The Cage

Life as we know it.

A friend writes that nearly all his co-workers at a Japanese school are on sick leave for stress or, if still on the job, in psychiatric care.

What he writes bears out my own belief that depression is not an illness, but a rational response to an impossible situation. It comes from being aware of oppression, that is, a set of rules by which you cannot win, a “double bind,” and therefore, quite correctly, feeling trapped. I suspect the same is true of bipolar, certainly anxiety “disorders,” maybe schizophrenia as well.

Of course, not everyone reacts the same way to the same situation. This is because there is a second factor involved, or perhaps two: intelligence, and spiritual awareness. The more aware you are, the sooner you will perceive that the very socially accepted “reality” and social rules of engagement we inherit are themselves a double bind. This is true in all societies. “Dukkha,” as the Buddha called it, in the original Pali; while the gospel calls the Devil “the lord of this world.” Depression is the rational response to this fact. Anybody who has not been depressed is just not in the game.

So the obvious first step for anyone who is depressed is to analyse their current situation and see if there is a specific double-bind they can get out of: by leaving that job, leaving that family, leaving that town or that country. But there often remains the existential problem.

How to escape this fundamental, existential double bind? That is what religion is all about. The initial depression, the “dark night of the soul,” as St. John of the Cross called it, whether prompted by a specific trap one has experienced, or by raw spiritual awareness, should be the first step on the spiritual path. Unfortunately, secular society has been working hard, increasingly in recent years, to shut and bar those doors of escape—policed, indeed, by our “mental health professionals.” Hence the rapid rise in mental illness, especially since the 60s. At least as striking is the fact that, in the past, most if not all mental illnesses were understood to be temporary; now they are essentially all considered incurable and lifelong.

My friend in Japan imagines that the rate of mental illness must be skyrocketing in places like Syria and Egypt, because of the civil strife there. I think he is exactly wrong. Not all stress leads to breakdown; good stress galvanizes instead. If there is a rise in the incidence of mental illness in the Middle East, it is the cause, not the effect, of the rebellions there.

When the London blitz began, British psychiatry braced itself for an expected influx of anxiety patients. They expected the depressed to collapse in large numbers. Instead, the opposite happened. The mental hospitals started to clear out, and admissions dropped off dramatically.

If life is a trap, or the particular life situation you are in is intolerable, the thought that you could die at any time is profoundly liberating. A time of general chaos is profoundly liberating.