Hope Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Lawyers With Depression

Hope Has The Final Say: A Lawyer Shares His Pain

I made a new friend this week.

A lawyer from down south emailed me. He had found me through my website. He told me about some terrible and unexpected turns his life had taken recently which had plummeted him into a major depression.

I e-mailed him back and said that I would like to speak with him by phone.

I learned that his drop into the well of depression wasn’t his first experience with this terrible illness. He had gone through a bad episode twenty-five years ago, but since then nothing until his most recent crash.

During our thirty-minute talk, I felt the rawness of his pain in his voice. I recognized this sound all too well. It was the pain of depression.

He told me that the only respite he felt was when he fell asleep because it was only in this state of unconscious that he had some relief from the grinding wheels of depression.

I also learned that he was married, a father of four and had worked very hard for over twenty-five years as a lawyer. He was a Catholic who prayed often. He felt horrible about the pain and anxiety his depression had caused his wife and children. He told me that he felt comfortable talking with me because I was a lawyer and someone who had been through depression. As we talked, his voice became a little lighter and his tone a bit more optimistic.

I don’t attribute to anything I did.

Instead, I see it more as a testament to this central truth about life on earth: It is in sharing with one another our stories that we heal.

And I believe that we’re all called to be healers of one another.

And in listening to one another’s stories, we learn that suffering doesn’t have the final say.

And in this truth, we find hope.

The Prisoner of Stress: What Does Anxiety Mean?

From Louis Menand at The New Yorker Magazine, a review of the new book “My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind” by Scott Stossel. Read the News

Lawyers With Depression: Crawling Towards Hope

The lack of hope is one of the most powerful features of clinical depression.

Why this is so is a complicated question to answer. For lawyers struggling with depression, perhaps even more so.

A lot of people, including lawyers themselves, find it hard to understand why such powerful professionals, superheroes and heroines in blue suits, would be afflicted with depression in the first place.

Yet, the numbers don’t lie.

Studies show that lawyers have twice the rate of depression of the general population. When put in context, that means 240,000 of this country’s 1.2 million lawyers are struggling with depression right now.

Why, some think, would lawyers, armed with intelligence, perceived wealth (whether true or not) and a take-no-prisoners fighters’ edge succumb to such a dire condition?

The Answer: Because depression simply doesn’t work that way.

The truth is that smarts might not matter much; wealth, while helpful to provide resources otherwise not available, does not guarantee recovery. And adversarial toughness? This trait might be more of a cause of depression than a shield because many lawyers’ believe that the remedy is to just “suck it up” or think their way out of their pain. But these strategies don’t work. They simply fall on depression’s deaf ears.

Because most folks don’t expect lawyers to suffer from depression, they tend to search for different explanations for a lawyer’s downcast affect. They often believe they’re suffering from “the blues”; or, worse yet, a failure of will to push themselves out of it. One survey found that over forty-percent of Americans see depression as a failure of such will. One can only imagine how much higher that figure would be for lawyers who people feel should be able to fight themselves out of just about anything.

Depression Isn’t the Blues

It’s normal to feel the blues: a bittersweet type of sadness that colors our lives from time to time. Blues music is popular given the universal nature of this experience. But while sadness and the blues are inevitable parts of life, clinical depression is not. The most significant difference between sadness and depression is that someone that’s sad goes about their daily business without much trouble. Depression, however, involves significant impairment in one’s ability to carry out daily task at work and home. Other differences between the blues and depression include the length of time the sadness endures and whether or not there are other symptoms associated with depression, which are tagging along with the perpetual sadness.

Dr. Richard O’Connor, in his deeply insightful book Undoing Depression, captures some of the difference between the two:

Everyone has had a taste of what depression feels like. Everyone feels the blues at times. Sadness, disappointment, fatigue are normal parts of life. There is a connection between the blues and depression, but the difference is like the difference between the sniffles and pneumonia.

“Why Don’t You Take a Vacation?”

When I was diagnosed with major depression over twelve years ago, I needed to take some time off from my hectic job to allow the antidepressants my psychiatrist had prescribed to take effect. I called a meeting to tell my three partners about my diagnosis and need to take a break. Until such time, they hadn’t known I was suffering from depression. Yes, my production was down and I closed my office door a lot more often. Maybe a little tired or burnt out, but what lawyer didn’t sometimes feel that way?

After hearing me lay it all out on the table, one of my law partners at that time said, “What the hell do you have to be depressed about? You’re the managing partner of a successful firm with a beautiful family. Why the hell don’t you just go on vacation?” The subtext on his stinging judgment and solution to my situation was that if only I were more “grateful” for the good things in my life, including my success in the law, I wouldn’t be feeling so “depressed”.

Little did he know how grateful I was for all the good things that life had bestowed on me. But no matter how many times I knelt on my church’s pews thanking God for my blessings or made a list of things to feel happy about, the specter of depression just wouldn’t leave me. It was my constant companion.

Like most people who have never gone through major depression, my partner simply had no reference point for what I was going through. He thought of depression as sadness: a series of bad days that would benefit from an all-inclusive vacation to Jamaica sipping Margaritas by the pool.

However, I was depressed even on vacations. The sun and surf weren’t pleasurable; they were painful. They reminded me of what I had lost: the ability to enjoy life, to appreciate the beauty of nature and the capacity to connect with my family who I loved so dearly.

The response of my partner, I was to find, was typical. It made me feel more hopeless and alone. I felt that apart from my psychologist and psychiatrist, few could understand. When really in the dirty trough of depression, I would think, “Nobody really understands.” I was adrift in a sea of melancholy with little hope of reaching dry land. Andrew Solomon, author of the best-selling book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression writes:

“When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.”

In the beginning of my illness, I didn’t recover from depression so much as survive it. I found myself crawling towards what hope I had left in me. At that point, the only thing that seemed to keep me going was the deep love for my wife and precious daughter.

That was it.

This beacon of love kept me trudging through depression, hoping that the heavy cloud of melancholy would someday dissipate so that that I could walk in the sun again.

While the antidepressants I was put on were no panacea, they became an important part of the solution for me. They didn’t obliterate the depression, but they kept me stable and prevented me from falling into the basement where I couldn’t function.

But medication wasn’t enough. And it isn’t for most depression suffers.

I needed to start thinking about how to live a better life and treat myself differently. My psychologist once called depression “crooked thinking”. I tended to catatrophize everything by more often seeing problems as unsolvable and conflicts a matter of life and death. When I lost a case, I would take it personally, I was a bad lawyer, and even a worse, a person who didn’t measure up. A loser. I didn’t realize that I was punishing myself. I didn’t realize that this was a choice and I could stop.

I began to feel like I didn’t have to go on this way anymore. I came to believe that problems could be solved and that outcomes weren’t always in my control.

I began to hope.

Copyright, Daniel T. Lukasik, 2014

The Tunnel of Depression

Depression makes a person’s world very small and narrow. During a depressive episode, he enters a long tunnel of despair; a dark passageway encasing him in its concrete walls. If he can see an exit, it is in the far distance, a sliver signifying a long and arduous journey ahead.

The tunnel constricts his vitality, his link to the world which isn’t all doom and gloom; where miracles and beauty and goodness are happen, But he cannot see it, cannot perceive the actuality of such events. His reactions to these events is often sadness; a despair borne of his inability to feel the happiness of such things. There is also a sense of hopelessness because the failure to enjoy such things isn’t just temporary. He feels it’s permanent. He will never feel the joy of a great vacation, a heart-felt complement or the glow of a child’s sweet face.

As he travels the tunnel, it can close in on him. He can feel suffocated; that he will die of asphyxiation before he blows out the other side of the tunnel. His breath feels like it is being sucked out of his lungs. He just doesn’t have the stamina to continue. But continue he must, if only on bloodied knees.

As long as you’re on your knees, it might help to pray. Abraham Lincoln, who suffered from depression his entire life, once wrote:

“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for the day.”

Lincoln knew all too well the tunnels of depression. But he kept going, kept persevering. And you will too.

Flashlights can help us in the tunnel as can wise guides or trusted friends; flashlights of skills about how to deal with depression before we go into the tunnel. One of the most important skills is the hard-won knowledge that there is a beginning, a middle and end to our depression — even if we don’t feel this is so at the time. A wise guide can be a therapist who can tell us what to expect and not to listen to the howling winds of depression that blow through the tunnel, to ignore the bats of doubt that live in the recesses of the walls. A trusted friend, can be someone who experiences depression him or herself, but is well enough at the time to walk through the tunnel with you, step by step.

While flashlights don’t light up the whole tunnel, don’t make the depression magically go away, they do provide a beam of concentrated light that burns through that darkness and provides a path, a walkway to an opening that is the end of the experience of a depressive episode.

Often, folks with depression can see the entrance to the tunnel and are heart-struck with a sense of real dread. Having experienced depression before, they know just how bad the journey will be once they’re through the portal. But they are pulled, as if from a rope emanating from the dark reaches of the tunnel, into depression. Attempts to turn around work sometimes.

Sometimes we are strong enough. Sometimes, we have the strength to override the gravitational pull of the tunnel.

But sometimes we don’t. And in this sense, it’s confounding. Because if we can do it sometimes, why can’t we do it all the time? Maybe that’s part of the mystery of depression. Because sometimes, even when armed with the best of skills, we still must enter the tunnel of depression.

But we must always remember the bright light that awaits us on the other side.

11 Years

From the blog Depression Marathon, a writer takes stock of her 11 year journey with depression. Read the Blog.

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,

we shall see Your hand,

Your purpose, Your will through all things.

Amen.

A Place Called Hope

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope – Martin Luther King

As renowned pessimists, lawyers struggle to be hopeful. One veteran litigator told me yesterday his definition of hope: getting up the next morning and, “hopefully,” having the energy to survive the day. But this type of hope is more about avoidance; the draining sense of dread people feel when they are working at maximum capacity and just barely staying on top of all of it. As lawyers, we need a more expansive sense of hope; of what hope is and how it can positively affect our lives as lawyers.

Hope, in its best sense, is a positive motivator in our lives. Psychologist, C.S. Snyder, in his 1990’s book “The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here,’ defined hope as a “motivational construct that let one believe in positive outcomes, conceive goals, develop strategies, and muster the motivation to implement them”. He actually invented a measuring tool and test called the “Hope Scale.” He discovered that “low hope” people have ambiguous goals and work towards them one at a time while “high hope” people often worked on five or six clear goals simultaneously. Hopeful people had definite routes to their goals and alternate pathways in case of obstacles. Low scorers did not.

More recently, psychologist Anthony Scioli expanded Snyder’s definition of hope and created his own “Hope Index.” According to Scioli, hope has a powerful spiritual (and transpersonal) dimension. From this perspective, hope includes patience, gratitude, charity, and faith. In a previous article from Martin Seligman, Ph.D. posted on the Lawyers with Depression website, the issue of lawyer optimism/pessimism was discussed. Scioli makes an interesting distinction between hope and optimism. In an article from the magazine Spirituality & Health, he put it this way:

“Faith is the building block of hope. Above all, it is based on relationships, on a collaborative connection with people as well as their higher power, as distinct form optimism, which is connected to self-confidence. True hope also differs from denial, which is really false hope, an avoidance of reality.”

Scioli’s newest book, “Hope in the Age of Anxiety,” coming out in September of 2009, takes square aim at how hope helps us deal with anxiety on both a psychological and physiological level:

“Hope represents an adaptive ‘middle ground’ between the over-activated ‘stress response’ [also implicated in depression] and the disengaged ‘giving-up complex’. At a physiological level, hopefulness can help to impart a balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity while assuring appropriate levels of neurotransmitters, hormones, lymphocytes, and other critical health-related substances. Equally important, a hopeful attitude may permit an individual to sustain this healthy internal environment in the presence of enormous adversity.”

While Scioli’s research and writing is focused on the broader themes and benefits of hope, other psychologists have addressed how “hope therapy” can help those who suffer with depression. In an article from MSN, psychologist, Jenniefer Cheavens said:

“We’re finding that hope is consistently associated with fewer symptoms of depression. And the good news is that hope is something that can be taught, and can be developed in many of the people who need it.” Hope has two components according to Cheaven – a map or pathway to get what you want, and the motivation and strength to follow that path.

In another article fromWebMD, Cheaver notes how hope therapy is different from other more traditional forms of therapy: “. . . hope therapy seeks to build on strengths people have, or teach them how to develop those strengths. We focus not on what is wrong, but on ways to help people live up to their potential.” According to other researchers associated with the hope studies, people with high hope possess these “components of hope”:

Goals: They have long-and short-term meaningful goals.
Ways to reach those goals: A plan or pathway to get there and the ability to seek alternative routes, if needed.
Positive self-talk, similar to the little red engine from the children’s book, telling themselves things like “I think I can.”

I have often thought of hope as something that just happens. But this research suggests otherwise. As lawyers who deal with adversity, stress and, all too often suffer from depression, it’s wise to ponder the role that hope plays in our days. Consider where you fall on the “hope index.” Learn more about how you can develop the skills of being a hopeful person. For further reading, check out this great article by lawyer, Dave Shearon called, “Hope about Lawyer Happiness” and another article by Leland Beaumont called, “Hope: This Can All Turn Out for the Best.”

My next blog will look at the spiritual dimension of hope.