheer force of willpower but without the joyful internal impulse that is so natural to little children? Is it a cause for sins of omission because, without the drive that comes from the simple enjoyment of life, even simple tasks can become overwhelming? Is it to teach us that happiness is not what life is about? Is it to develop an indifference to death that will come in handy if some day we are called to become martyrs? Is it to deepen our appreciation of life on the days when life is good? Is it so that we greet the sun with thankfulness when it comes, instead of taking it for granted?
Another good post, Unagidon — and interestingly related to Peggy’s post before it.
You write: “Depression is a spiritual problem for me, ironically because it causes me to have to fight using pure reason. There is a faith behind this reason, in that I believe that I can and should use reason to oppose the emotions that my depression makes me feel.” The trouble is that depression often comes with a very reasonable letter of introduction. In fact, its reasons are sometimes better, or at least better founded, than the reasons sanity throws up against it. Our good moods may not be our most lucid moods, and a mood disorder may innoculate us, at least partly, against certain kinds of self-deception. Many therapists would say this idea is itself a kind of self-deception, a sick person’s defense mechanism, but several recent studies have suggested that the clinically depressed do a better job of rating their own abilities accurately than most healthy people do. They are less prone to self-aggrandizing fantasies. Perhaps less prone to fantasy generally. (Fantasies can just as well enable as disable.)
So what if there is choice, or at least a tradeoff? We can be better adjusted and less truthful or more truthful and less well-adjusted. Except of course that no one chooses to become depressed, though one may choose not to do the things that could relieve one’s depression.
Jean: I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about. Chronic boredom with life, yes. Acute suffering from sad thoughts, I don’t know what that is…
Matthew: “Where ignorance is bliss, it’s folly to be wise”… External reasons can be perfectly valid reasons for sadness. Once I met a colleague in the elevator: “How are you?”, he asked. “So so”. “What’s wrong?” “My mother just died”. Then, after an awkward moment, he said: “Well, at least, it’s a nice day out today. Enjoy the sun!” I had no answer to those well-meaning but inappropriate good wishes. Sometimes sadness is the appropriate state to be in, and the insistence on cheerfulness is frustrating. Americans are supposed to be always excited about their latest project, always enjoying their job, always looking forward to something, always optimistic about the future, always looking at the bright side of things, always pursuing happiness, almost with desperation. It’s exhausting!
Beautifully written, unagidon. Thank you.
Understanding depression is a stretch for those it has never touched but critically important, especially when a loved one struggles with this condition. Very personal testimony is available in William Styron’s Darkness Visible. The faith component is well rendered in Wrestling with Our Inner Angels: Faith, Mental Illness and the Journey to Wholeness by Nancy Kehoe, RSCJ.
As an outpatient therapist in a community mental health center, I see many people with depression, and often it seems that their mind is their own worst enemy. Thoughts of “I’m an intelligent person, I should be able to think my way through this” are very common. As is the idea that a pill will make it better. If you have depression, and take medication, it doesn’t necessarily make the depression go away, it deals with symptoms. When something bad happens, an we feel down again, our brains are trained to respond to being down in the same old way. There is good evidence that suggests that brains can be “trained” so to speak, to respond differently. There is some good evidence that “mindfulness” is helpful. A good resource is “The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness”. I would suggest that one might utilize prayer (centering prayer, rosary etc. as mindfulness practice)
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Unagidon, we are who we are. I might say that I, too, am depressive, but words mislead as well as clarify, and my depression likely is substantially different from yours and Jean’s. I’m tempted to let this go with the facile advice to accept yourself and go with the flow. That’s good advice as far as it goes, but many of us want something a lot more structured than that. We’re highly social beings with a strong desire to be accepted by others.
Humans are born tinkerers, with both tangible and intangible objects. We see something and immediately imagine how it could be improved. We build mental models of the ideal spouse, the ideal country, church, self. We call the imperfect thing we see before us “unhealthy” and experience an urge to fix it. That’s natural – it’s the way our brains work – but like any impulse, it can become an obsession and a burden.
It’s all about balance, I think. Proportion. Depression isn’t “bad”, any more than elation. There are plenty of things in most of our lives to be depressed about. So be depressed. Indulge. But the pessimism that leads to depression is just a point of view. We need to balance it with the understanding that there are perfectly good reasons for equanimity and even, on occasion, happiness.
And don’t knock meds. We take aspirin for headaches, antibiotics for infection, and insulin for diabetes. Why not take SSRI’s when the part of our chemistry SSRI’s target is seriously out of balance?
In the end, it’s all us. We’re a package, very imperfect, always, but always complete.
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I have enormous respect for those struggling with depression, and gratitude for their courage in sharing what it means in their lives. Thank you profoundly, Unagidon and Jean. This is really an act of love.
