Nell Casey Archives - Lawyers With Depression

Other People’s Judgements About Our Depression

We all dish out opinions and advice whether asked for or not.

Much of it harmless; some, necessary and kind.

Then there’s those we dole out without knowing what the hell we’re talking about. Where we should tread carefully, we lumbar.

For better or worse, there’s tremendous power in words we use to express our opinions. When vulnerable – as we are during depression – the critical or misguided words of others take on the ring of gospel truth. Some may blame us for our depression.

In one poll, 54% of Americans said they thought of depression as a “personal or emotional weakness”. This explains much of stigma surrounding not only depression but all mental illness.

In a recent survey, what do 43.8 percent of women state as the Number 1 reason for not telling someone they were depressed?

“Others would think I am weak or think less of me.“

What do 57 percent state as their Number 1 reason?

“I believe I will get over it by myself”, followed by the same reason as women, the fear of being seen as weak, at 32 percent.

In the book, Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression, author Susanna Kaysen writes:

“The Failure of Will theory is popular with people who are not depressed. Get out and take your mind off yourself, they say. You’re too self-absorbed. This is just about the stupidest thing you can say to a depressed person, and it is said every day to depressed people all over this country. And if it isn’t that, it’s, shut up and take your Wellbutrin. These attitudes are contradictory. Conquer Your Depression and Everything Can Be Fixed by the Miracle of Science presuppose opposite explanations of the problem. One blames character, the other neurotransmitters. They are often thrown at the sufferer in sequence: Get out and do something, and if that doesn’t work, take pills. Sometimes they’re used simultaneously: You won’t take those pills because you don’t WANT to do anything about your depression, i.e. Failure of Will.”

Some just don’t think of it as the illness it is, but an excuse not to work hard.

Years ago, when I first told my three law partners that I was diagnosed with major depression and would need to take time off from work. They sat there stunned. After a moment of awkward silence, one partner said, “What in the world do you have to be depressed about? You’ve got a great job, wife, family and friends. Take a vacation!”

His anger humiliated me. “What’s wrong with me?” I thought.

I later learned that his reaction was, sadly, all too common. His judgment was that a lack of gratefulness was at the root of my distress. If only I jetted to Florida and sat under a palm counting my blessings, I would be depression-free.

For some time, these types of comments hurt me. They made me feel less-than. But after a while, they often made me angry. I thought, “What the hell do I have to do to be worthy of their mercy?” In retrospect, it wasn’t a question of my worthiness, but their ignorance. They didn’t have an emotional reference point for depression. They thought of it as stress, or, at worst, a bit of burnout. I recall a surgeon friend of mine (you would think that he, as a medically trained person, would know better!) telling me I was just in a “funk.” And then he said, “You want to see people who really have a right to be depressed? You should see the poor people with little money take two bus rides just to get to my office!”

Another painful innuendo. I had no right to be depressed, he must have thought. I was an upper-middle class professional, after all.

Some people (friends, family and business associates) will never be able to overcome the inertia of their own ignorance. They’re not bad people. It’s just the way life is. And we have to learn to be okay with that.

One of my best friends who has struggled with depression the past five years is frustrated by his wife’s lack of interest in talking to him about his depression. “Why doesn’t she love me, Dan?” “It’s not that she doesn’t love you,” I replied. “It might just be that she’s not capable of understanding in the way you want her to.”

But then there are others. These precious souls – and there don’t have to be lots of them – who have our back. They truly want to understand and help. Mother Teresa was once asked by a hard-boiled reporter what God expects of humanity. I think the reporter expected some stock answer. Mother Teresa, in all her gracious dignity, said that all God really wants from us to be is a “loving presence” to one another. There are those in our lives who want to be that presence to us.

Give them the chance to be that light.

Dan’s Top Ten Depression Books

Undoing Depression – Richard O’Connor, Ph.D.

This is the best book I’ve read on depression. Perhaps it’s more compelling than most books on this subject because Richard O’Connor, a therapist in New York City, has gone through major bouts of depression himself. Depression has often been compared to heart disease; an illness fueled by complex and interrelated factors: genetic, biochemical, environmental. In this book, O’Connor focuses on an additional factor often overlooked: our own habits. Unwittingly, we get good at depression. This book teaches us how to replace depressive patterns with a new and more effective set of skills. We already know how to “do” depression. And we can learn how to “undo” it. With a truly holistic approach that synthesizes the best of the many schools of thought about this painful condition, this book offers new hope, and new life, for sufferers of depression. Go to Dr. O’Connor’s website

The Noonday Demon – Andrew Solomon

Winner of The National Book Award following its release a decade ago, this is a beautifully written book by depression sufferer, Andrew Solomon. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, he not only helps us understand depression, but also the human condition. Go to Andrew Solomon’s website to read a chapter

The Mindful Way through Depression – J. Mark Williams, Ph.D.

