Depression: Our Modern Mythical Monster
Defining the term ‘depression’ used to be simple. “I am depressed” meant: “I am experiencing a low mood. I feel a bit down. I am not happy.”
Now depression has an ever-growing list of symptoms, which includes anything from feeling anxious, worried, or even suicidal to having trouble with your menstrual cycle. For those who don’t have one of those, just feeling irritable and intolerant of others will put you in the same ‘depression’ box.
When a number of these symptoms occur together, and across a given time frame, doctors and mental health professionals prove you are entitled to, indeed, must own the label: Depression. Next comes the serious medication. I mean, serious medication, and perhaps a little bit of talk therapy. However, this is definitely not a cure.
This type of treatment and the general underlying view turns depression into a monster. Yet, like the Gorgon or Hydra of ancient legend, it is a mythical monster, albeit a modern one. That is why it has been given the name Black Dog. This shows society’s attitude towards depression. In fact, the original black dog of legend was an evil spirit dog that stalked our streets. This is a convenient concept for people and a very marketable approach for the medical industry. Just like the legend, we are told the black dog roams the streets and passageways of our brain and frightens us into submission.
This monster that we have created is a very destructive myth within our culture. We know this because we never exactly find the monster’s lair. We are only shown the tracks and indications that he definitely lurks in the brain for unknown reasons, and we are asked to use an array of various weapons—chemical weapons—to try to combat, yet never defeat him. If we were able instead to adopt a completely different approach to this threat and search earnestly for the real monster’s lair, we would find it right in our ordinary experience of living, and it could be coaxed out into the open and slayed, once and for all, or maybe even made friends with…
So, the first reason that depression is a myth is:
All so-called symptoms of depression are at their base actually just ordinary states of mind that have always been part of living a life. Taking into account that these states of mind can be traumatic to experience, relentless and ruthless at times, they are all still not necessarily as of themselves anything to do with ‘depression’ as it is presently conceived.
The second reason is that although these uncomfortable experiences are registered as symptoms of depression because they are distressing, they will not ultimately be cured with medication because:
These states of mind, while being real, were not always there. They are the result of one’s responses to current and earlier real life experiences that need to be recognized and faced with deep acceptance and appropriate understanding and attention.
The third reason that depression is a myth is that:
We as humans had to create this mythical monster, this all-encompassing label, to conceptualize our frustration because we do not readily understand the mind and cannot help each other easily.
We have turned to expert bodies, boards and associations for a particular diagnosis to determine what we are experiencing so that we can have something to fear, a thing, something tangible… a depression, something to apply a treatment to, which mostly consists of drugs that will temporarily affect our brains and maybe make us feel better for an uncertain amount of time. Maybe we will also be advised to see a therapist or a psychologist, but the myth of the monster lives on…
For some, the drugs can work in the short term. For most, life becomes a roller coaster ride of persistent suffering, sometimes dipping us down into the depths of despair, and the roller coaster never slows down. We cannot get off it. If we do, we are left feeling somewhat zombie-like and never quite reconnect with what might be our real selves.
Depression is badged as an illness. This means then that we have to see life as an illness. Depression may be increasing but what is really happening is that our minds are becoming heavily distracted and our mental states contorted and we do not understand that this is happening. People do not commit suicide because of ‘depression.’ They end their lives because their lives are unbearably painful and they have no deep and satisfying understanding of what brought them to that point or even what life is about. Mostly, their life cannot be cherished. It has no meaning. They have no other way to end the pain and suffering. Endless rounds of medication, counseling and therapy just do not work. For some, perhaps, it staves off the problem in a restricted way, but for most it is no answer. We know that because the need for the drugs and counseling never subsides.
Miraculously, it has just been found in some studies that a program of simple exercise to move the energy around one’s body will work positively for some people with so-called depression to help them feel better. It has also been discovered in trials that placebo treatments of sugar pills can improve a patient’s state of mind, in contrast to the real antidepressant drugs. Such information is wonderful; however, it will not discourage the Depression Industry because no money can be made by giving out an exercise regimen or a sugar pill substitute for a drug.
Did you know you are able to now take one of these antidepressant drugs for SAD…a type of depression? This is for the many who just do not like winter. Please check it for yourself if you do not believe me. It is true that I myself used to be one of those who would become quite anxious when winter was approaching. I feared the cold and would feel gloomy, especially at the beginning of the season. I eventually had to turn that around by preparing myself during autumn and forcing myself to enjoy the cold, the grey skies, the rain, and the lack of green when the leaves fell from the trees and bushes, and the flowers no longer sprang up. I had to work with my mind very diligently to tell myself winter was just a season with a difference, different to the beautiful, relaxing summers that I always enjoyed. Now, things have changed, and I look forward to winter and its chill, invigorating winds that have their own exquisite qualities.