I did read Styron’s book some years ago.
As for spirituality, I do think psyche and soul hang together. We are one person, and it just makes sense that each influences the other. Appreciating that depression has a biological component should lessen guilt that one just needs to buck up and move on.
There have been multiple tragedies in my family from schizophrenia (suicide and decades of debilitation), so I do understand the toll of mental illness; it’s absolute hell for the patient, with little surcease. As though all the neural connections are not only deficient, but purposely jumbled to a malign source. I have no idea what purpose is served by such painful horror, and might have a question or two at the pearly gate (hoping I get that far), or does one simply fall into silence?
I do believe it is important for therapists to be sensitive to the spiritual landscape. Ann Ulanov (prof of psychiatry and religion) speaks of having to disabuse some people of their harmful interpretations of Christian theology. Much damage is done by faulty interpretations.
Again, with gratitude to Unagidon and Jean.
A few years ago I read a book that I greatly appreciated: “The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value,” by the English philosopher, John Cottingham.
In his chapter, “Religion and the Good Life,” he quotes Alasdair MacIntyre saying that the tradition of moral philosophy in the West has “only passing references to human vulnerability and affliction and to the connections between them and our dependence on others … Moral agents are presented as though they were continuously rational. healthy, and untroubled.”
Cottingham expresses his own persuasion in these words: “To live morally, courageously, generously, while facing the unavoidable fragility of our human lives, we need a continuing program of spiritual ‘askesis,’ which will replace fear with trust, which will address our vulnerability by transforming it into a receptivity, an openness, a willingness to become like the child that is intimately present deep within the adult life of each of us.”
Do his words resonate? Both Unagidon and Jean speak of the practice of praying the rosary.
Jean, thank you. (And thank you everyone else for your kind words).
It turned out that I had a predisposition for depression that was masked by the grief I expected to feel when my brother died. My grief seemed abnormal to me at the time, but my relationship to my brother was complicated; he had disappeared more than a decade and I had just found him after searching for him all those years. It wasn’t sadness that made me realized I was depressed. It was a loss of control; I suddenly couldn’t understand the mathematical formulas that I use in my work and even simple tasks became more than I could physically do. When I was diagnosed with depression, I was delighted to find that it wasn’t something much worse.
I have been resistant to integrating depression into my life. I hope that this doesn’t sound like I am giving up on myself. But I find that I cannot predict a relapse (although I think I have been getting better at seeing the times when I over commit myself; something that sometimes acts as a trigger). I won’t say that when I am depressed I am experiencing some kind of dark night of the soul. I still maintain a prayer life and I still find solace in it, even though I might have to radically simplify the kind of praying that I do. But I think, and I suppose that I am also proposing, that depression might fall into that class of mental states ranging from boredom, to some kind of illness that temporarily or chronically affects one’s mental state, to grief, to stress, to anxiety, and to depression itself, where one has to develop some kind of mechanism to stay afloat. As I write this I see that I am almost saying “do something useful”. But when I suggest that in my case I have to let reason take over, I am saying that I have to live as I would live if I felt the emotions that corresponded to the love, joy, and happiness that I am trying to achieve.
The idea that “action precedes attitude” is an Asian one, but before the Romantic Age it used to be a Western one as well (in my opinion). Practice and you will come not only to do something well but you will come to love doing it well. One does not have to love it first. One puts in their 10,000 hours. The master craftsman is someone who had a master craftsman for a father who made him master the craft. I suppose that I am saying here that spirituality and balance may be a sort of craft as well. Jean and Father Imbelli both talk about the Rosary. I didn’t come to view the rosary that way that I do until I spent long hours praying it. I decided to take a risk and practice it as a craft. It did turn out to be something that one can do well or not well. It was faith that made me interested in spirituality, but it was reason that made me approach the rosary the way that I did; the rosary seemed to work for people who seemed to be the kind of spiritual masters I wanted to be. (That’s why Cathleen’s Frenchmen are wrong, by the way. Reason is never enough to create a reality and bear its weight all by itself. Thinking that reason will solve a problem before it is solved is an act of faith involving risks that reason alone cannot kill.)
Claire, the states of happiness that you describe are important. I can tell you that 20 years ago, when I also became profoundly depressed, I knew that the drugs that I had to take at the time had kicked in when things suddenly seemed to appear in color (I hadn’t noticed that color had been drained) and I woke up one morning to the sound of birds singing. But depression to me isn’t so much about not being happy but about not being confident enough to think that I can have any effect on my life or environment. For me it’s a sort of radical loss of confidence that then touches everything with a grayness. It’s rather like being half dead; and I will suggest that depressives who kill themselves think that they are not going as far to death as someone who is confident, if not happy.
Depression, for me, is not only loss of confidence, but loss of concentration, a kind of slouching toward mental entropy.
Saying the rosary, doing centering exercises, breathing mindfully, thinking positively, avoiding negativity are all salubrious. But when you’re in the clutches of a depression, you can’t always muster the concentration and will to do them.
Hell, I can’t always remember the words to the prayers. It’s a victory if I can go around all the beads saying “pray for us.” Sometimes I merely hold on to the beads to remind myself that something exists outside the depression. Occasionally I can even believe it.
Re Carolyn’s comment, I was fortunate to find a therapist who incorporated spirituality, religion, and the arts into my treatment.
I’ve also found it useful never to confide in your family. I don’t talk about my depressive episodes in real life; people just end up trying to reason me out of it, and it never works, and then I feel guilty for making them unhappy.
I have more frequent depressive states as I’ve gotten older, but the depth of the depression is much less.
I’ve wondered about this: does spending a lot of time in on-line interaction like this help depression? Intensify depression? Have no effect on depression? Does the nature of the interaction matter, e.g. is it better if we love one another than if we snipe at one another?
Not much else to contribute, but as someone who also knows what depression can be like (though I know your mileage may vary), I am prone to suggesting a self-help book (I know, you might want to groan now) titled “The Little Book of Letting Go” by Hugh Prather to others.
It’s a book with some stuff that perhaps isn’t very in line with sound Catholic doctrine, but some of the things it says might strike as much of a chord with you as it did with me.
An example of one of its aphorisms is: “Some things are simple, and here’s one of them: you can either relax and let go of your life, in which case you will know peace. Or you can try to control your life, in which case you will know war.”
That’s probably a different mindset from “being confident enough to think that I can have any effect on my life or environment,” but maybe a more helpful one.
Anyway, you can read a nice interview with Prather about some of the concepts in this book at http://web.archive.org/web/20020818141130/http://www.lifechallenges.org/door/ALukara.html
(part II of the interview is at http://web.archive.org/web/20020618060038/http://www.lifechallenges.org/door/PratherH.html )
God Bless,
Derrick
“Unagidon, we are who we are.:
Davaid S. –
Yes, we are, David, but most of us *can* change. True, there are some mentally ill people whose illness is beyond the reach of either pills or psychiatrists talk, but they too are not beyond the grace of God and some are quite loving and holy indeed. Read the pitiful Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, the superstar dancer who was as crazy as crazy can be. But some consider him a saint because in spite of all his various sorts of madness he maintained a love of poor people that is inspiring.
In fact, psychiatry has helped millions and millions and millions of people. Why do you know it so? It can help most people. No, it doesn’ make most patients into perfect human beings, but so what?
Re: Jean’s comment on praying, centering prayer etc. being difficult while in the midst of depression; you are absolutely right. It is much more usefule to start the practice when not in the depths of despair. Also, the statement about finding a therapist who incorporates spirituality, religion and the arts into treatment is also worthy of note. The professions involved in treating mental illness (Clinical Social Work, Psychology, Psychiatry) all at some point can be traced back to significant religious roots, however, in the process of developing as “professions” they have distanced themselves from religion and spirituality. Finding a therapist who is comfortable with religion and spirituality and has the knowledge to be able to incorporate the client’s beliefs have been somewhat hard to find. Given the number of people who profess one faith or another, it is suprising that it is possible to complete graduate studies in these professions without ever seriously considering th ereligious or spiritual aspects.
“I’ve wondered about this: does spending a lot of time in on-line interaction like this help depression? Intensify depression? Have no effect on depression? Does the nature of the interaction matter, e.g. is it better if we love one another than if we snipe at one another?”
I’m glad you raised that question, Jim, b/c one of the really difficult things about being a depressive is that people are afraid you’ll get “set off” by something and it’ll be their fault if you go haywire. It’s another reason I don’t talk about it much at home, b/c I hate seeing people tippy-toe around, which is, to me, depressing (but not something that sets off a depressive episode).
But, then, I grew up around depressive alcoholics who jacked people around by accusing them of causing their episodes, which I (much) later learned was more a function of their controlfreak personalities than their depression.
I suppose there can be catalysts for some depressive episodes, but depressives are also capable of having “normal” sad feelings, too. I did not go into a depression when my dad died; just felt really sad. My depression usually isn’t “set off” by anything; it just shows up.
Nothing on this blog has ever thrown me into a depressive episode, however much it’s irritated or maddened me.
But, of course, it’s always better when we love rather than snipe at one another.
Jean writes (06/15/2011 – 4:03 pm) :
Absolutely :o)
I just want to put another plug in for accepting ourselves as we are.
