The title of this piece is not a reference to an historical period except in the sense that is an apt description of personal history - mine. I'm not completely sure why I'm drawn to write about this today. Perhaps it is a delayed reaction to the community response to a recent incident with one member. It may also be fueled by how tired I have recently found myself, constantly needing more sleep than has been my wont in recent years.
I know that as I explore this I must walk a very delicate line. I must respect the wishes of Leaves on the Current (who is not present to totally dissuade me from writing this) that I not be totally transparent, lest people misunderstand. She maintains privacy by nondisclosure, whereas I have always been able to keep people somewhat distant by the opposite approach, offering perhaps more than they can comfortably handle.
This will be very personal. And if such makes you uncomfortable, consider yourself under no obligation to read further, even if you regularly peruse my postings. Be forewarned, the picture that will be presented will not be glamorous.
I have struggle with depression for most of my adult life. While I am not truly bipolar, I have behavioral patterns that have often led others to wonder if I were manic-depressive. I would tend to attribute the mood swings as much to being very shy and yet very much wanting to be with other people, not knowing how to put those pieces together. But all of this is intensified because I am so prone to depression. In exploring this I am not seeking to justify the myriad of failures in my relations with others. I am offering this in the hope that by using myself as an example I can help some who are not as familiar with the sometimes debilitating and distorting effects of depression to better understand when they might be encountering it in someone they know, possibly care about, whose behavior seems to bewilder them.
I cannot point at a specific moment when depression became a regular part of my existence. For much of my childhood I was actually fairly happy, although there are some moments in my very young days that are not completely clear, perhaps because I have sought to repress them. The memories do not seem to be comfortable, and as a result I have difficulty completely recalling them.
Certainly by the time I was in 8th grade things began to change. That was the year i missed a lot of school because of chicken pox. It was the only time K-12 I was ever out for more than 3 consecutive days. I was out of school for two full weeks. Somehow by late that spring, which was my bar mitzvah (I was a year ahead of myself in school) life had begun to change.
Much of my early depression was hidden from others. But by 10th grade my problems were all too clearly visible. I had even in 9th grade begun to crash academically, requiring tutors to get through first year French and Latin. By 10th grade I was in and out of the office of the school psychiatrist and even the principal, a very caring man who knew there was something wrong. This was also a period of almost intolerable family conflicts which certainly exacerbated any underlying problems. During this year both parents and my sister were separately seeing the same psychiatrist (probably not a good idea) and yet somehow a decision was made that I did not need professional help.
Perhaps that is why I felt almost impelled to do something big and dramatic to get attention. Only at the last minute I balked. I was so unhappy I decided that I would kill myself. But I really had no idea of how to proceed. I went into my parents bathroom to look for pills. All I could find was aspirin. So I began to gobble them down. My father happened to come in and asked what I was doing, I told him "nothing" and left. I had swallowed 20 aspirin, shortly thereafter I threw up and did myself no apparent serious damage. I felt horrible - I felt so inadequate that I could not even kill myself, or even get attention by what i was doing.
This was the first of a number of brushes with the possibility of suicide. The serious explorations do not exceed the number of fingers on one hand, but even that is far too high a number, and was very seriously pushing the limits of survival. The less-fully committed explorations are far too numerous to even list - it is a part of depression that the possibility of suicide is never very far below the surface. And the thought process that leads to that point is very destructive - it is like a whirlpool into which one is being sucked. Consider it almost an emotional black hole - once one starts around that spiral, one is drawn in deeper and deeper, and absent some kind of intervention from outside one runs the very real risk of talking oneself into destructive behavior of some sort. There is no contrary information to the negative thought processes that shine light on other possibilities. Sometimes even when a friend or lover tries to reassure you, to tell you that you are not so horrible, so much of a failure, it has the perverse effect of making things worse - I am so horrible that even others cannot conceive. I at least used to think that what it showed was that no one really cared for me or else that would understand how horrible I really was.
Please note - as I write this I am NOT depressed. I am reflecting on something that is still very much a part of my life, with which over time I have learned to deal so that I do not get caught in any spiral with the potential of a downward movement that is irretrievable. You do not need to send the authorities to my door.
People will often suggest medication for depression. After all, there are biochemical changes when one is depressed, and there is some justification for attempt to restore biochemical balance, and for that medicine may seem appropriate. On the few occasions when I have undergone courses of medication I found them more debilitating than was the depression. On medication I lost all enjoyment of simple things,and it has usually been the simple things that were able to draw me out of my depression. As I write this the latest of our rescued cats is lying next to me, now deeply asleep, having come over to share bodily warmth. It could be that, or my late beloved sheltie licking my face, or suddenly noticing a flower, or experiencing a smell that triggered a positive memory, or a sound evoking a different time and place. On medication the experience of any of these was so dulled that they had little effect upon my mood. As I became more experienced with wrestling with depression I learned how to provide some of these stimuli for myself, and thus prevent any downward spiral from becoming too severe. I learned to live with my disability, to compensate as i have learned to compensate for other things as well.
