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January 22, 2012 

Let’s Talk About . . . Depression

Things have gotten pretty political around here lately, and I know that doesn’t interest everyone, so we’ll put that on hold for a while for your sake, and frankly, for mine. I just can’t take it for too long. I just find myself getting worked up over it all, and I need to take a break, to step away for a bit.

In that vein, I’ve decided it’s time to talk about something a great many people don’t understand. Depression is a very real medical and psychological condition, which isn’t solved by “a little more Jesus,” or “Just get over it,” or “He really should just grow up.” I have heard each of these responses to the topic of depression, and how it’s not real, it’s “just in your head,” and if you were stronger it wouldn’t be a problem.

I think a lot of the ignorant comments surrounding this disease comes from, well, ignorance for one, but it’s a very difficult thing to understand when you don’t know how it feels. I will attempt to dispel the fog surrounding how it feels to be depressed. Understand that how /I/ experience depression may be very different than someone else, but generally, many of the hallmarks are universal. This post is one I have tried to write a number of times, but have never quite been able to come up with the words, but after a particularly tough morning, I sent what follows to a friend, and for the first time, I felt like I had a decent glimpse of what it feels like:

Some days everything just goes wrong all at once and it feels like everything you have is just slipping away into nothingness, and you’ll be left standing there staring into the void wondering what you did to deserve this, what you could have done differently to avoid it. But then you realize that it doesn’t matter anyways, because it’s all gone and there’s no getting it back, no recovery, there’s only you and you have two choices: pick up and move on or stay put and let the void consume you, and you wonder if there’s even a difference.

Imagine you’ve gone to a soothsayer, who has a penchant for never being wrong, and she tells you that “Tomorrow, your world will end. You will not go to heaven, you will not go to hell. You will cease to exist, and everything about you will be forgotten forever. You will leave no legacy, you will simply never have existed.” The opportunists in the crowd will take this advice as carte blanche to have a ball. But really think about it. Look around you at everyone you love, everything you’ve done. All the lives you have touched, and all the lives who have touched you. Nothing. NOTHING will remain. Your life and all the hard work you’ve put in amount to nothing. And nothing meant anything. Why did you even bother?

Pretty depressing, huh? Now imagine waking up with that feeling every morning. Imagine taking a shower, brushing your teeth, doing any of the hundreds of mundane little things you have to do just to get ready to, what, go to work? And what for? Does it matter? Will it ever?

It’s those thoughts that fester in the mind, that gnaw and eat their way through any barriers of thought and reason. They form an impenetrable downward spiral, neigh impossible to stop, even when you know it’s happening. Fear leads to doubt, leads to anxiety, leads to self-doubt, leads to loathing, leads to nothing. All roads lead to Nothingness.

These are feelings that I have lived with since I was about 9 years old. It started off with my just not feeling quite right. I remember not really feeling like all the other kids /looked/ like they felt. So I started to fake it. I kept it to myself because I didn’t understand it, and it was easy enough to keep up the act, but when I got to high school, I began to wear thin. I spoke with a mentor about everything, and started seeing a counselor. I didn’t like him, and quit going. I also got on medication, which I took for a while and quit. That song and dance was repeated often. I’ve been through more medications than I can remember, and I’ve seen a handful of counselors, most of whom I ended up quitting, disappointed in their inattention and silly games. I have continued to quit the medications cold-turkey when I get on them.

It has been a long process, and I have not been the best patient, but I will, this coming week, be visiting the doctor to get back on the medication. It’s occurred to me that maybe I need to get this depression in check, because there are too many people who it affects. My ability to keep up the act 24/7 has waned, and I’m beginning to lash out and hurt people around me. So it’s time to swallow my pride, and get the help I need.

But as for depression itself, some people are depressed because of some major life event they can’t get a handle on. Some people are depressed because of neurochemical imbalance. Some people are depressed for, well, the list goes on and on.