We spend a tremendous amount of time and money and energy trying to improve ourselves, fix ourselves, cure ourselves. In fact, we’re fine as is. Life is often rough and sometimes purely painful, but that’s the way our universe is put together. Vitality struggles against decay – and always loses. But we thrive in the spaces in between – and there are always spaces in between.
David, I’m completely puzzled by your “advice” and attitude. There are many days I was not fine as is. This is not about having a few bad days and failing to stop and smell the roses. I work full time, I raise my kid, I deal with my elderly mother who drives me nuts, and try to hold a marriage together in love and faithfulness.
What in hell do you want from me?
There’s that all-too common misunderstanding that views depression (the biopsychosocial condition, as opposed to run-of-the-mill bummed-outedness) as merely about not recognizing and accepting that “life’s tough” or “life has ups and downs” or “you’re fine as you are.” Good Lord! If only it were that simplistic.
Nothing, Jean (10:03). Sorry if it seemed I was criticizing you – or anyone. I wasn’t. Why did you take it that way?
We live in a very negative culture, in which suffering is seen as abnormal and intolerable. Suffering is the lot of humanity – it’s perfectly normal. If we didn’t suffer, we wouldn’t be human. We can spend our lives trying to make the pain go away, or we can accept it.
Of course, there’s always the hope that science or luck will discover the magic bullet that will make the pain go away. But to make our internal equilibrium hostage to that slim hope is like saying we’ll finally be happy when we win the lottery.
Jean, a comment regarding online activity and depression.
In my practice, I see many clients who as they become more and more depressed, isolate more and more. In their “isolating” they replace actual human contact with hours on-line. We all can probably identify somewhat with the sense of “time loss” where you get engrossed online and suddenly a lot more time has gone by than we were intending. This seems to happen in a bigger way, with people “losing” themselves online for hours at a time.
David, it seems to me that you equate depressives with negative thinkers who demand magic bullets to put themselves in some perpetual state of happiness, unwilling to accept any tiny amount of sadness or discomfort, and unwilling to do the hard work of finding some sort of acceptance and grace in their illness. It seems to me that unagidon’s original post puts the lie to that.
Or perhaps you’re merely trying to offer some sort of buck-up message here: “Vitality struggles against decay – and always loses. But we thrive in the spaces in between – and there are always spaces in between.” Sorta like “have a nice day,” “remember today is the first day of the rest of your life,” and “smile, God loves you!”
One of the minor ways in which depressives suffer is having to listen to Hallmark claptrap like this.
Brian, it seems to me that a lot of “normal” people are spending too much time on line, too, so I’m a little chary of saying this is much of an indicator of depression. I have my students set goals for themselves at the beginning of each term, and “spend less time on line” comes up almost universally. When students haven’t done their work, they often tell me they’ve been caught up in an online game or spend too much time fiddling with their Facebook pages. I think living on-line is a serious national malaise. You might enjoy Kit Reed’s novel “@expectations,” about a therapist who starts to live in an online community to the detriment of “real life.” It’s dated, even though it was written in 2000, but it’s an interesting cautionary tale.
OK, time for me to get off before someone starts adding up how much time I spend on here and comes to the conclusion I’m crazy as a bughouse rat.
In the comments, there is not much echo to the suggestion that “Brother D” might be a friend of sorts. I’m assuming that that’s a reference to St Francis who, before he died, said, “Let us sing the welcome to Sister Death.”
Instead the comments are mostly about the evils of depression. Are there ways to view Depression as a brother, as some kind of friend? (“Exhausting friend”, but still a friend, unagidon suggests). That strikes me as a novel perspective on depression, but… maybe it is complete nonsense. I don’t know (it seems that I don’t know enough about depression to be able to chime in on that), but I would be interested in reading attempts to take that perspective, if it makes any sense to any one.
@Claire, And Brother Ass–the body, if I recall correctly. So perhaps the recognition that depression isn’t about a weakness or sin or failure of perspective, not an adversary that bucking up and bootstrapping will defeat but something real, physical–embodied, no longer easily distinguished from the core self, whatever that is–changes what depression means. I can’t see “friend”–maybe frenemy, to use the kids’ term??
