depression Archives - Page 6 of 8 - Lawyers With Depression

Do Elders Have a Place in Helping Us Heal from Depression?

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Recently, an article about depression ran in the USA Today newspaper. In essence, it repeated the oft heard formula about how to treat depression: recognize the symptoms, visit and be evaluated by a psychiatrist (and go on medication if needed) and see a psychologist. I have lived out this trifecta of care and treatment and it certainly did help me recover from the worst aspects of depression. But, there was always something missing.

Two weeks ago, I decided to find and commit to a spiritual director in my life. This has taken the form of engaging a person to fill that role in my Catholic tradition. When I first met with my director, I said that I’d lived quite a bit up in my head as a lawyer. I didn’t want to read anymore books or facts about God. I was looking for a relationship with an elder who could teach me about deepening of my relationship to God.

In recent times, our society has called such a teacher-student pairing “mentoring.” Often, we think of it as an older person forming a relationship with a younger one centered on an activity such as school or sports. I believe that it can and should be more than that. And it certainly doesn’t have to take a religious form nor does it have to be an older person imparting his/her wisdom to a younger person. People can be our “elders” by virtue of their wisdom and/or special connection we share with them; indeed young people can be “old souls.”

I did a search today for depression and mentoring on my computer and all of the search results concerned adults helping out younger people to recognize and treat their depression. Yet, don’t we all wish that we had someone to guide us whatever our age? How many times have I heard veteran lawyers tell me that they sorely miss that parent, grandparent or special friend that was there to affirm them and to whom they could talk about the larger issues of life.

In contemporary society, psychologists (or more recently, “life coaches” or “executive coaches”) often fill the role of elders. My own psychologist (a true atheist whom I love and respect dearly), loved my idea of engaging an elder guide calling it “creative.” While depressive thinking does need to be confronted by healthier and more adaptive thinking, it may also require a larger dimension in which to examine and heal from it. Therapy can and does help us to “deal with”, “overcome” and “adapt to” depression. But for me at least, it doesn’t answer the larger questions of meaning. What meaning does this depression have in my life, if any? If it’s just the product of genetics, purely a disease, is there any meaning in it? If it’s just a psychological malady, why would I even bother – or feel the need – to address the spiritual dimension?

Think about it. Think about an organic experience with someone who may provide you with spiritual insight into your depression and help move you in a healthier direction. They can be like an old pine tree that you encounter during a long walk in the woods. How do we find such an elder? First, we have to be open to the idea and recognize that it could be of value to us. Once we have reached this place, we can begin to think creatively about who could fill that role. For me, it was a formal relationship with a spiritual director. Talk with your friends, spouse or psychologist about who could be a good fit for you. It’s true that when a student is ready, the teacher shows up.

Create space in your life for such a teacher and see who comes knocking on your door.

The Need for Community

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My psychologist said something remarkable months ago: “You’re a real loner Dan.” I really never thought about myself that way – and I’m 48 years old! But after reflecting on it awhile, I found what he’d said to be profoundly true. It didn’t mean that I didn’t have people in my life that I love and who love me. I have the best wife, a beautiful daughter and great friends. Yet, I often didn’t see just often I isolated myself by choosing solitary activities. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It’s a question of balance. For me, the scales are tipping in the direction of reaching out and enjoying the fruits that only happen when really sharing with others.

And it’s not just lawyers that feel lonely. In a recent edition of the national publication for judges, Judicature, it was estimated that 70% of judges feel lonely. While there haven’t been any depression studies on judges, as there have been for law students and lawyers, one can only imagine their high depression levels.

I know that when I went through the worst of my depression, it was a very lonely experience. Not because people didn’t try to be there for me and help. Rather, it was because depression short circuits something in our brains that makes us essentially human: our capacity to engage with and feel connected to people. I’ve often said that being a lawyer can be a lonely job and believe that most lawyers, at least in their private thoughts, feel this way. When this loneliness in our jobs is compounded by the isolation we feel during a depression, it has a crushing effect. Oxygen disappears from the room only to be replaced by the vapor of melancholy. It feels like there is no escape and we are pounded into submission; a submission that on one level makes no sense because we are still carrying on with our lives – but just barely.

Lately, I’ve felt the desire to end my isolation. I have begun to recognize that what is most important in life, really, is family, friendship and community. It may sound trite and simplistic to offer this up, but such a simple truth has long eluded me in my life. My best friend, my wife, has seen me reach out to her more and it has only deepened our marriage. How many of us who have dealt with depression don’t reach out to the most precious person that we live with everyday? For some of you, it may not be your spouse. It could be anyone that you feel close to. If you don’t have someone like this in your life, it’s critical to develop one because a hour of therapy per week and a trip to the psychiatrist once a month simply is not enough support, love and encouragement to recover from and stay out of depression.

Think hard about your life. How much time do you spend with friends that you really connect with? What is your relationship life with your spouse and children? As lawyers, we often think and say, “Time is money.” However, the span of our lives is short and none of us is guaranteed even another day on this earth. If you are spending all of your time at the office and neglecting your need to connect with others, the cost is simply too high.

Leaving Behind a Life that Doesn’t Work

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Psychologist, James Hollis, describes depression as a “swampland”; a place that’s murky and dark where we’d rather not go. He doesn’t underestimate the power of the physical dimension of depression; the chronic fatigue, difficulty concentrating and disrupted sleep. Nor does he dismiss the notion that depression, for some people, has a genetic basis. But what he suggests, which is different than your standard psychological tome on the topic, is that depression can be the result of our psyche, or “true self” if you will, trying to assert itself. We are depressed, he opines, because we are essentially living a life we don’t want and didn’t consciously choose. We are living out a script created for us by our parents and societal expectations to be successful, accomplished and respected in a way that’s not in accord with our real needs and desires.

At some, the psyche protests; it tells the guys upstairs running the ego’s show, “We’ve had enough! We’re staging a work stoppage!” And so the psyche withdraws large amounts of energy from the false life we’ve been trying to construct and live out of. We try harder during a depression to compensate by swimming even harder in the habits we know best: exerting more effort, distractions or maybe even addictions. But, the psyche won’t budge. It wants to take us in another direction; it wants us to pay attention to our own inner compass and turn in that direction. In doing so we are enlivened and a depression may lift – – maybe. It seems like the true self doesn’t give a damn about all of our “career objectives” and false gods. That’s not its objective and it demands to be heard.

In my own life, this most certainly played out in my decision to become a lawyer. As I have previously written, my dad was an unrepentant alcoholic who abused me, my siblings and my Mom. Yet, early in his life, he was a hero in many regards: captain of his football team, a sailor in the Pacific theater during WWII and a graduate of the University at Denver. But somewhere along the way, as he aged and had more children, the wheels fell off. This would have large ramifications in my own life.

I became the hero of my family in a way that my dad never managed to achieve in his adult life. I played sports, was a “good kid”, earned great grades in college, and went to law school. Like many people who do well in undergraduate school, I didn’t know what to do with my marshmallow degree in psychology. So, true hero that I was, I went to law school. I must admit that I didn’t like it very much even though I did well. Its emphasis on rules and analysis, too often to the exclusion of the human journey, sometimes bored me silly. I would often wander off to the undergraduate library and read great works of literature while my orphaned law books sat at the edge of my desk. “Pick me up,” they pleaded. I turned a deaf ear and went back to my novel.

One evening, towards the end of my first year, I went to dinner with my Mom and older brother. I began pouring my heart out to her that I wasn’t happy in law school.

My mom listened half-heartedly. Her eyes began looking around the restaurant to avoid my gaze. “Have they changed the wallpaper in here,” she managed in a sing-song voice. I persisted: “Mom, I really need your help. I need you to hear me.” My brother, who had been sitting quietly next to me, got annoyed: “Stop, bothering mom; you’re upsetting her!” So I stopped. I learned that whatever I was planning to do about law school, dropping out wasn’t an alternative. As the hero, being lost – or worse yet, a failure – was simply unacceptable. I never listened to what my psyche was trying to tell me. That choice would come back to bite me later in life as one of the causes of my depression.

I can now see the unrealistic expectations that my parents unintentionally laid on me. Somehow a “successful” son would make up for all the brokenness in their own lives. It would somehow redeem the pain that our home had harbored for so long.

Now, after years of struggle, I realize I have choices. I don’t have to unconsciously live out my parents unlived lives. I can forgive them and move on. I now choose to be a lawyer, but on my own terms. With that comes responsibility. No one is going to make healthy choices for me. My depression certainly caused a “work stoppage in my life.” It isn’t something I would have ever consciously have chosen – who would have? But I used the experience to go back to the drawing board of my life to figure out what I really wanted out of life. I didn’t want to continue to be stuck in the muck of depression so I had to change. I had to build a life that worked for me.

And that’s still a work in progress . . . .

Is There Any Room For Kindness in the Law?

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Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.” Kindness is an element that’s often missing in the practice of law. Perhaps the absence of this most human of qualities is why lawyers are so unhappy and unfulfilled. Likewise, kindness is often lacking during a depression. During such times, others may not be kind to us. Whether it’s out of ignorance or simply not caring, it hurts. Moreover, there’s the lack of kindness towards our selves during a depression. During such times, we use most of our energy grappling with the darkness just trying to find our way home. Kindness towards our selves seems unobtainable if not inconceivable.

When we get our bearings and depression lifts, it might be helpful to turn our ship towards kindness as an important quality to nurture in our work lives. Some of my more cynical brethren think I’m smoking weed when I talk like this. They opine: “You’d get crushed if you acted kindly. Don’t be a fool.” But, I’m not some idealistic dreamer, I’m actually a realist. Having been in the litigation trenches for over 20 years, I know all too well the brutality, hand-to-hand combat, scheming and grenades that are lobbed back and forth into our bunkers. I think I’m a realist because I’m well acquainted with and see the tremendous cost of it all. These experiences were, most certainly, a cause of my depression as it is for many lawyers.

Since I don’t want to return to my former melancholic state, I have thought about the cost of not incorporating kindness into my day – yes, even during my workday. It can be done in small ways, such as becoming aware of our tone of voice when we speak to our secretary, seeing our client’s phone inquires not as annoyances to endure but as opportunities to be of service or bringing a cup of coffee to the receptionist.

Kindness is intricately connected to the heart, more than the mind. We can’t crunch the numbers or do a cost-benefit analysis about this sort of thing. We have to simply take chances. In my own experience, the following Zen adage holds true: “Just leap and the net will suddenly appear.”

I believe that the fatigue most lawyers complain of is often connected to the lack of kindness. Kindness has an enlivening and authentic dimension to it. Harold Whitman once wrote, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

Poet, David Whyte, who I’ve written about before, speaks to such corporate titans as IBM, Mobil Oil and Citibank about meaning and beauty. In one moving passage of his book, “Crossing the Unknown Sea, he talks about his friendship with a pretty hip monk named Brother David Steindl Rast who happens to be a psychiatrist. Here is an excerpt of their dialogue:

“’Brother David?’” I uttered it in such an old, petitionary, Catholic way that I almost thought he was going to say, “Yes, my son?” But, he did not; he turned his face toward me, following the spontaneous note of desperate sincerity, and simply waited.

‘Tell me about exhaustion,’ I said. He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along, to say a life-changing thing to me. He said, in the form both of a question and an assertion:

‘You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?’ ‘The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest,’ I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence. ‘What is it, then?’

‘The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.’ He looked at me for a wholehearted moment, as if I should fill in the blanks. But I was blank to be filled at the moment, and though I knew something pivotal had been said, I had not the wherewithal to say anything in reply. So he carried on:

‘You are tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers’.”

Perhaps it’s tough to bring kindness, or wholeheartedness if you will, into our lives until we listen to our deeper human needs, both our own and others. That deep need which tells us that we are more than our jobs that we convinced ourselves we can’t change or leave. We must discover our “true powers” and part of that journey is reconnecting with this most fundamental of human yearnings – the desire for simple kindness.

One Lawyer at Midlife

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A few weeks ago, I attended my 30^th High School Reunion at a local watering hole. As my wife and I drove to the event, I felt the wind of the seventies blowing through my now thinning hair. Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business” blared out of my speakers; a feel good anthem of my generation. The song felt like a buoy that I had long ago sailed past only to return to now.

Walking into the tavern was like stepping through a time portal to a different time and place; its strangeness exaggerated by the dim light and pop of Bud Light’s being pried open. Above is a photo of me at the reunion with our Valedictorian. The thinning hair alluded to above is self-evident.

As I walked around the room, I sensed that my interactions with everyone would be cursory:

“Hi — How are you? — Married? — Divorced – Oh, I understand — Kids?– What you doing now?”

The changes in our bodies and faces bespoke the eternal passage of time; each of us entering the Fall of our lives.

Midlife, and all the challenges this stage of life brings, has been on my mind. You know, the sort of thing that wakes you up at 3 a.m. In a few weeks I’ll turn 48 and have been out of law school for 21 years. Besides the reunion, one other thing supplied the voltage for this middle age meditation.

I’ve been reading a book by Robert A. Johnson called, “Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life.” He points out that the first half of our lives is spent addressing matters in the outside world – learning a trade, marrying and raising children and finding our way in this difficult world. Then, “in the second half of life, the hunger of our missing pieces often becomes acute. It dawns on us that time is running out. So we often set about rearranging things on the outside. Such changes distract us for a time, but what is really called for is a change of consciousness.”

There is something inside of all of us which has been unlived. This is part of the maturation process and just plain growing up. We choose this; we don’t choose that. As we age, our lives take on certain defining features that we never could have foretold in young adulthood. As I mingled at my reunion with people from so long ago, I imagined what unlived lives they each had. We all smiled and made small talk as we swayed to the music. All the while, I imagined their hopes to live their unlived lives gently humming beneath the surface.

Johnson further extrapolates on the unlived life:

“We must work very hard, until exhaustion, just to get ego awareness working well in contemporary life. It takes the whole educational system and all of our socialization processes to promote this consciousness, and our entire society is highly invested in this struggle. However, in the process of becoming differentiated adults, we inevitably become split. We all have both a lived and an unlived life. Most psychotherapies are designed to patch up wounded people and then throw them back into the battle of oppositions. They guide people in how to become better adapted socially: more adept at making money, more highly disciplined, more dutiful, more economically productive. Even when such therapy is successful and gets an individual back out into the rat race again, you can watch them wither over time under the weight of it all.

In the second half of life we are called to live everything that we truly are, to achieve greater wholeness. We initially respond to the call for change by rearranging outer circumstances, though our split is actually an inner problem. The transition from morning to afternoon that occurs at midlife calls for a revaluation of earlier values. During the first half of life we are so busy building up the structure of the personality that we forget that its footings are in shifting sands.”

Many, many lawyers are exhausted by the weight of their lives at the midpoint of their journey. It seems that their careers, and all the obligations that go along with it, have built a momentum that is seemingly unstoppable. So, they settle for distractions (entertainment, money, good food, etc.) along the road to retirement to blunt the pain. This pain is the pain of the unlived life; the part of their inner lives they didn’t get to live while committing large chunks of their time to building their careers.

We must turn and face ourselves at midlife. We must stop running and finally listen to that inner voice which is trying, desperately, to get us to listen; perhaps for the first time in a long time. It dawns on us that we are not the immortals we fancied ourselves in our youths to be. We recognize and sense our mortality and we have yearnings. We want to start living a life, instead of enduring one. Or, as Bruce Springsteen once said, “At some point, you have to stop thinking about the person you want to be and be that person.”

And maybe that’s what depression is about for some of us: painful symptoms that leak out because of un-reconciled parts of us demanding to be heard and lived. If the central concern of the first half of our lives is building up our resumes of success, maybe the second half of life is a deeper search for meaning and purpose. For me, the unlived life has recently found expression as a writer. I feel meaning in writing about things flowing through the deeper currents of life; in sharing my insights, musings and struggles with you.

Stress, Depression and Our Bodies

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Working as a lawyer and struggling with clinical depression is tough. I know, because I deal with both every day. In a peculiar sense, it’s really like having two full-time jobs that absorb all of our time. As we know, the daily demands and stress of our jobs as lawyers are often unremitting: Deadlines to meet, phone calls to return, and that motion to argue in Court the next morning. We often feel that others who aren’t lawyers really don’t understand us and our work because they haven’t walked in our shoes.

The “job” of being depressed seems to parallel my experience as a lawyer. A common experience of feeling depressed is feeling alone and isolated. When people who care about us reach out to help, there are times we push them away out of a sense of bitterness, thinking: “You really don’t know what it’s like to be a lawyer”.

Yet, there may come a time when we might want to begin seeing depression and our vocation as lawyers a little differently. Not as two jobs, but really one. The one job is to find a way to take care of ourselves. Mother Teresa once said that what God expects of humanity is that we be “a loving presence to one another.” Taking that further, I would suggest what God equally expects is for us to be a loving presence to ourselves.

In any law firm, the barometric pressure of stress rises and falls frequently. Consequently, we often find it difficult to be a “loving presence” to ourselves: to eat well, exercise, get enough sleep, and nurture a support structure of good friends. The gale-force winds of stress, burnout and depression can begin blowing and disconnect us even from this basic agenda. Yet, if we are to regain our health in the midst of chronic stress, burnout and depression, we must return to these basic concerns because these maladies afflict our minds and our bodies. Our physical state -our precious bodies- gets hammered by the unremitting punishment which they dish out. I have often described my depression to friends as “wet cement running through my veins.”

The biochemical imbalance that is so often a part of depression affects every part of our physical makeup: our eating, our weight, our energy level, and our ability to sleep. How can we realistically hope to “feel better,” to regain the healthy ground that depression has knocked us off, if we don’t offer a loving presence to our tired and afflicted bodies left unbalanced, weakened and fatigued in depression’s wake?

Being a loving presence to our bodies is like being a loving parent. We need to pause – and to have a support structure of people who remind us to pause – to ask ourselves what is good for our bodies. My family doctor once told me that our bodies are like giant tape recorders that remember everything we have done to them. Too little sleep, too much stress, not enough exercise tells our body that we simply don’t care and/or don’t have the time for it. This pattern can have catastrophic consequences when depression hits because the body that we need to help us is not fully able to be our ally. Because it has been ignored, it is of little help to fight depression and actually participates in it. Anti-depressant medication can be a way, especially in the beginning, to begin to soothe our bodies, to calm our minds enough, so that we can begin thinking of how we are going to rebuild that loving relationship with our bodies.

One of my favorite parts of the Bible comes from the Old Testament, the Twenty Third Psalm. To me, it speaks about the journey: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.” All humans must make this journey. We must all “walk through the valley” of a life which is certain to have its victories and times of happiness, but also its stunning defeats and times of deep sorrow. The shape of those victories and defeats take a particular form for lawyers. Even more so for lawyers who struggle with depression. The valley can feel more like a deep trench with no way out. Our bodies can feel buried in this trench with no light or air able to penetrate depression’s paralyzing weight. Yet, there are steps each of us can take to begin our climb out of this hole. In my experience, our bodies are like the ladders propped against the trench of depression. The great Psalm tenderly says to us that we are not alone; God is there with us in the deepest darkness. Yet, I would also suggest that our bodies are there for us also, waiting to assist us in our journey towards wholeness.