There’s good news, though. Our good friend Science has given us a plethora of anti-depressant medications which fiddle with your brain bits and help you feel normal again. There are counselors, and therapists, and pastors, and gurus, and friends, and chocolate. It’s not the same for everyone, but it’s no less insidious, and it can cause some very real life-altering problems.

So let’s talk. Do you know someone who is clinically depressed? Are you? How do they deal with it? How do you? Do you have any questions about depression? If so, please ask, and I’ll do my best to answer them. So let’s talk. Let’s all gain a little understanding.

January 10, 2012 

Let’s talk about . . . People

No. Not like that. I mean people we meet, spend time with, befriend, and ultimately, drift apart from. It’s a fact of life, not everyone you were friends with back in elementary school is still your friend now. Not your first crush, not your second crush, not your best friend who you dodged all kinds of trouble with back in high school.  People move apart. Simple as that.

A recent conversation with Rachelskirts brought a lot of thoughts about this phenomenon to the surface, and I think it’s something worth visiting, as we enter a new year, when we’re all usually feeling a bit over-nostalgic anyhow. She pointed me to this post by Sarah Brown  (who I think we can credit as being a major influence for Rachelskirts). It’s short, so it’s worth a read, but to summarize: letting go of people is tough because they impacted you so deeply, you hold out for hope that you can always be close.

This is an exceptionally sunny and, potentially, heartbreaking approach to the matter. And this way of coping with these events is not without merit. It espouses a more optimistic outlook. It makes your memories more keen, less dull. It allows for the full spectrum of emotion in your thought-life as you reminisce when you pass an old haunt: coffee shop, school, perhaps even motel. You feel deeply, but it also means that when things come to an end you hurt deeply. You long for those good times again, and you have trouble letting go. A deeper felt hurt lends to more fond memories of the past. You live in the moment, and then in the past. But in the moment, you’re really living. You just have to make sure not to get stuck in the past.

I, on the other hand, don’t really deal with the situation that way. I’m not very good at living in the moment. I tend to live in the future, always looking for what’s next. I don’t mean to say I’m constantly unhappy with my present–quite the contrary, I feel like I’m in a pretty good position in life right now–but that does not mean that I stop and try to look into the future for what’s next. The same goes with people. I suppose I always have some subconscious reticence to forge deep ties with my peers.

I have had any friends, many good friends along the way. Many people who have left impregnable marks upon me and who I am, as I have upon them. But people are transient. Many of these people I’ll never see again, never even talk to again. Sure, there’s maybe the odd “Happy Birthday” on Facebook, but that doesn’t really mean much. And while some would view it as sad that these connections are lost, I just see it as a naturally occurring part of life. People flow in and out of our lives, no one more or less important than any one else, just some sticking around longer than others. We learn from, grow with, and impress ourselves on each other, but then it ends. They go do the same with someone else, and so do you. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

I guess maybe it sounds cold and cynical, but that’s not really it at all. It’s just an acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, it’s okay to let someone grow into who they’re going to be, and it’s okay to let yourself grow into who you’re going to be, and that often means you’re growing in two different directions. In many ways, you helped shape those paths for each other, if you’re feeling the cosmic irony of it all.

But every person from the past is worth remembering, worth thinking about, but ultimately not worth regretting the decisions you’ve made that led to your separation. Because those decisions got you to where you can make new friends, as long as you’re willing to let the old ones go. These too will likely not last forever, but you know what? That’s okay. It’s just another step, and it’s your job to help each other get where you’re going, wherever that may lead.

So. Let’s talk. How do you handle the ebbs and flows of people and friends through your life? Do you cling for dear life, or do you just see where it’ll take you. Do you mourn the loss, or do you get excited for what’s next? Am I full of crap? Maybe! Let me know.

Let’s talk.

December 7, 2010 

Letting Go

Today is another Reverb10 post:

December 5 – Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? (Author: Alice Bradley)

This past year, I have made pretty great strides in letting go of my self-derision. Letting go of my self-criticism. That’s not to say that I don’t step back and evaluate, because without that, we’d all be terrible people. What I mean is, I have made steps to become less hard on myself. To appreciate my own talents a little more.

While it may seem insignificant to you, it’s a huge thing for me. Though I’ve still got a lot of work to do in building up my self-image, and my confidence. I have always been pretty rough on myself. I have a few skills that I KNOW I have, and I’m proud of those. But for everything else, I usually just feel mediocre at best. A fraud, a joke. And I don’t want to feel that way about myself.

By letting go of all those negative thoughts, I think I can move forward, hone the skills I already have, and sharpen the ones that I may not be so good at, but would like to be. There’s freedom that comes in feeling like it’s okay to fail, okay to not be perfect. Okay to be working, growing, learning. And with that freedom, comes the ability to see improvement, which is a far cry different than just seeing how each piece fails to measure up to some Platonic form. A far cry better.

To what have you let go?

November 3, 2010 

NaBloPoMo Day 3: Scope-Severity Paradox

My dad sent me an article today by Loren F. Nordgren of Northwestern University and Mary-Hunter Morris McDonnell of Harvard Law school about the “Scope-Severity Paradox.” Standard logic would state that for the more victims a given crime has, the more severe it would be, and therefore the stricter punishment would be.

As they found in their studies, this was not really the case. Interestingly, in 2 direct studies they found that the exact opposite was the case: students who reviewed vignettes of cases with few victims in fact tended to rate the crimes as more severe than those students who reviewed vignettes of cases with many victims. For example, take two nearly identical cases: A fraudster cheats two people out of their money, and a fraudster cheats 20 people out of their money. Consistently, the first case was rated as more severe, and given harsher punishments than the second.

Weird, right? Observing the results, it’s difficult to grasp that such a thing can even happen, but they were able to document the same result with about 90 different students. While it seems to defy all conventional logic, the researchers were also able to find a cause: identifiably.

In a secondary study, the identifiably of the victims of the groups were increased. The small-group case studies were accompanied by names, occupations, etc. The large-group case studies were accompanied with a photograph of one of the many victims. In this study the severity and punishment scores were drastically normalized, with the differences being statistically insignificant.

While this is an oversimplification of their studies and results, it sufficiently demonstrates the effect, and quite frankly, it just blows my mind! To clarify a bit further, they didn’t just find these results in a lab: they also studied actual jury decisions on all manners of “toxic tort” cases (asbestos, lead poisoning, etc.). Juries awarded smaller judgments to cases with more plaintiffs, and larger judgments to those cases with fewer plaintiffs.

Where this becomes extremely interesting to me is how we all do this illogical thing all the time, without realizing it. I wonder how the actual legal system tends to skew these results as well. Particularly in cases of copyright infringement, especially dealing with the RIAA.

In these cases, the damages sued for are astronomical in consideration of the actual cost of a single song or album, and indeed, jail time for pirating one single song can often be longer (and with more severe parole stipulations) than rape or murder. How do these instances mesh with the findings of this article? Is an advocacy group more immediately identifiable than a murder victim? Or can the advocacy group more readily identify its victims to the jury because of the notoriety any given band already has?

As for how this knowledge can be used to change the world, it seems this article is the perfect explanation for why a martyr is so effective. A singular person is seen as being victimized by a faceless organization, be that a government, interest group, etc. So people are already predisposed to see the acts of the group as more severe (either positively or negatively) because it was just the one person victimized. So no matter which side of the issue you stand on, the martyr is more effective. From his side, he’s an individual victimized by a group. From the group side, an individual was victimizing many. So the predisposition is that the individual is either more powerful as an individual or more identifiable as a “this could happen to me” situation.

Fun stuff. If you would like to read the actual article, it can be found on the SAGE website. Unfortunately, only the abstract is free, unless you have either a personal subscription or a subscription through a school of some sort. If you can figure out a way to read it, I highly recommend it.