THE MASK OF DEPRESSION – We Are Not Just Our Depression

People who suffer from depression often describe it as a sense of hopelessness. We associate it with  a devastating loss, disappointment or rejection. I describe a bit of my experience with depression in my posts,  Living Under the Cloud and  A Crack in the Night Sky. Depression begins for many in childhood, even when it doesn’t show up until adulthood. It has also been just this year shown to be in the DNA of sufferers.  In April of this year (2018) a study published in the journal Nature Genetics, showed astonishing findings. Depression can now be linked to 44 genes.

We are beginning to understand that depression may be very well entrenched in our biochemistry, it is not who we are. It is a lens (often with a biochemical foundation through which we view life.  We must not, however, allow our depression laced view of the world become  who we believe ourselves to be!

Depression is a mask, and as such, we must do what we can to take it off, not simply accommodate it.  When we incorporate our depression based view of the world into our identity, we give up the possibility of healing and the do not enter fully into the healing process.

Pharmaceutical advances have contributed to the common conviction that medication is the best and most expedient solution for many of our ailments, particularly mental illness.  It is more accurate to see them as a form of management, not healing. Moving beyond debilitating, genetically based depression, requires much more than medication. It requires a whole person approach.

Modern medicine has done wonders for the general health of the public.  It has also sidelined solutions because it struggles to think outside of the box.  We’ve become a quick fix society, losing sight of alternative pathways to healing.  As our body of knowledge grows, we’ve become increasingly compartmentalized, leading to a dangerous narrowing of focus in practice. In general, patients are no longer whole persons with a history, but smaller and separate body parts.   The foot doctor has no idea what the eye doctor is seeing or telling us!

For-profit drug companies drive research and production of medications for popular illnesses — because they are profitable. Depression is one of those “popular”, and profitable to the drug companies,  illnesses.

In order to effectively treat and heal depression, particularly chronic depression, it is absolutely necessary to listen to and treat the whole body. Depression is classified by clinicians as a “mood disorder.” This “mood disorder” is the mask. Getting to what lies beneath is more of a challenge. It is my conviction that those who suffer must be shown how to step back from themselves and the labels  to learn to see themselves differently. Stepping back creates the space that can allow in new ideas, new treatments, new methodologies, new understandings of what it means to heal, what it means not only to survive, but to thrive.

Depression was not well understood when I sought help in the 1970’s. It took a decade or more for science to hand me antidepressants and therapy as a solution. It was a God send for me at the time, but it was not a permanent solution. A decade later I was not rid of depression, as my physicians and therapists told me I would be.  At that time psychiatrists were the only medical professionals authorized to prescribe  psychotropic drugs and from whom I received my first explanation as to how they worked.  My doctor told me that antidepressants would “ jump start the synapses in my brain and once mine would eventually begin to work again without help.”  I understood enough about jumping cars to understand the concept and it sounded plausible. What I didn’t think about, nor did he seem to be concerned with, was why was the battery draining and what would keep it from becoming depleted again.

After several relapses and futile attempts to go off antidepressants I was then told by therapists and physicians to just accept that my body was not going to do what it needed to do. They encouraged me to look at my condition as one similar to diabetes, a condition that could be managed with medication.  I had no choice but to accept the sentence I was given, but I never liked it.

I wasn’t convinced that it was quite that simple, although I had not yet found an alternative answer, nor did I even understand the nature of the problem.  Medication and therapy were the only options I was given and I relied on them to get me through the child rearing years.  It was not easy. In fact, while I functioned, and even well at times I felt almost “normal”, I lived under a cloud that threatened to pour at any moment.  Therapy was more of a crutch than a cure and I tried a wide variety of therapies and therapists over the years.

I have functioned, more or less, throughout my life with one hand tied behind my back, and I am fairly certain that there are plenty of people just like me who are doing the same thing. Whether the rope that keeps us bound is depression, anxiety, fear, narcissism, PTSD, or any other mental or emotional condition, I do not now believe that it is always in our best interest to ride the waves in a boat designed by drug manufacturers and over specialized physicians.  Their perspective is far too narrow and has become far too complacent.

Those of us who are riding the waves owe it to ourselves and other sufferers to push the edges of our condition, to challenge the status quo, to do more than just survive. We owe it to ourselves to dig deeper, to try new avenues, to ask hard questions and to accept and love ourselves through it all.

Mental and emotional illness, is more accepted now than it was fifty years ago. If I had been born just twenty-five years earlier I might have spent a good portion of my life in a mental institution undergoing shock treatment. Before that I might have been sequestered behind bars. I am grateful for what was available to me and the relief it did offer. However, I think we can do better. I believe we can work toward acceptance and understanding in a way that doesn’t simply pat the suffering individual on the head and send them home with a pill and a therapist. Mental health issues are more accepted, but they still make us uncomfortable.  We don’t understand them and they frightened us. We fear what we don’t understand. We marginalize what we fear.

All you have to do is look at the state of mental health treatment in this country to see our fear and disregard for the suffering.  Public institutions are underfunded and understaffed. Research is funded more often by drug companies than independent research.  The mentally ill too often end up wandering the streets or end up behind bars.  For those who manage to function more or less normally, current treatments are not often healing treatments.

Depression and anxiety have plagued me most of my life.  Pain is a powerful motivator and it has been the  impetus behind my never-ending quest for understanding. It has driven me to question, research, study, contemplate and experiment, not only to find relief for myself, but to find true healing for all who suffer from this painful, life altering condition. In the process I have amassed an enormous amount of experience and knowledge on the subject. I have seen the commonalities between myself and those I’ve tried to help. The threads that weave us together are the threads that can set us free.  As we untangle these threads we loosen the mask  and the painful pressure beneath is relieved.

As I continue this backward glance at my own struggle with depression and the effect its had on my life, I hope to reach into my knowledge and experience and pull out the most important threads required for healing.  One by one, I hope to offer what insights I am able to offer, not only on the healing process but on mental health treatment in the twenty-first century.

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