Depression Truths

 

Kurelek, "The Maze"

A middle school student I tutor has done a competent job of detailing the cause of depression as popularly understood. It is worth going through it to identify the major errors in the popular understanding of depression. This includes the understanding not just of most people but of most psychiatrists and psychologists, although the more honest ones will admit that they are just thrashing about in the dark, and “nobody knows.”

The essay:

“Depression is a mood disorder that can make people feel sadness, hopelessness and loss of interest. It can make you feel, think and behave differently and can lead to serious emotional and physical problems. It is basically a type of mental illness that can make people start not interacting with other people and feel hopelessness and become sensitive. … Depression comes from 3 major reasons, genetic vulnerability, severe life stressors, substances you may take (some medications, drugs and alcohol) and medical conditions. 

We need to be nice and friendly to people who have depression. They can get in bigger trouble if you say some sensitive words to them. Lasty, depression is an illness to take seriously. We need to find correct solutions to cure depression. We need to help people that have depression, instead of hurting them with words we say.”

Let’s take these points in turn.

“Depression is a mood disorder.” No, the mood, sadness, is a symptom. This is like saying cancer is a pain disorder. 

Why would we imagine there is no cause for the sadness? That is like supposing there is no cause for pain. Sadness is a warning that something is wrong. To only treat the mood is to leave the problem to fester and grow.

Depression is a loss of meaning, direction, and clear values. One cannot discern right from wrong, good from bad, and so does not know what to do. It is a loss of esprit, or, in Africa, “loss of soul.”

“that can make people feel sadness, hopelessness and loss of interest,”

Anxiety is at least as common as these, but ignored or treated as a separate problem.

“It is basically a type of mental illness that can make people start not interacting with other people.”

This is perhaps the most harmful misconception: that wanting to be alone is a part of the disease. It is the proper and instinctive cure. When one has lost one’s sense of values, of meaning, the urgent need is to retreat and meditate.  To seek company at such a time is no better than to seek alcohol or drugs.

Unfortunately, the treatment most commonly recommended is to get back into one’s social life as quickly as possible. Perpetuating the problem, probably making it worse.

“Depression comes from 3 major reasons, genetic vulnerability, severe life stressors, substances you may take (some medications, drugs and alcohol) and medical conditions.”

That’s four major reasons; but there is really only one.

Symptoms mimicking depression can be caused by drugs or physical illness; sure. The symptom is not the disease. 

The idea that depression is genetic was fashionable back in the eighties or nineties. Back then, the structure of DNA had been relatively recently discovered, and the big rush was on to decode the human genome. Because it was the latest thing in science, genetics was thought of as miraculous. This is always the way with science: each new discovery is first thought of as the answer to everything. When electricity was discovered, it was supposed to be the essence of life. See the story of Frankenstein and his monster. When computers came in, “running it through the computer” was thought to be a sure proof of anything—a delusion that survives in climate science. So too with genetics: it was the cause of everything for a while, of criminality, of alcoholism, of homosexuality, of depression, of schizophrenia.

Further evidence that depression was genetic was that it tended to run in families.

Over the intervening years, however, as we have isolated the entire genome, and multiple genomes, we have found no gene for alcoholism, no gene for homosexuality, no gene for schizophrenia, and no gene for depression. Wrong tree, dog.

Something other than genes runs in families. Politics does too; religion, world view, culture, values, personal habits, and parenting styles.

Depression comes from bad parenting and miseducation. “Abusive” parenting, if you like; but that term as commonly used is misleading. The issue is not blows to the body, or sexual exploitation as such, but blows to the mind, soul, and conscience. Confusing children as to values, right and wrong, the rights of self and of others, the point of existence.

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.” 

This is also what original sin is all about; it is these distorted values that are visited by the father to the son unto the fourth generation.

Severe life stressors can come into play once the distortion of values has been instilled. But only stressors of a specific kind: if issues of right and wrong again become ambiguous. Some people, and not others, are vulnerable to breakdown in such cases, because their moral roots are not as firmly planted.

“We need to be nice and friendly to people who have depression. They can get in bigger trouble if you say some sensitive words to them.”

Notwithstanding this vulnerability to life stressors, this idea that the depressed are more emotionally fragile than the rest of us seems to be the opposite of the truth. Aristotle pointed out that great war leaders and heroes are commonly depressive. Grant, Sherman, Lincoln, Churchill… Yet the prime requirement to be a great war leader is to keep your head under intense stress—to the extent that someone is trying to kill you.

Because the abused grow up under constant threat and stress, they generally learn to bear stress better than the rest of us. So long as right and wrong are clear, they tend to have great personal courage. A situation of open war can bring renewed energy: now the sides are clear. This, however, is more true of a military commander than of a soldier in the trenches; who lacks the strategic view and only sees the moral dilemma of being asked to kill people he sees no reason to kill.

At a minimum, the depressed are particularly able to bear any level of insult without flinching. This is just what they are used to, and, sadly, they can be drawn to a similar such abusive situation like moths to the flame.