People are incredibly complex creatures. Scientists have spent years, decades, even centuries trying to establish why people behave the way they do, why two people can react to identical emotional stimuli in different ways, at times those reactions may even be complete opposites of each other. Why should this be the case?
I admit, I am no expert in behavioural science and those who are would probably rip this blog apart in seconds, pointing out discrepancies between my beliefs and academic studies and such. I have no scientific research to back up my beliefs or data to study laboriously to lead me to my conclusion. What I do have is experience of my own, and others close to me, who have been affected or touched by the misery that emotional turmoil can bring.
Sigmund Freud is perhaps the most famous of ‘head doctors’, those who study the psyche, or the Id, or the Ego or the Super Ego. A lot of those ideas have since been proved to be at best, suggestive in their interpretation of why we act as we do. The answer is incredibly simple. We are all different, every last one of us.
From the moment we are born until the day we die, we are attacked on all sides by emotion. Love, hate, anger, joy, jealousy, pride, confidence and despair. It shapes us and makes us unique, as those forces that control our mind are never handed out in equal measure. Every person receives an accrual of emotion that is different to everyone else. Some strengthen a person, others weaken, but all have a cumulative effect on the way you think, the way you act and how you perceive yourself.
Imagine for a second the human mind as a mountain, a perfect pyramid. Place ten of them at different points on the earth’s surface. Each will be attacked by the elements over time and each will begin to erode and take different shape, as each will be subject to differing climates. Should you then randomly swap their locations, their new shape will leave them even more susceptible or more resilient to those elements as they are applied at different ratios. Over the millennia those pyramids would be unrecognisable to how they once appeared. Each still standing but all unique. There is even a possibility that one might just crumble, the aggregated stress of differing climates reducing the whole to a fractured mass. Your mind is no different.
At the root of all people, I genuinely believe this, is the desire for acceptance. Now, I have to elucidate what I mean here. I don’t mean that a person should want to be recognised as good looking or strong, skinny or fat, funny or sad. That is merely vanity, a quick fix for someone with low self esteem. This is not who you are, only how you are perceived by others. What people need is to be accepted for the person they see themselves as. To have their own belief system, their own desires and their own inner self validated by others. Again, this is not to be mistaken for arrogance or a way of self-flattery. It is just that ultimately we would all like to live a life where there is no requirement for mind games, emotional barriers and hang ups. To live in reality what we genuinely feel inside. We condition ourselves to respond in a certain manner to certain types of people, but if we were true to ourselves we could say what we want without fear of it being taken the wrong way, laugh off insults and live in an idyllic state of joy. We don’t though. This is why he have so many associates but very few close friends in life. Those friends are the ones who you can live this ideal with, the associates the ones that your perception interacts with.
This is the weakness of the human mind, and when it starts to unravel it can be both speedy and terrifying. In many instances it can be a simple argument or an ill thought out jibe that can turn the rational mind into the irrational.
There seems to be a craze weeping the nation right now, depression. I believe doctors are far too quick to diagnose people with depression. There is a massive gulf between someone that suffers with clinical depression and somebody who is depressed. I can use my own direct experience here, and very recently. Between April and January I was out of work. It was both damaging to my own sense of self worth and how I felt I could be perceived. I could easily have fallen into a depressed state, but I didn’t. I had a wonderful girlfriend who ‘got me’, healthy children and a lot of hope. Within a week I had lost that girlfriend, argued with the children and had about another twenty job applications that were not even acknowledged. My bedrock was gone. What had been a feeling of hope had now become a sense of hopelessness. When you feel down then all the other factors multiply in your own mind. The snowball effect at its very best.
On November 5th, as everyone else was watching the fireworks explode, I had spent all day in bed. When my eyes opened that morning it had dawned on me that I had absolutely no reason to get out of bed. None at all. I wasn’t seeing the children, I wasn’t seeing my estranged girlfriend, I wasn’t going to work, I had nothing that required me to get up for. So I didn’t. I just lay there. It was awful. I thought that the world and I were just about done. I thought of all the mistakes I had made. I thought of all the people I had hurt. All the times I should and probably could’ve done things differently. I was beating myself up in the harshest way possible.
I have never kept many friends. I have hundreds of associates, all over the world. I have people I could call on but I thought that this would be hypocritical as I had never truly revealed myself to them as I was quite happy being the man who could wear a thousand hats. I could be whatever I needed to be. The thug, the thinker, the clown or the ringmaster. I was adaptable. That changed when I met the now estranged girlfriend. I could be ME. Validation that the person behind the disguises was a valid soul. This apparent rejection of me was especially hard to bare and I suffered.
