Depression & Perspective

Depression is commonly associated with sadness or melancholy by a society that demands full-time satisfaction and happiness. It’s almost as if experiencing emotional trauma without an obvious and shared reasoning is somehow an act of treasonous ingratitude toward a world that provides so much for so many, especially when compared with other societies where the diagnosis of clinical depression doesn’t ever occur to them because they are too busy searching for food, shelter, and avoiding genocide. I am made to feel that I am sub-normal because my ‘condition’ is not assuaged by the prosperity and relative quietude of my circumstance. We have all heard the classic parental admonition over a child’s refusal to submit to mealtime tyranny which goes “Eat your dinner! There are children in Africa that are starving! You should be grateful!” If only all remediation were that simple.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway (it’s my blog after all), that placing one's circumstances in perspective can be very healing. I am pleased to no end that I was sufficiently fortunate to have been sired in a modern era, within the borders of a free nation, and although we were never more than working-class drones, we still enjoyed the benefits of a relatively prosperous society. (I’m also happy that I was never asked to provide postage for all the food I would have had to send to hungry nations. Just how much is postage to Sri Lanka? How long does macaroni and cheese keep if shipped cargo?) Yet, that realization doesn’t prevent personal pain or suffering. My biochemistry is the same as the starving Salvadoran. The vast difference in situation does not change the natural process of how pain, pleasure, or emotional stability come to be. Does sadness hurt any more or less to a Bedouin? Should my pain simply disappear because I live in a land of plenty?

In part, the answer is yes. Prosperity offers some leisure and the luxury of not having to spend all your waking hours searching for those items required for biological survival. In addition, living in a freer society without the rigid controls of the state, church, or king allows me enough liberty to pursue ideas and coping mechanisms. The services required are available and the wherewithal to take full advantage of them is at hand (for most). So, they’re right. I’ll concede this point. If one is being told to be happy that he or she is not lingering in a destitute refugee camp somewhere in Rwanda, such a reminder seems like a perfectly reasonable and realistic way to put our own emotional suffering into better perspective.

Yet, there is another side to the story. Consider this. If now, where I have my basic needs met, I am still feeling depressed, then how can those, living under horrible conditions not be depressed even more so? Projecting ones own thinking pattern onto me is misguided enough, but then to project the thinking of people one has never encountered while appraising a circumstance not yet endured seems patently absurd. That’s a third party projection once removed (in my book) and not a valid argument for anything, especially when I don’t have the leeway to point that logic back at my accuser! How can someone tell me just how the Rwandan refugee actually feels without asking him? Not to mention that informing children that there are hungry children all over the world might leave them feeling even more depressed! (All this added to the fact that now we must bear the guilt of somehow invalidating someone else’s suffering by our refusal to obediently take part in pleasure.)

Perspective, however, only works on a clear-thinking person. It takes a calmer psyche to digest the full import of situational comparisons. Depression is not a rational animal. Though bouts of depression can be induced by traumas such as grief, bankruptcy, or illness, generally clinical long-term depression is not directly due to any external factors. Many live through such horrific circumstances and either become strengthened by them or show no effects at all. A family history of depression is a distinct possibility. I know that depression runs (or usually just lies around on the couch watching movies) in my family. There is a vicious cycle of genetics, socialization, and denial that feeds and fosters this predisposition to depression, and it doesn’t matter if one is immensely wealthy or terribly impoverished. Depression is an equal opportunity disease, but one won’t contract it unless there is already a susceptibility to it.

This perspective is a reminder to remain rational as possible, even in the midst of a gnawing depression. It won’t remedy that depression any more than the child in Boston who dutifully masticates his or her spinach (is spinach even food?) rescues an African child from starvation, but it will, with steady application, remind us of our place and time. We are not living in vacuums or in a universe specifically designed to meet our emotional requirements. There are other things going on the we must take part in and, if perspective provides anything useful, we become a teeny-tiny bit more rational, and thus emotionally competent (albeit for the moment), enough to ‘go through the motions’ and do what we need to not make the situation even worse.

One Day at a Time.

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” (Marcus Aurelius)

Kol Tuv