New York City Finds One in Five Adults Has Mental Health Problems

Reuters reports, “At least one in five adult New Yorkers, or about 8.4 million residents, suffer from depression, substance abuse, suicidal thoughts or other psychological disorders every year, according to a report released on Thursday ahead of Mayor Bill de Blaiso’s new mental-health initiative.” Read the News

 

Depression is a Thief: It Steals the Stuff You Love

Depression is a thief. It sneaks into your heart and steals from you your passion: not only your power to conjure enthusiasm but also those exact things that once, that maybe all your life, excited you.

In other words, those things you loved not in the sparkly-pink-hearts sense of kissing or strolling along the beach with them or wearing white lace gowns to marry them — although in some cases, those too: Depression whooshes in through open windows, easily as any breeze, then yoink! 

Burglary victims, stickup victims: Unlike us, they realize they’ve been robbed.

All my life, until last year, I was very interested in very many things. The vastness of these interests made my childhood bedroom a museum, piled with barometers, feathers, halfpennies and fossils. So numerous were my passions that picking one as a college major or career felt like infidelity: Becoming a Wild West historian meant not becoming a marine biologist. Mastering Japanese meant not mastering Danish (weird, I know) or breeding dragonflies. Designing hats meant not being a forest ranger or parapsychologist or ethnomusicologist or bonsai gardener or gemologist. Instead of choosing one, I chose to write about them all, and more, and so went 30 years.

Then whoosh. After a lifetime spent looking things up, looking at things, spinning rapturous anecdotes about gold prospectors and sunken ships, last year these topics that had so thrilled me that I mistook them for myself lost all their light. They existed: France did not roll up like a rug and vanish. Sea chanteys were not erased from history. But suddenly I saw these things I’d loved the same way I’d always seen math and sports: as flat, alien realms irrelevant to me.

On shelves, polished agates and haiku volumes mocked me. In the world, all sumptuosity vanished from surfboards and cinnamon rolls. My keyboard rapidly became an enemy. Writing — shimmering reefs of detail, one deft word — was also yanked away, leaving me blinking blankly at my hands which long wrought fun and wonder and a living but now produced less and less, plus every word they typed felt like a lie. Which is to say: a sin.

Discussing boredom bores, as every poet knows. So — those who’ve never been there, I will spare you. Those who have, and are: Accept my fellowship. Get help. Last year I noticed certain friends avoiding me because, sans hilarious narwhal factoids and bone-marrow narratives, I was puzzlingly dull.

But I feel somewhat better now, so I can warn: Depression is a thief. It steals intangible yet priceless things. We have every right to shout I want my stuff back.

Stolen jewels you might replace. Stolen cash you can report to the cops. Stolen cars sometimes track their stealers via GPS. Passions, though. “Excuse me, officer, I’ve lost my enthusiasm, yearning, creativity and curiosity. I’ve lost interest in archery and baking. Oh, and also in bringing my kids to beaches. A marauder took it. Catch that thief! Issue an all-points bulletin!”

To whom do you report stolen interest in Tanzanian politics, preference for oolong over keemun, preoccupation with stars if you’re an astronomer?

Report them to your therapist, if you have one. But if you don’t? Because you haven’t yet assessed your losses? Because you think they’re your fault?

To whom, then? Partners? Friends? See, that’s the thing. These passions we’ve lost were what bonded us to them. Worse, if our friends and partners are themselves those passions — well.

Depression is a cruel thief that raids your heart, your home, your future, your present, your past. It steals your most precious possessions not to keep or use or give away or sell but just because they’re there. Those loves for which you lived become loot burning by the wayside. This is stealthy, silent theft that masquerades as aging, failure, sulkiness, stupidity, ingratitude, unmindfulness, unwillingness to try. This is a monumental crime that masquerades as just another day.

Depression is a master thief that slips through gaps you never knew you had. As deft in daytime as in darkness, it wakes no watchdogs and it trips no alarms. It happens to the best of us.

Which is not to say I’m the best. It is a mere figure of speech. But we are legion, those of us who have been robbed in this manner stand here stolen-from, raising no chorus of outrage because most of us don’t know we’ve been robbed. We sensed neither warning nor denouement, no “OMFG” moment but a slow and subtle awareness: Huh. Where’s my awe? 

Another tricky aspect of depresssion’s thefts is that it leaves the shells of what it takes. And/or replaces stolen goods with holograms.

So we say: See? Nothing has changed. So celebrate! Seize every moment and rejoice! You’ve got nothing to cry about. No leprosy, no blindness. 

So for a while we sip coffee calmly in our homes which still seem full. See, there’s my laptop. There’s my child.

We tell ourselves we cannot have been robbed because our lives look as they did before — which, to the naked eye, was perfect.

All the while, depression runs in circles, laughing, long arms loaded with our stuff. Once — if — we realize we’ve been robbed, we scoff because our losses are all in our minds.

Which makes us say, in hopeful moments: This was not grand theft but a transition. Transformation. What was lost will be replaced with other, better things — as in tales whose frogs become princes and straw becomes gold. So maybe, hey: Instead of Danish, Cornish. Or no languages at all but … what? Chemistry? Shoes? My reluctance to write: Is this too not catastrophe but a cosmic shift, a breathless pause before I start to sing or sail instead?

Or will I write again, but about wildly different subjects, such as sports, or in some wildly different manner, such as rhyme?

By turns pompous and panicky, I pronounce my own anomie a holy threshold, a garlanded crossroads beyond which — behold.

Or not.

Yet.

I feel somewhat better now than last year, whose sleepless nights sent me crawling across carpets, tearing into bits not one but two paperback copies of The Secret Sharer, sobbing How can this be my life now? when that life looked like paradise and I thought: I will be punished for sorrow I cannot explain or justify. I’ll be given “something to cry about” for failure to snap out of this, failure to meditate, failure to write, failure to sleep. For not demanding and getting my stuff back, abracadabra, I will be penalized with injury or irony. On some bright day I shall be sickened. Stabbed. Because in 2014 I lost interest in 10,000 things.

But really, I feel somewhat better now. This geode glitters in the sun. I saw pelicans yesterday. My reluctance to write, my sense of having nothing to say anymore to anyone, scares me — and makes me, among other things, a stranger to myself.

Pssst: Depression doesn’t just steal. It also lies. In voices very like our own, which we mistake for ours, it asks: Why did you ever have such pointless passions anyway? They weren’t passions but pastimes, tools for killing time.

Depression says: You idiot. You brat. Depression says: I did not sneak into your heart and home and steal your loves: You lost them, scatterbrain. You let me in.

Copyright, 2015 by Anneli Rufus

Studies

NPR radio reports that the benefits of talk therapy for depression have been overstated in the scientific literature, according to a study in the journal PLOS ONE. The finding comes several years after a similar study reached the same conclusion about antidepressant drugs. Listen to the Story

 

Lawyers, Depression and Substance Abuse

From the website Attorney at Work, a great Q&A from James Kelleher, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Arizona, and Brian Cuban, a lawyer who has been open about his struggles with depression, substance abuse and other mental health issues.  Read the Blog

Dallas DA Sets Ethical Example with Depression Treatment

The website, Law360 reports: “When Dallas County’s district attorney took a leave of absence to treat serious depression — a problem that affects attorneys in disproportionate numbers to the general population — she faced calls for resignation, but experts say getting treatment and ensuring that any clients are taken care of is the ethical thing to do.” Read the News

How Much Should You Push Yourself with Depression?

Depression blogger, Therese Borchard writes: “In deciding whether or not to push yourself, you must first ask yourself if you are doing this thing — a job, a new class, having lunch with someone — because you WANT to do it, or for other reasons.”  Read the Blog

Pushing Back Against Depression

Depression will push our backs up against the wall. It often seems bigger than us: a bully. If we let it, it will pound us down. So, we’ve got to push back.

If we don’t fight back, together with the help of others, depression can consume our lives leaving only our pulse and some air in our lungs, but precious little else. The vitality, the passion and full array of emotions that make life worth living may be sucked up out of us as if by an alien ship from above.

There are many tools to fight depression. They can certainly help us regain our footing and make our lives functional and productive again. But isn’t life more than just about a return to “normal”? We all have dreams and aspire to live them. Theres’s something wild about dreams.  So often, they are outside our “normal”. And regaining them is a big part of recovery for it is these passions that bring us most fully alive in the cosmos. And we have to fight for our dreams.

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Just like fighting a bully, pushing back against depression takes courage. We have to reach deep down inside ourselves to listen to that part of our life force in us all that gives us the grit to say to depression,“no more”. We must say to ourselves, “I’m sick and tired of being ‘sick and tired’”.

When we’re ready to make some changes, we push the bully back. A small push in the beginning will do. We gain some space and separation from this goblin. We stop defining ourselves as a “depressed person,” as if our identity were wholly made up of our affliction. We are not our depression. It is a part, albeit a very painful part, of our lives. But it need not be all of it.

To fight back against depression, we need to empower ourselves to level the playing field. One of the best ways is learn mindfulness. With it, we gain detachment from our negative thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness teaches us that pessimistic thoughts and disturbing emotions are clouds passing in the sky, not reality.  Check out the excellent book, The Mindful Way Through Depression to learn more.

If we don’t buy into the depressed stories our minds spin out, we can begin to see them for what they are: puffs of cerebral and neurochemical smoke. We don’t have to buy into them.  We don’t have to live by that script.

This takes a lot of practice and we have to start slowing. This is, by no means, a quick “fix”. But in detaching ourselves from our mental jumble and the over reactive emotions that accompany my anxiety and depression, we gain freedom. We again have choices in life. We need not walk in the deep ruts of depression anymore.

And this is empowering.

Poet, Mary Oliver in her poem, “The Journey,”beautifully captures the sense of determination we need to recover from depression:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

 

 

 

Did You Know That Lawyers Suffer From Depression More Often Than the General Public?

The idea that lawyers shouldn’t have problems increases the sense of isolation for those suffering from this debilitating disorder. People with depression often feel emotionally numb, empty and completely alone, even when surrounded by other people. Many lawyers who struggle with depression suffer in silence so as not to appear weak to colleagues.  The Washington D.C. Bar offers help.  Read the Blog

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