It doesn’t surprise that it’s difficult to think of it in other than negative terms, not least because of the toll it takes in terms of numbers of lives lost. But there is something in our culture that rewards a non-depressive affect. It’s that demanded uber optimism, extraversion, git-up-n-go, blue sky dreamy world expectation that I find so bizarre. Those are the people I’m convinced will end up on the tower with the rifle–it’s like they’re dancing as fast as they can, slow down and they’ll have to admit a lot of what’s in front of them really sucks, or at least is utterly meaningless. Maybe I spent too much time with psilocybin, Sylvia Plath, and the Smiths in my misspent youth, but I find many folks who have depressive tendencies (and here I do mean the folks who have struggled with depression as a real medical issue) to seem more authentic, more empathic, and more spiritually adept. This ramble sounds like “Hey, Mrs. Lincoln, at least you saw a great play!” which isn’t at all what I intended–certainly not to say depression is recommended as the route to authenticity nor that depressives should jolly well just make existential lemonade from screwed-up brain chemistry. I don’t know if this is what Claire was talking about, but I guess I’d say I think that the abyss’ return stare stays with you even after you pull back from the edge and are able to look elsewhere. And that some folks are able to make something of that forever-changed perception.
Claire writes (12:08):
Thanks, Claire. You’ve put much better than I what I’ve been stumbling around trying to say. I’ve found my depression perhaps not completely a friend, but an understanding companion. It’s almost always there, and I’ve come to appreciate and be comfortable with some of it’s better qualities. When it becomes particularly troublesome, I try to relax and let it have its way. In other words, it’s part of me, though I wouldn’t have designed myself to include it.
I don’t know what possessed St. Francis to greet death as his sister, except that he had faith that something better lay beyond it (or perhaps it was more of a comment on the state of his family relations :-)).
I fear to know what depression is the doorway to. I don’t have much faith that, untreated and unmanaged, it leads to goodness.
If there is something wrong biologically drugs can be helpful. Other than that I believe this part of what Jean wrote: “Depression that is caused by external events.” Those external events can be very negative– discouraging parents or any other authority figures, especially in our early years. The reason Unagidon is right to accept depression as a friend is because it is impossible to eradicate it completely. Any association, whether words, weather, scent, noise etc. can trigger depression. The important thing to understand when we get depressed is to realize that we are getting in touch with some negative feelings that can come out of the blue, but we can tell ourselves that we will be alright since there is no reason for a depression at the moment. In other words there is not present loss or hurt to bring it about. This is not easy because our minds are just like tape recorders storing all those negatives. This is why Mary Baker Eddy advised a person to say while going to bed “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.” This certainly works but one should get competent therapy to understand the negative tapes. Understanding is not enough. One has to decide to think differently about the negatives. I have found gestalt therapy combined with what those in Transactional analysis term “Redecision therapy” very helpful both in practising therapy and personally.
Even if one has strong faith a person can be thrown for a loop when depression is triggered by an association. Having said that there is no greater antidote for depression that the belief that “Christ is Risen” and will raise us up on the last day. There is nothing to equal what Jesus says: “Peace be with you.” Even atheists admit that they would like to have that kind of faith.
I’ve read that, contrary to popular belief, Freud himself did not treat depressives, schizophrenics and other psychotics. (He did write about schizophreni, but on the basis of an autobiography written by a schzophrenic.) He thought that they were beyond the reach of his psychoanalytic method — in other words mere understanding by the patient could not cure the psychoses. It turns out that the types of illnesses he saw as untreatable by him are illness which psychiatrists now think are caused by brain chemistry problems.
It he was right (and I don’t doubt it), then depressives need to be supported, not sneered at as weak or otherwise responsible for their state of mind..
I apologize for responding rudely to David who was, after all, only trying to add to the original post. I also apologize to Unagidon for derailing the conversation away from depression and spirituality, and dragging it in a more pedestrian direction. I understand Brother D better after living with him for 50 years, but I don’t like him any better. This wasn’t the place to rant about it.
To get to Claire’s point–and Unagidon’s–about whether you can “make friends” with depression, let me recommend Oliver Sachs’ book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” He has a wonderful chapter about St. Hildegard, who may have suffered from severe migraine headaches–and chapters about many of his own patients who have “made friends” with their afflictions.
I don’t know if this scripture passage, which is the appointed one for Morning Prayer this morning, sheds light on Brother D, but it is one with which I have struggled for years – it’s a form of spirituality that perplexes me.
“As to the extraordinary revelations, in order that I might not become conceited I was given a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satan to beat me and keep me from getting proud. Three times I begged the Lord that this might leave me. He said to me, ‘My grace is enough for you, for in weakness power reaches perfection.’ And so I willingly boast of my weaknesses instead, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
“Therefore I am content with weakness, with mistreatment, with distress, with persecutions and difficulties for the sake of Christ; for when I am powerless, it then that I am strong.”
(2 Corinthians 12:7-10)
Oh, Jim, this is the perfect quote. Thank you!
To me, spirituality is a practice and it is a practice in the sense of the medieval craft. Medieval craftsmen pursued the excellence of their craft in the context of a community and the support of the community was part of the excellence they pursued. (This is one reason why I became a Third Order Franciscan; it seems to have a similar structure.)