At absolutely no stage was I suffering from clinical depression though, I was merely depressed. I realised this during that longest of days in bed. My mind was not shutting down, far from it. It was numbed and trying to protect me but it was still there, actively looking for solutions, ways to stop feeling this way, ways to get a job, to win back a lost love, to reconcile with my children. I was low, very, very low, but I still had my wits about me. They were just further from the forefront than usual.
There are times in life where we should feel low, where we should be sad or take a breather. It is natural. It is not a sign of mental illness to grieve, to mourn or feel yourself unable to cope with a situation. This feeling of ‘depression’ is not an illness. It is the most natural thing in the world to feel this way. It is a time when, if you had the ability to realise it, you are completely alive with emotion. There is as much succour in this as feeling the sun on your back, feeling sea spray on your face or smelling the flowers in the park. Embrace the emotion and learn from it because the fact you feel it is proof enough that you are strong enough to deal with it.
Clinical depression is not a sense of feeling low, it is a sense of feeling nothing. It matters little if there is money in your bank, a trophy wife and a mansion. It matters little that you could be adored by millions or in the public eye. The reality is that you have no self-worth whatsoever. The person inside, at that time, is dead. The horrible irony is that on the outside the clinically depressed mind can still allow the body to function but the behaviour is purely instinctive, it is not natural. The laugh is a millisecond out of place, the smile on the face does not match up with the emotionless eyes. There are no tears as there is no emotion to cause them to form, let alone fall.
The person is an automaton, a shell that is simply mimicking life. You can’t reach them. There is nothing you can do other than hope. If there is salvation, it can only be sourced from one place and this is from deep within the sufferer themselves. That one day a spark, a glimmer can penetrate the darkness that shrouds their mind and allow emotion in. Sufferers in relapse often talk of a black dog. It has become a metaphor for the void that swallows every sense, severs every grasp with the real world.
I wrote the following post on FB earlier this year when a friend of mine attempted to commit suicide.
There is so much ridicule, scorn and even abuse aimed at those who suffer from mental health problems with very little thought or understanding given. There is a whole world of difference between feeling depressed and suffering with depression. Fortunately for myself the former has had occasion to appear in my life but never the latter. The key word is ‘suffer’ because those trapped in a thought process that involves ever decreasing circles of negativity, the outcome can be tragic for those around them as the individual cannot bear to suffer any longer. There is nothing that makes any one of us immune. There is no quick fix. No miracle cure. No words that can penetrate the darkness that clouds sound judgement and objectivity. Phrases such as ‘man up’ or ‘there are people worse off in the world than you’ actually only exacerbate the feeling of worthlessness, that somehow the individual is weaker than even they thought because others could cope. It is an illness. It carries no weight your social standing or background. As an illness it is completely non discriminatory. All you can do is pray, or hope, that enough light can reach that darkest recess of a person’s mind and illuminate their belief in their own self worth. Next time you see, or hear, that someone you know is suffering, do the very best you can just to be there. Sometimes, just sometimes, that may be enough.
I stand by every word. I also commented that there is this unwelcome fashion of people screaming they are suffering with depression when in fact they are not. They are simply feeling down. That is not to say they are not suffering but what they are suffering with is life. If they are able to identify their own need to talk to someone, they have the ability to realise that they can be helped. Clinical depression is not a badge of honour, it is a heinous curse, so why people feel it is at times is damaging to the recognition of the illness for what it actually is.
In any first aid course you are taught that in a multi casualty scenario those who are screaming loudest should be treated last. Watch out for the quiet ones, they are losing their battle but do not have the strength or even the cognitive ability to realise it. Someone with clinical depression is dying, every day, and they will not tell anyone for they have lost the ability to either be empathetic or sympathetic to the needs of others, they are alone. Completely alone. They feel nothing. Suicide is often the way out and it is not selfish. Not to the person committing or attempting the act. They cannot even begin to think that anybody would so much as care if they were gone, their broken logic would actually suggest this is the right course of action to take.
Look after each other. Listen to your friends and watch for the signs of clinical depression if they appear not to be themselves, for the chances are, they really aren’t themselves. Nobody can be complacent, nobody. This illness has taken far more lives than will ever be recognised and can be crippling to families who have to live with those who suffer, never knowing if this day will be the day it ends, or will this be the day a spark of life reignites in the soul.
I know I say in a sentence what could be said in a word, I can extend a sentence into a monologue, but this man here, a true wordsmith and free thinker, says it far more eloquently and far more emphatically than I have tried.
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