I am not SAD anymore. S-A-D unbelievably stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder, one of an ever-growing list of categories of depression. You can take Wellbutrin XL for SAD… oh, and also fit in a bit of Light Therapy and some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy too.
I think I could make up a few categories of depression myself. How about ARD? Allergic Reaction Disorder. Or IND? Intolerance of Neighbors Disorder. We may as well expand our repertoire because life has so many possibilities, and this is where we are headed. Every one of life’s problems could easily become a type of depression for which we will need a specific chemical treatment, and perhaps a little bit of conversational therapy. Life will become depression, and if we keep adding every experience of negative feelings, crushing emotions, or painful mental states, and do nothing to work with our actual minds to come to understand these states, ‘depression’ will naturally become our life.
The World Health Organization predicted some years ago that depression would become the leading health problem for the world by the year 2020. As I see it, we are right on target. We do have a worldwide critical health issue, but it is not really what they think it is. It is simply that we are losing the ability to manage our lives because of our minds. If we gave it a name, we could call it LMMDD, Life of the Mind Management Deficit Disorder. That covers just about everything, all the problems we will face in life. Without being too facetious, I feel somewhat sure there will be some happy little research scientists going to work on a brand new and very advanced product to treat LMMDD, even though I just made it up one minute ago, because I suspect that someone else is also perhaps making it up somewhere in the world. The only reason I would feel unsure about this is that it would limit the amount of competitive products in the market, wouldn’t it? Wait!!! What am I saying?!?!? Of course someone is working on it! An enterprising research team will definitely be working on a remedy for LMMDD right now, because they think they will be able to completely take over the market! If they came up with just one drug, the SOMA for all forms of depression, they will rule the whole therapeutic scene. Yes, it is definitely in the pipeline. I can truly say, though, it will be a ‘SAD’ day when it hits the shelves.
Instead of waiting for this cataclysmic day, I think we need to understand the life of the mind. We need to understand our own minds and we need to take great care to nurture our young as their minds develop. We need to affectionately watch them and take care of them, and understand what is going on inside their developing selves. We ourselves need education about that. We must improve our powers of observation. If we learn to observe ourselves more closely and gain some real understanding of how our mind is, how it works, we will then automatically know our children’s minds and what it is like for them to be them.
I understand the boy who is a bit fidgety, too nervous and stressed at age eight to sit in a classroom and learn, the boy who does not really understand why everyone else is happy in their play yet he himself somehow feels a long way outside of that happy feeling. He knows he is disconnected from his very self but he cannot describe what that is. There is no feeling and there are no words. He is often teased. By others, he is seen as just a bit disjointed, a bit awkward. Sometimes he has a temper or feels down and withdrawn but he is ‘such a nice boy really,’ they all say.
That boy, who grew up, sat in my room recently and told me everything he could think of about why he is alone and lonely and very vexed about still being a virgin, as he put it, at his age of twenty-four. He told me he is terrified that if he was to have sex he may end up choking the girl until she is lifeless. He said it is not the fear and terror that he cannot stand. It is the fact that he knows he would do that. That is what eats him up from the inside. He does not want to do it, but he does hate girls. He would go ahead and then he would ruin his whole life in one sexual encounter. He knows he would do it and he has never told anybody about it except me.
Readers may be confronted by his pronouncement. I was not. I understood immediately and thoroughly from my extensive work with him, and looking at his background and upbringing, there is every reason he would be plagued by such terrors. I already had understood what happened to him throughout his childhood, none of it drastically cruel, none of it outrageously painful, but much of it internally painful, the pain he learned early to cover up. Suicide has become a comforting but gruesome friend often thought about and often entertained, only once tried, but not accomplished once he got the knife to his throat. He reminded me that I had once warned him of the possibility that cutting into one’s throat does not actually sever one’s head as I knew he would have seen in images, movies and videos. My advice would have jumped into his mind at the feel of the sharpness of the blade at his throat as he became terrified that it may not work. Such is the development of the ADHD boy! He was, of course, diagnosed in his teens with depression.
When we do not understand the developing mind, the results can be dire. This kind of belief in depression forms a world full of humans being born, not into life, but into its mutation, a life haunted by the myth of so-called depression, a monster whom we never really understand, a bogeyman who lives on the edge of the swamp or in a far-away, dark cave, a colossus getting bigger and more powerful all the time, roaming the internal landscape, consuming our whole being in the place where we feel disconnected, ravaged by an all consuming anxiety until we suffer a mental breakdown...whilst all along he was just a self-created monster, the monster within.
We failed to understand that, and so did they. They just saw us as heavily depressed and did not know how to help us, except to avoid us or medicate us.
How utterly depressing is that?