Deeper than Depression

 

I am surely not alone iwith the difficulies associated with understanding and hence having some power over depression. From the ‘outside’ as it were, professional health providers may regulalrly experience startling short-term results in some patients with a brief course of medication, while other patients’ probems seem intractable, severe and enduring. Too, the conceptual complexities of the state of depression once it is considered aside from quotidian expedience of intervention reveal a matrix of contarry and contradictory theories and approaches which blend into and overlap with sociological angles (for instance, the ‘political’ nature of ‘therapy culture’ as an ideological address to alienation) and the philosophical questions around emotion, feeling, mind, and – yes – morality.

From the ‘inside’,  if like me one begins to survey and engage with the above this is to greatly complicate the task of comprehension – this even at some posited objective level, but I am of the deep belief that what one thinks will in complex ways infrm what one feels. What one feels (brought into expression by emotion) is as fundamental to one’s sense of being as anything: a confusion over feeling will tend to a difficulty in locating points of orientation in ‘the mind’s own place’ and whence to a sense of stability, continuity, ease with living int the world. The negativities of depression are well documented, and surely I have suffered all the manifestations: it is these which medication may help alleviate or remove. However, it is not at all clear to me that the symptomological spectrum of depression describes its continual presence as almost an underlying sense of self. In other words, what I call – along with any word, but especially in relation to words of feeling, for conventional convenience – my depression  is much ‘deeper’ than feeling bad, low, even suicidal.

Six or so years ago I was in hospital where I had sever peripheral neurpathy. I could not walk and worst of all, I could not control my wrist and hand to write. Over a period of ten days, I practised walking and trying to write and fortunately found my nerve damage was not irreversible. I was able to write a scrawl which at least I could interpret. I was at that time in a state of very intense depression and being medicated for that, of course. I was also suffering from severe physical illness, and had a range of situational problems that are the common things that drive people to despair – addiction, relationship breakdowns, unemployment, housing insecurity, low income, shame, guilt, stigmatisation. Within this context, the ability to hold a pen was as important to me as the relief given by antidepressants. Within this context, not that important but certainly necessary. Necessary but not sufficient.

What is it that urges me to express, and to write? Even at the darkest times dreams or nightmares are writing themselves, the mind awake is spinning stories – albeit bleak ones  – that come spontaneously and complete, like dreams themselves. It has been posited very often that there is a link between

mental  illness and creativity. I shall be looking more closely in a later post at some recent  controversies surrounding this claim (and this will be in a broader context of examining the array of confient and erudite reductionist theories of depression). I will say here that while I need medication to handle the sheer suffering of depression (and the dangers of hypomania, although that is qualified by the ‘joys of hypomania attenuated not for its ‘feeling state’ per se – which can be very uncomfortable and mixed with depressive symptoms – but for the marvellous energy that can be applied productively) I do believe my deeper temperament, my character, my soul are lugubrious and melancholy. Whatever the words may be, such underlying attributes suggest a foundational attraction to certain ways of living, to different arts and philosophy that refract such a foundation, and to modes of expression.

Whether the spiritual state (sin, in some quarters) of accidie, the dark nights of the soul, the various alienations, Melancholy… such existential aridities and lonely sufferings have their place in our shared history of humanity. So too do the myriad expressions that come to terms with these (the ‘coming to terms with’ much more prevalent than cheap  and insubstantial transcendences). I cannot not be other than I am at this level, so yes, whatsoever I bring to light must begin in darkness.