I have over the past 40+ years seen psychologists and psychiatrists, psychiatric social workers and marriage and family therapists. I have in employment prior to teaching taken advantage of Employee Assistance Programs. I have also lost relationships and at least two jobs because of not addressing my depression appropriately. In both job losses I quit, but had I not I might well have been fired. I used to regularly run away from things. Were I unhappy I would move, or change jobs, or change relationships. Of none of those was feasible I would change the hirsuteness of my appearance, growing or removing facial hair in the belief that if I changed how I looked I would somehow change how I felt.
There was in all of this an element of magical thinking, the idea that one thing could change everything for the better. That is, of course, no more realistic than the belief that one thing could forever ruin everything, put one in a situation from which there was no hope of recovery. These are not contradictory beliefs. Rather, they are the same misguided belief explored from two different perspectives.
What is important to recognize about the kind of depression that has been so much a part of my life is that it is neither a character flaw nor something that is subject to self-will and self-discipline. It is an illness, one which can become debilitating or worse. In my case it is a chronic illness, as much a part of my life as would be a disease such as lupus or other permanent non-soluble conditions. I recognize that some would argue that the proper medication and therapy might ameliorate the effects of the depression, but given my experience with both and the fact that I have learned to cope I would respectfully decline to again go down such paths. My condition is permanent, and the only question is how I cope, given that I have reached a point where the drawings towards the possibility of suicide (which are still a part of the condition) are now readily addressed so that I am not at risk of literal self-destruction.
I have spent much of my life observing others. I used to sit in singles bars and simply observe the interactions. Even in my own unskilled interactions with others (a product in part of my shyness as much as it is of my depression) I have usually processed how people react to me and to others. We seem to have a strong tendency to think what we can best offer someone else is what we think works for us, or for someone close to us. But that is not seeing the person as s/he is, and can sometimes be counterproductive. I understand that such empathy is an important part of human interaction - we want to be able to understand the other person, to let her know that we care, that she is not "other" in a way that places barriers between us. Sometimes it may be appropriate to share our experience - I am, after all, doing so in this posting. There are other times when the most felicitous thing we can do is simply be present, not seeking to understand, not attempting to demonstrate our care by sharing our own experience. Sometimes the best thing we can do is not to do, but simply to be present.
And sometimes we must be like Cher to Nick Gage in Moonstruck: "Snap out of it." It is my sense and my experience that such occasions are far fewer than the number of times that people choose to follow that model. I certainly can offer no statistical evidence, nor can I offer any reliable means of determining when it is an appropriate course of action.
If you have read this far, you may be wondering what the point is of my writing this. After all, I offer neither clear analysis nor ready solutions. I do not even offer all that much guidance. And this diary is now reaching the outer limits of what i can reasonably impose on those who have continued to read. Let me offer a few thoughts that will not represent any kind of conclusion, but perhaps offer some justification for my writing this.
You are under no obligation when dealing with anyone who is a depressive to treat with any special care or greater latitude. If that statement seems odd, it is because I think we should treat all persons with the greatest respect for their uniqueness. We should be willing to encounter them as they are, act with our aspirations for whatever may be best for them, and grant them the freedom to reject whatever friendship, love or care we may offer them.
We do need to be able to recognize the sometimes subtle signs of depression. Those of us in positions of responsibility for others will sometimes be confronted with the need to intervene - after all, one characteristic of deep depression is a lack of clarity in one's own perceptions and thought processes in a way that can be quite destructive. As a teacher I am fairly attune to signs that might indicate depression, perhaps because of my own lifelong struggle. I am not a mental health professional, although I have had some training in counseling. I have worked with a student who was suicidal, for whom I was the last adult she trusted. It was very moving to see her succeed and graduate last June. During the summer one of my fellow attendees at my NEH seminar on separation of church and state was a relatively young teacher who had had a student commit suicide in the past year and was still recently with his own guilt, even as intellectually he knew he was not at fault. What helped was to be able to accept that his feelings of guilt were a positive sign of his humanity, his deep caring for others.
If I sometimes seem a little "odd", remember that I am not cured of my depression. I know it will be part of me for the rest of my life. I no longer worry about simply letting go and descending into madness or catatonia or deliberately ending my life. I no longer live at a pace seemingly designed to be destructive of extended life. I usually allow myself time to reflect or to simply be, not thinking at all. Here I should note that I am far more emotional and intuitive than I am intellectual. Often what will trigger depressive episodes for me is when I do not allow time and space for my emotional and intuitive dimensions and try to live completely in my mind or through my physical actions.
I have no idea if what I have written will be of any purpose to anyone. As is often the case, I had no intention of writing anything today. Even once felt prompted to write about this subject, I was not sure what I would offer. And other than running a spelling checker, I have done no revision or editing except that done as I wrote.
Do with this what you will.