Umbrella labels like ‘depression’ (and ‘anxiety’ and ‘panic disorder’ and ‘OCD’) are useful, but only if we appreciate that people do not all have the same precise experience of such things.
Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don’t think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn’t say the things they say.
The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.
But with depression and anxiety the pain isn’t something you think about because it is thought. You are not your back but you are your thoughts.
Suicide is the leading cause of death among men under the age of thirty-five.
A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.
Twice as many women as men will suffer a serious bout of depression in their lives.
Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you ‘admit to’, it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience. A boy-girl-man-woman-young-old-black-white-gay-straight-rich-poor experience. It is not you. It is simply something that happens to you.
The more you research the science of depression, the more you realise it is still more characterised by what we don’t know than what we do. It is 90 per cent mystery.
The theory goes that an imbalance in serotonin levels – caused by low brain cell production of serotonin – equates to depression. So it is no surprise that some of the most common anti-depressants, from Prozac down, are SSRIs – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – which raise the serotonin levels in your brain. However, the serotonin theory of depression looks a bit wobbly. The problem has been highlighted by the emergence of anti-depressants that have no effect on serotonin, and some that do the exact opposite of an SSRI (namely, selective serotonin reuptake enhancers, such as tianapetine) which have been shown to be as effective at treating depression. Add to this the fact that serotonin in an active living human brain is a hard thing to measure and you have a very inconclusive picture indeed.
That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.
The whole idea of ‘mental health’ as something separate to physical health can be misleading, in some ways. So much of what you feel with anxiety and depression happens elsewhere. The heart palpitations, the aching limbs, the sweaty palms, the tingling sensations
Einstein said the way to understand relativity was to imagine the difference between love and pain. ‘When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.’
When you are depressed and anxious your comfort zone tends to shrink from the size of a world to the size of a bed. Or right down to nothing at all.
Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running,’ Murakami also said,
People often use the word ‘despite’ in the context of mental illness. So-and-so did such-and-such despite having depression/anxiety/OCD/agoraphobia/whatever. But sometimes that ‘despite’ should be a ‘because’. For instance, I write because of depression. I was not a writer before. The intensity needed – to explore things with relentless curiosity and energy – simply wasn’t there.
To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.
‘Most parts of the brain do different things at different times,’ says Dr David Adam, author of The Man Who Couldn’t Stop. ‘The amygdala, for example, plays a role in both sexual arousal and terror – but an MRI scan cannot differentiate between passion and panic . . . So what should we think when the amygdala lights up on an MRI scan when we are shown a picture of Cameron Diaz or Brad Pitt – that we are afraid of them?’
FOR ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, the depressive’s favourite philosopher (and one who influenced Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein in varying but significant ways), life was the pursuit of futile purposes. ‘We blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.’ In this view, happiness is impossible, because of all these goals. Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.
In fact, if you really think about it, a life made of goals is going to be disappointing. Yes, it might propel you forward, keep you turning the pages of your own existence, but ultimately it will leave you empty. Because even if you achieve your goals, what then? You may have gained the thing you lacked, but with it, what then? You either set another goal, stress about how you keep the thing you attained, or you think – along with the millions of people having mid- (or early- or late-) life crises right now – This is everything I wanted, so why am I not happy? So what was Schopenhauer’s answer? Well, if wanting things was the problem, the answer had to be in giving things up.
How to stop time: kiss. How to travel in time: read. How to escape time: music. How to feel time: write. How to release time: breathe.
The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them.
Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.
Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax.