“Melancholic Reason”
by Dennis
If you're like me, you've probably always wondered what "normal" is. That is, you've wondered what makes nondepressed people, well, nondepressed. But curiosity about this is usually as far as it goes. Depression treatment centers mainly on what makes us depressed — not on what makes nondepressed people nondepressed. We go into therapy to change our thinking, and take medication to change our brain chemicals.
But even after years of all this, we still haven't a clue how to be "normal" or nondepressed. We haven't learned how, nor do we even have a frame of reference to do so.
I think the main fallacy, with this approach, is that depression is a dysfunction. The more I learn about it, the more I'm convinced that this is not true. Sure, brain physiology and genetics have something to do with it, but they don't completely account for depression.
Consider for a moment the kind of thinking that is labeled "depression." Frequently this is the result of low self-esteem. "I'll never amount to anything, I'll never find a job, I'll never have a girlfriend," etc. These are depressing thoughts, and in therapy we're told that they need to be changed, as these are "cognitive distortions." But really, how "distorted" are these thoughts? Why is it that we come to have poor self-esteem?
The answer is simple: Life events. In what people around us say and do, we learn what our value is. No one is born with low self-esteem; we are, instead, clean slates, with no self-esteem at all, whether positive or negative. Our sense of self is our reaction to what happens.
If we have enough failures in life, we learn to give up; to conserve our efforts and not try anymore. If we have enough rejections, we learn not to have any expectations. It is very much like the "learned helplessness" noted in laboratory mice who are repeatedly placed into unsolvable mazes; if put in a solvable maze, they won't even make an attempt to get through.
Depression, I think, is a manifestation of this. In a very real way, depression is often a reasonable response to our own situations. It is taken to an extreme degree, but still, it's a result of our own instinct to "pick our battles," preserve our energies for efforts that are worthwhile. To turn this instinct off, is impossible.
Unfortunately, most people — including depressives — consider depression to be irrational, a malfunction, something which is broken and needs to be corrected. To an extent, this is true, but much more than that, depression is an adaptation, or perhaps, a maladaptation.
People newly diagnosed with depression are ill-served by being told that their thinking is a malfunction. This sets them up to be constantly at war with themselves; they have depressive thoughts, which they then tell themselves not to have, one after the other, going on indefinitely. What's more, since a depressive's thinking is so caught up in past experiences, this just convinces them that those experiences were meaningless.
No wonder relapse is so common! This is no way to live.
A more rational, reasonable view of depression is in order. A view which says, "Yes, your experiences were meaningful, you are partly right to think what you think."
Is this such a difficult thing? I think not. Yet, of all the books on depression and bipolar disorder that I've read (and there have been many), not one of them acknowledges that depression is often a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation.