I have written this post for people who share their lives with a depressed someone.
It is hard to understand depression as it has no physical evidence; if you have never experienced a strong sense of helplessness, hopelessness, meaningless and lifelessness all merged, you will miss the crushing power of it.
Depression and sadness are not the same, although depressed people may feel sad as well. I am quoting again an anonymous and poignant description of depression:
“Imagine trying to enjoy a poolside party when you are drowning in the pool and all you can hear is people having a great time and laughing while completely oblivious to the way your body keeps submerging into the water and getting heavier by the water filling your lungs.” Anonymous.
If you were raised in a Western culture, you will most likely think of your emotions and feelings as private events located within your body or head. You will also describe an emotion using possessive adjectives, such as my anxiety, my anger or his depression. This is partly because of the artificial Cartesian division of body and mind which has dominated Western thinking since Des Cartes’ famous philosophical proposition: I think therefore I am. Combined with an expanding individualistic lifestyle, which sees us as separate from one another, we are left to see our problems as events separate from us rather than activities.
Naturally, this logic leads us to view depression as a personal event that takes place within the person. The problem with this view is that it removes the context in which depression takes place. It also creates a culture of blame. And so in addition to struggling with feeling isolated in trying to make sense of their debilitating experience, many depressed people report feeling as if they have done something wrong.
The current difficulty in treating depression is that it is almost impossible to pinpoint the causes; unfortunately and despite much research, there is no one linear cause and effect that explains why people get depressed. There may be different causes for different people and it may also be that the term depression is too broad and covers different experiences, sort of a miscellany file. Whilst medication can offer some relief to some people, it cannot offer sufferers a depression-free life, something else is needed.
In a way, all life is a struggle against depression and each of us has to cope with a long series of losses, letting go and grieving. Each of us has to undergo trials that inevitably expose us to a sense of depression. Yet, the fact that not everyone develops depression, should offer us hope that those who do, can recover.
A drowning person cannot rescue himself and the chances of someone who is depressed to recover from it by himself are limited. In any case, what would be the point? Depressed people tend to withdraw as they feel misunderstood and isolated. I believe that solitude undermines our ability to sustain relationships which is the essence of our existence as social beings and at the moment the best results seem to come through enduring, accepting and sustaining relationships. The tricky part is that we cannot do relationships on our own, we need other people.
This is not about being dependent or independent, but about accepting that people need people, for almost everything. Despite how independent we believe we are, we can only go so far on our own. In order to survive and flourish, we need to be connected. Connecting with others and feeling acceptable and understood is one crucial and healing experience most depressed people describe in the therapy groups I facilitate regularly.
The University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo, who has dedicated his career to studying how social isolation affects individuals, writes that being lonely increases the risk of everything from heart attacks to dementia, depression and death, whereas people who are satisfied with their social lives sleep better, age more slowly and respond better to vaccines. The effect is so strong that curing loneliness is as good for your health as giving up smoking. It seems that loneliness increases the risk of many health issues, not just depression.
Crucially, these differences relate most strongly to how lonely people think they are, rather than to the actual size of their social network and often one or two understanding people can make a great difference.
The aim of this post is not to remove the responsibility from people who are depressed and place it within their environment, while sufferers are not responsible for being depressed, they still need to want to recover. The aim is to locate the responsibility where I believe it belongs, in relationships. The best thing we can offer depressed people is to help them to accept that they are and support them so they feel they belong with others. Accepting depression as a given can help shift the focus from getting rid of it, as if it were a virus, to more meaningful activities which in turn can support recovery.
They say that if you pursue happiness directly you will not find it, that happiness is the outcome of meaningful engagements. I believe the same is true for depression, tackling it head on may not bring about recovery, but slowly engaging in meaningful activities may. Not everyone will buy into this approach, some want a quick fix and will continue to pursue one only to find that it can be an elusive one.