The apprentice craftsman has little mastery over the craft and he has to begin by operating under the faith that the pursuit of a mastery that he may not yet be able to understand will yield the kind of excellence he seeks. Until the apprentice obtains some level of mastery, what he has to have faith in is what the tradition of the craft says.
Depression for me radically undermines faith because it seems to cause the structures of identity to disaggregate. The facts I know don’t change; my past experiences don’t change; and the environment that I inhabit may not be changing. What changes are the connections that I have made between these things. My identity is made up of an elaborate illusion of control, of abilities that I have and the productive desires I have that come from those abilities. In a severe depression, the connections between these lose their value. In effect, they disappear. So I feel that I have no control over anything. A certain randomness appears at the very core of one’s world. It’s very terrifying and I think that depressives tend to find solace in dark quiet places or in repetitive meaningless acts with which they can pass the time.
To one on the outside, nothing seems to have changed about the depressive’s situation except his attitude. Therefore, one person’s depression is hard for another person to understand. Since the facts on the ground seem stable, it would seem that all the depressive has to do is adjust his attitude to the facts that are right there before him. But the depressive can’t do this, because he cannot maintain at all any consistency in his attitude.
Here is where the faith of the apprentice enters. The faith of the apprentice is that no matter how things seem; whether confusing, boring, pointless, or hopeless, the craft itself is the road (and the only road) to the excellence that one seeks. The demon screams at the apprentice that the confusion, pointlessness, boredom, and hopelessness are the bald reality of things. Only faith can keep the apprentice plugging away during this. Sometimes all one can do is keep the tiniest spark alive. But sometimes this is all that is required.
Brother D has become my friend, because it reminds me to always focus on the faith of the apprentice.
The problem with depression is that you are blamed for having it! Like any misfortune, it is not what we have chosen just what we find ourselves subject to. I appreciate the folk who recommend medication treatment as a first option. If we are honest with ourselves, most of us use our favorite food, drink, drug or activity as a counter to depressed moods. Sometimes that works but a lot of the time it doesn’t. Categorizing it as a spiritual issue seems only to heap additional blame upon the sufferer.
I wasn’t saying (or at least I was trying not to say) that depression is a spiritual issue. I was trying to look at the spirituality of one who is depressed. Depression makes me want to put everything aside; friends, family, work, etc. Makes me want to put any kind of spiritual life aside as well. So that’s what I was trying to talk about.
“The idea that “action precedes attitude” is an Asian one ….Practice and you will come not only to do something well but you will come to love doing it well. One does not have to love it first.”
This sounds like the advice my therapist gave me about making a commitment to life, and to life without self-harm in particular. She said I shouldn’t wait until I wanted to make the commitment; I had to make the commitment even though I didn’t want to. And then I had to commit over and over every day, sometimes lots of times a day, and eventually, she promised, I would discover that I “felt” committed to life and safety. She was right in that I am much more committed at present. But like you, unagidon, I have cycles of depression followed by periods of sometimes euphoric creativity. Some have suggested I am just a little bi-polar, which might be like having just a little cancer .
As to befriending Depression? What I find useful is the idea of befriending my depressed self. Trying to identify symptoms and address the needs before they take over, as it were. I got myself back on anti-depressants prior to the anniversary of my son’s suicide, rather than waiting until I was suicidal too. And I have accepted that I need to remain on some level of antidepressant.
As to spirituality? My son’s death called everything spiritual into question for me. It ripped away the last vestiges of my faith in a loving God, and there wasn’t much left after my abuse by a priest as a child and the record of abuser advocacy in my Church that has surfaced since 2002. Nonetheless I know that healing emotionally and psychologically will never be enough. So I am committed to pursuing a spiritual healing. I just don’t know where that will take me.
Unipolar depression runs in my husband’s family, with at least two suicides attributable to it. I am grateful for unagidon’s post and all the comments here. You are all so courageous to share your experiences. I know that depression saps the all the energy out of a person, a marriage and a family:it is the ever-present “elephant in the living room.” I recently found Kathleen Norris’s book “Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life” about the tangle of depression, physical illness and spiritual struggle in her own life. Her development of the ancient notion of acedia was very telling for me.
Perhaps we’re all being to hard on depression. Aren’t there times when it’s perfectly fine to be depressed? Can depression be salutary? Why should one size fit all, all the time?