Suicide: The Death of a Law Student

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I am Chair of the Committee to Assist Lawyers With Depression in Erie County. Our committee is producing a documentary about depression in the legal profession. It will be made available to Bar Associations, legal organizations and law schools around the country later this fall. As part of this project, I headed off to New York City last week to interview some remarkable people. One of them was Andrew Sparkler.

Andrew is a lawyer in Manhattan who graduated from Fordham Law School four years ago. During his first year, he met a remarkable young man named David Nee. David is shown in the photograph above sitting between two of his law school friends.

David went to one of the finest preparatory schools in the country, Princeton University and then to Fordham. In my interview, Andrew told me that David was happy-go-lucky, the life of the party and always sought to make others feel comfortable. He was brilliant, often not having to study for exams and still getting good, if not great, grades. Something, however, changed during his Third Year of law school – at least in his friends eyes. David would disappear for weeks on end. When friends called him, he didn’t phone back. When he finally showed up, he always had some sort of plausible excuse.

Shortly after law school graduation, while studying for the Bar exam, David Nee died by suicide. In a note which he left, he said that he had been struggling with depression since he was fourteen years old. This poor soul, I thought. On the outside, he seemed so happy and carefree; on the inside, stuck in the dark world of depression.

Andrew Sparkler, his friends and family were devastated by David’s death. Why didn’t they know he was depressed? They decided to remember David by forming the David Dawes Nee II Foundation, a not for profit created to educate law students about depression and suicide. What a noble effort that deserves our praise and support.

Dave (not his real name) is in his late fifties and had battled depression most of his life. One day, he was driving his usual route to work. As the car sped by him, all he could feel was the pain of his existence. He suddenly got off the Niagara Falls exit. Once there, he parked his car. He got out, took off his shoes, socks and watch. He was methodical. He was a good lawyer after all. He thought of his wife and what his death would do to her. He called his best friend who got him into a psychiatrist that afternoon where he was immediately put on antidepressants and went into counseling.

In her best-selling book, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, psychologist, Kay Redfield Jamison states:

“Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense, and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death not uncommonly is violent and grisly.”

Jamison, who also suffers from depression, notes that there is a suicide every 17 minutes in this country. Identifying suicide as an often preventable medial and social problem, Jamison focus attention on those under 40 (suicides by those who are older often have different motivations or causes according to her book). Citing research that suicide is most common in individuals with mental illness (diagnosed or not), particularly depression, she clearly describes the role of hormones and neurotransmitters as well as potential therapies. Click here to hear an interview with Dr. Jamison on the Charlie Rose show.

Given that lawyers suffer from depression at a rate twice that of the national average and that the number one cause of death of middle aged lawyers is suicide, I believe that the legal profession must face this issue. It isn’t as if lawyer suicide is a sometime sort of thing. It happens a lot. Even one is too many.

The point here is not to be depressing by addressing suicide. The point is to speak up about just how dangerous depression is. It just isn’t just a mental illness; it’s also a killer.

A recent news article reported that 27 million American are on antidepressants – a staggering figure. Given the strong connection between depression and suicide, how can we avoid a frank discussion on this topic?

For more information, support and resources, check out the American Association of Suicidology.

I welcome everyone’s comments on this important topic.

It’s Just Cancer – Get Over It.

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I arrived in New York City’s JFK Airport yesterday. My family and I are visiting friends over the weekend. While walking through the terminal, I saw a large advertisement from the Depression Is Real Coaliation. If you haven’t heard of this organization, check out their website. The ad read as follows:

YOU’D NEVER SAY, “IT’S JUST CANCER, GET OVER IT”. So why do some say that about depression?

When I first developed depression over seven years ago, at least five people told me to “get over” or “snap out of” it. Get over or snap out of “what” I often thought. I searched my mind for some frame of reference.

When people are too preoccupied with themselves and their problems, we have all thought or told them to end their narcissistic nonsense. “Life isn’t so bad. So stop complaining,” is our common refrain. We judge them to be selfish, inconsiderate or even burdensome. Yet, were such people suffering from a physical illness – say cancer, diabetes or heart disease – we would never imagine saying such a thing for fear of being thought cruel, rude or simply ignorant.

Sadly, all too often, people treat people with depression as if they don’t have an illness, but a problem of self-absorbtion. And for people who have experienced the Black Dog, they know exactly what I am talking about. Such comments make us doubt ourselves: “maybe I am just a complainer,” or “I’m just selfish.” But deep down, we may sense otherwise. If we do, we know that something is seriously amiss.

Critical comments from others made me feel like the accused. I imagined what must have been going through their minds: “You’re faking it. Now let’s get back to the business of practicing law.” They just didn’t seem to believe me. That didn’t believe that I had a chemical imbalance in my brain, that it wasn’t my fault and that this had made me sick – very sick.

In the beginning of my journey, I wanted everyone to understand me. I wanted them to just say, “It is okay, Dan. You have a medical illness and need treatment.” Sometimes this happened and sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t, I felt hurt and even angry. I thought, “Just step in my shoes for an hour and you’ll know that what I’m experiencing is true.” We need to be careful who we choose to expect sympathy from. Make no mistake about it, we need allies when we are in a depression. Most often, it will come from other depressives who have “walked the walk,” people who have known and loved others with depression, or just big-hearted, everyday people.

In his book, Against Depression, psychiatrist, Peter Kramer, M.D., takes an unflinching account of the illness that is depression. Check out his Blog. Kramer cites a number of scientific studies linking depressive symptoms with abnormalities in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex of the brain. Kramer also emphasizes that depression is more than a brain disease. “It is a neurologic, hematologic and cardiovascular disease. Overactivation of stress pathways causes a liability to clots and [heart] arrhythmias – and along or together, they predispose to heart attacks, silent strokes, disturbed mood and sudden death”, he wrote. Listen here to Dr. Kramer being interviewed by National Public Radio.

Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., author of the best-selling book, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn’t Teach You and Medication Can’t Give You, makes clear why depression should be likened to other major medical illnesses:

“Heart disease is a good analogy to major depression. Heart disease is “caused” by a complex of factors, including a genetic predisposition, emotional factors like how we handle stress, and habits like diet and exercise. You don’t catch heart disease from an infection. You develop it gradually, over time, as plaque builds up in your arteries. Once you cross an invisible threshold marked by standards of blood pressure and cholesterol levels, you have heart disease . . . . Depression may be a similar threshold disease – genetic and biochemical factors may determine a different level of stress for each of us that, once reached, puts us over the edge into depression.”

It is critical to remember that depression isn’t your “fault.” However, it’s equally important to remember that it’s your responsibility. We must take responsibility to get better and stay that way. Yes, the critical judgments of others hurt. That’s why it is imperative to not go through this alone. Join a depression support group. They have also dealt with the judgments of others. There truly is strength in numbers.

Spiritual Hope – A Postscript

I have been listening to a wonderful audio interview with author/educator, Parker Palmer produced by a company called, Sounds True. Check out their website. Its catalog of authors address wellness, meditation, spirituality and personal growth is simply amazing.

Parker is currently 70 years old and a Quaker. In the interview, he recounts the three major episodes of clinical depression he went through during his life. He said some insightful things to say about those experiences. He doesn’t believe in “formulas” or “How-to-Lists” to cope with depression. He speaks about depression in the context of his spirituality:

“Perhaps, the answer is that my ravaged mind rails against even the idea of God, but something deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. ‘There are no foxholes,’ I guess, and depression is the deepest and deadliest foxhole I’ve been in. It may be the ‘dark night of the soul’ that the mystics talk about but in depression it is not so much that one becomes lost in the dark as that one becomes the dark. I have never been able to ‘do theology’ when I am in this state; the best I’ve been able to do is hang on. Only later, in the light of day, am I able to understand that God walked with me in the darkness even though I could not feel God’s presence at the time.”

Later, he talks about how he survived his depression: he “slogged through it.” And maybe, sometimes, that’s all we can do. While we may feel that a depression will never end, it’s important to remember that it always does and we can use that knowledge to slog through it.

A Spiritual Sense of Hope

In my previous Blog, I looked at hope from a psychological perspective. This writing will focus on the spiritual dimension of hope and the experience of depression.

Hopelessness is a common feature of depression. During the depths of my episodes, it was my constant companion. I believe that hopelessness is strongly connected to a sense of helplessness: no matter how sincere or noble our efforts to overcome depression, we don’t. We hit a wall; a wall of spiritual darkness. In this space, there is the sense that God doesn’t care about us, that he has abandoned us, or that he doesn’t even exist. If he does exist, why would he allow me and others to suffer so? It is the pointlessness of our suffering which seems so hard a cross to bear.

Barbara Crafton, minister and author of the book, “Jesus Wept,” captures this sense of sorrow:

“Religious people want there to be meaning in everything. Randomness is hard on us: that things just happen for no reason sometimes brings us closer than we want to be to the possibility that we’re not central to much of anything . . . . And so we hope and expect the universe to have a message for us. Let there be something just for me, we pray and expect, something that will make it all make sense. A plan.

And yet, the crushing weight of depression lies precisely in the meaninglessness that characterizes it. A flat voice within contradicts every hopeful thought: live with it long enough, and the hopeful thoughts don’t even bother surfacing. Muffled and parched, bereft of any vision that might ratify your journey or give it a reasonable goal, you trudge on and on for no particular reason other than that you know you’re supposed to.”

What is our spiritual response to this state of affairs? As we drift out to sea, we long for a voice that will show us a way home. We may go long periods of our lives with no such beacon. And then, it happens. We have a sense of God’s presence in the midst of our pain. Jesus certainly understood such pain. Contrary to the movement in some Christian circles to paint Him as a salesman of happiness, he was a man “well acquainted with sorrow.” His life suggests that in a spiritual life we are not changed from some sad state into, necessarily, a happy one. That’s not the point. God doesn’t want some happy, well-adjusted and self-satisfied person per se. He wants a real and authentic person. Such authenticity often comes at a very high price. We must walk through suffering.

The Twenty Third Psalm says:

Even though I walk

through the valley of the shadow of death,

I shall fear no evil,

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff,

they comfort me.

In one form or another, all humans most walk through “the valley of the shadow of death.” There is simply no escaping the profound experience of suffering. Depression is one such form of suffering. It is a valley; a trench from which we so often feel there is viable exit. During depression we stop walking through that valley. We are immobilized by our pain and can’t step forward. The “rod and staff” of God, however, tells us that depression is a “shadow”. It doesn’t have the final say. God does. We must not stay stuck in the valley, but keep walking.

As we walk through our days, what are rods and the staffs that comfort us? If they are the false sirens of success – of money, status symbols and power – they may temporarily satisfy us. But they won’t sustain us. At some point – it is hoped – we will recognize them for the phantoms that they are.

Whatever our spiritual orientation, chose a spiritual sustenance that isn’t borne of your small sense of self with its limited plans and agendas. But rather a grander hope and vision of which we are intimately connected to. A view of ourselves not distorted by depression, but by how God views us. We are indeed precious in his sight, His children. We can hope in his vision and plans for us.

In closing, sustenance for the day from Saint Ignatius Loyola:

O Christ Jesus,

when all is darkness

and we feel our weakness and helplessness,

give us the sense of Your presence,

Your love, and Your strength.

Help us to have perfect trust

in Your protecting love

and strengthening power,

so that nothing may frighten

or worry us,

for, living close to You,