Such a healthy online discussion signals that depression touches many, many lives in today’s world. There is no panacea, despite what the pharmaceutical companies would like us to believe. My own lifelong struggle with Brother D erupted into a full-on fire fight after the disappearance of my Guru in 2004 and my subsequent departure from Siddha Yoga. The feelings of bliss and peace I had harvested from the practices of chanting and meditation were very effective at keeping my underlying sadness and hopelessness at bay for 20 years. Bereft of these, and devastated by the collapse of the global belief system behind these spiritual practices, my mind went into overdrive, and I was driven to therapy to try to keep my increasingly dark thoughts under control. My psychiatrist put me on “Vitamin Z” (Zoloft) and kept upping the dosage, so that the 50mg I started on had increased to 250mg over the course of a year (despite her insistence that it was not possible to develop a tolerance to SSRI’s) . She also insisted that I see her once a week to take the talking cure but it didn’t work. I found her insights into my challenges and problems depressingly shallow, and she kept nodding off when I would describe my vivid and exceptionally complex dream life. I eventually stopped seeing her but kept on the meds for another 4 years. They did not stop my suicidal ideation, but merely made me too passive to actually act on those thoughts. Then, in November of 2009, I lost my job, turned 50, and had one of my oldest friends die suddenly. My body shut down, I got swine flu and was in bed for 6 weeks. When I recovered I suddenly knew I had to get off the Zoloft. Stepping down the dosage didn’t work for me, as soon as I decreased it even by 25 mg I went into full-on withdrawal–so I made the decision to quit cold turkey. Without a doubt the hardest and best thing I’ve ever done. The physical withdrawal symptoms were intense–profound lethargy, light sensitivity and the ‘brain zaps’ that were like someone repeatedly kicking a hornet’s nest over in my brain. After 4 months these finally subsided, and the emotional withdrawal symptoms began. Each feeling I had been too numbed by the drug to feel now took its turn on the stage of my mind–anger, fear, sadness. The coda to these was a beautiful melancholy that left me choked up and close to tears often. Blossoming out of the other side of melancholy was a brief period of hypomania, characterized by a burst of creative energy, feelings of self-worth and control, and deep empathy for others.
Sadly, my single episode of hypomania was much briefer than my depressive periods. These return regularly, and I am slowly learning to deal with them. Diet, exercise and avoiding alcohol all help, but they are no cure-all. I’m coming to understand that Brother D is a lifelong companion. I very much appreciate Unagidon’s Franciscan characterization that turns the affliction of depression into something like a troublesome family member that you know you didn’t choose but will doubtless grow old with.
Christopher, your story illustrates the crap shoot that psychotropic drugs are. These are not like antibiotics, where you take a culture, figure out what the infection is, and then select the antibiotic targeted specifically to that infection.
Nobody knows exactly what causes depression; those who glibly talk about “chemical imbalances” being restored by various psychotropics are simplifying this issue dangerously in my view.
I applaud your efforts to make changes in the way you live. One does one’s best to identify and avoid the things that exacerbate the condition in order not to be a burden to oneself and others.
David, perhaps you could suggest some examples of how depression is salubrious. I’m clearly not plugged into this conversation. In my view, saying depression could be good sometimes strikes me as saying having gangrene might be a good thing in some circumstances.
Christopher (1:07 pm), thank you very much for sharing that. All best luck to you.
Jean (6/19, 10:19 pm), I suppose in a way I am saying that having gangrene might be a good thing in some circumstances. Of course, one does one’s best to avoid having gangrene, but if it comes, it comes. Human beings are created to suffer. We must suffer. To refuse to accept our pain is to refuse reality. We hurt. A lot. How can we not learn from it?
If the following (from
Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis)
isn’t fully appropriate here, at least it’s tangential:
“Human beings are created to suffer. We must suffer. To refuse to accept our pain is to refuse reality. We hurt. A lot. How can we not learn from it?”
I’m afraid I can only view a god who created us to suffer as a sadist, sort of like the neighbor we had growing up who used to come home from a hard day at work and beat the hell out of his dog before he would give it its supper. I can buy the notion that there is suffering in the world b/c we are no longer in an innocent state and there is sin. But that seems far different from physical and mental illness.
As for learning from suffering, what I’ve learned from depression is that there are very few understanding people out there, including many medical professionals, and you better hide it if you don’t want to get more depressed by their witless advice, or get pegged into a hole labeled “nutcase.”
I wish it were possible to come to some sort of understanding on this issue with you because it would show I could see things in a more Catholic way and might not be beyond the pale. Sadly, I think I’m fairly embittered by my depression and the negative thinking that often attends it, so perhaps have moved beyond the reach of grace that some of the rest of you have.
I have to agree, the idea of a God who wants us to suffer extreme depression (not just melancholy) seems sadistic. CS Lewis struggled with this idea of God, as did the biblical Job. I can’t accept suicidal depression as intended by a loving God. That would mean God wanted my son to suffer the torments of the depression that led him to end his life in a gesture of complete hopelessness and profound sadness: shooting himself while clutching to his chest pictures of the family he loved. No! God– if there is a God — cannot intend such suffering. And so I keep searching for who or what God is to me and I keep hoping for the touch of Grace. Don’t give up Jean.
Mona, my heart goes out to you and your family. I am glad the Church takes a much softer line on suicide than it used to. I don’t know if you know about the LOSS groups founded by Fr. Rubey in Chicago. You can read a short excerpt from him here:
http://www.forsuicidesurvivors.com/father-charles-rubey-why-suicide.html
There are links to other writings that are much more comforting than anything I could offer, though you and your son have my prayers.
Thank you Jean, I will look into that site. We attended a support group for a while. I process a lot through writing. I have a blog about surviving a loss on wordpress:
http://monav.wordpress.com and I am working on a book on grief and loss. I find writing helps me process. The final section of the book will be about god and faith…I’m just not sure what it will say yet. But it’s coming. For anybody else who reads this and who struggles with depression, there is a wonderful website called Psych Central which offers information and a bunch of support groups and even an arcade of games to play when you can’t sleep. All free.
Brother D is not merely depression. Brother D is a Door. The door opened and you felt that you could not live with it. You tried to shut the door. It would not stay closed.
Brother D is Death. Why can’t death just leave us alone while we are alive. We can deal with it when it arrives. The problem is death has something to tell us. We don’t want to hear it. We just want to be alive and not think about it. But brother death wants us to think, not about death, but about what it means to be alive. We had thought it meant getting ahead, but death asks “ahead of what?” It turns out that the only thing we were trying to get ahead of was death itself. We wanted to pretend it did not exist. But it does and not to scare us, but to inform us that this life is not real. Death is. We can only find out what that means by opening ourselves to what it is trying to tell us.
Illusion one is that death can be escaped. Illusion two is that what passes for life is real. Illusion three is that we cannot ever know. Illusion four is that we can create a story to keep it at bay. Depression is bringing you a message that you do not want to hear: the life you were living was not working. You knew that but wanted to keep pretending like everybody else.
We believe that depression is suffering because it keeps us from dancing the dance everybody else is. We try to do the dance, but it just seems stupid to us. We know that nobody doing the dance ever finds the truth.
The devil that you wrestle with is yourself, believing that you can outfox death. Death is only real if you believe that there is something that can die. But you see death. Your brother died. You saw it. You want to believe that your brother is as real as you want to believe you are.
Reason cannot oppose the emotions that my depression makes me feel. Reason is only a story. The depression feels real because it is telling you something that you do not want to hear. Depression is a truth that leads to a deeper truth. You cannot ever make it go away, you can only drug yourself deeper either with chemicals, or with stories.
There is a love you can and do float in, but it is not the love that you felt in the story. You give up the story and that love leaves you, but it does not leave you without love, only that story of love.
When you say I believe that I can and should use reason to oppose the emotions that my depression makes me feel, you are saying that you will continue to fight for a story that your heart tells you is not true. You opened to the truth and it scared you. You labeled it depression and tried to make it go away. You feel you have to fight for the story that is not true rather than surrender to the unknown. But as you have learned God is unknown.
The latest column from Ron Rolheiser may be of interest: http://www.ronrolheiser.com/columnarchive/?id=649
I read it after your reply above JJ. They seemed connected.
I come from a depressive family. My father was hospitalized with depression when it was a “moral failing.” I have had bouts of depression nearly my entire life, though I didn’t know exactly what was wrong with me until I was in my 30s.
Moreover, I also suffer from one of the most invisible diseases there is, fibromyalgia. As Jean Raber pointed out, “If you’re depressed AND menopausal, you can expect not to be taken seriously by anybody in the health profession.” Add to that the vague, inconsistent symptoms of fibromyalgia, and quite a number of the medical profession will say that the individual is a druggie looking for a fix. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Until about 2007, I had been able to “manage” my depressive states without much, if any, medication. However, anti-depressants are used to manage the pain of fibromyalgia. So, although I took anti-depressants they were not “therapeutic” levels.”
After moving to a new town, I went to see a doctor who specializes in fibromyalgia. He immediately put me on one of the new and most popular anti-depressants. I went into a real tail-spin. Everything suffered. My boss, younger than my son, put me on probation. All I really wanted to do was die! By the grace of God & the love of my family, I lived. That particular medication seems to have permanently upset my brain chemistry.
I lost my job and eventually applied for and received disability, and I eventually ended up seeing a psychiatrist. I now take two anti-depressants and a foliate that crosses the brain blood barrier. I will, most likely, have to take this medication for the rest of my life. I struggle with this idea daily.
I could go on at length about God, suffering, loss, suicide and all the thing that tie them together, but my strength and energy are limited and writing (coherently at least) is exhausting.
Peace & blessings to all.