Mindfulness, a simple yet powerful way of paying attention to your most difficult emotions and life experiences, can help you break the cycle of chronic unhappiness once and for all. It seems like every few days, there is a new book or article out on the power of mindfulness. Here, four uniquely qualified experts explain why our usual attempts to “think” our way out of a bad mood or just “snap out of it” lead us deeper into the downward spiral. Through insightful lessons drawn from both Eastern meditative traditions and cognitive therapy, they demonstrate how to sidestep the mental habits that lead to despair, including rumination and self-blame, so you can face life’s challenges with greater resilience. Jon Kabat-Zinn gently and encouragingly narrates the accompanying CD of guided meditations, making this a complete package for anyone seeking to regain a sense of hope and well-being. Go to a review and summary of this book

Listening to Depression – Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D.

I first read this book five years ago and was struck by its originality: depression isn’t just a disease to be fixed with medication and therapy, but a warning signal that our lives are off track and needs to be healed. In this sense, depression and its painful symptoms is a sort of unwelcome wisdom. Dr. Honos-Webb argues that we too often try to cut off or numb our feelings of depression instead of listening carefully to what they are telling us about our lives. Listening to Depression offers insightful ways to reframe depression as a gift that can help you transform your life for the better. Go to an interview with Dr. Honos-Webb

Lincoln’s Melancholy – Joshua Wolf Shenk

I am a little biased here. I am a lawyer and Lincoln is my hero. He not only was a great trial lawyer, but also struggled with depression his entire life. Giving shape to the deep depression that pervaded Lincoln’s adult life, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy reveals how this illness influenced both the president’s character and his leadership. Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health from the time he was a young man. Shenk draws from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of his unhappiness. In the process, he discovers that the President’s coping strategies—among them, a rich sense of humor and a tendency toward quiet reflection—ultimately helped him to lead the nation through its greatest turmoil. Go to the author’s excellent website about the book

Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression – James S. Gordon, M.D.

One of our country’s most distinguished psychiatrists and a pioneer in integrative medicine, Dr. Gordon believes that depression is not an end point, a disease over which we have no control. It is a sign that our lives are out of balance, that we’re stuck. It’s a wake-up call and the start of a journey that can help us become whole and happy, one that can change and transform our lives. Unstuck is a practical, easy to use guide explaining the seven stages of Dr. Gordon’s approach and the steps we can take to exert control over our own lives and find hope and happiness. Unstuck is designed for anyone who is suffering from depression, from mild subclinical depression (“the blues”) to its severest forms. Go to this PBS television intereview with Dr. Gordon

Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression – Nell Casey

The only book of its kind, Unholy Ghost is a unique collection of essays about depression that, in the spirit of noveliest William Styron’s Darkness Visible. Unlike any other memoir of depression, however, Unholy Ghost includes many voices and depicts the most complete portrait of the illness. With an introduction by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, Unholy Ghost allows the bewildering experience of depression to be adequately and beautifully rendered. The twenty-two stories that make up this book will offer solace and enlightenment to all readers. Go to an excerpt of the book

Depression is Contagious – Michael Yapko, Ph.D.

Dr. Yapko has identified the types of relationship patterns that lead to negative ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others and culls from the latest findings in neuroscience, social psychology, epidemiology, and genetics to provide a practical, proven plan for developing the skills and insights you need to forge stronger, healthier social connections and enjoy an enriching, interconnected life. While commonly prescribed drugs address some of depression’s symptoms, they cannot change the social factors that cause and perpetuate the disorder. By treating a social condition as though it’s a disease, the problems compound rather than diminish. The foundation for recovery is to build a healthy social life based on understanding what to expect from our relationships, what we should give, and how to relate to and accept others — skills that have been neglected by modern society. Dr. Yapko’s groundbreaking plan of action — filled with skill-building emotional and mental exercises, anecdotes, and illuminating explanations. Go to an article written by Dr. Yapko about his approach to treating depression

I Don’t Want to Talk About It – Terrence Real

Depression is a silent epidemic in men who hide their condition from family, friends, and themselves to avoid the stigma of depression’s “un-manliness.” Problems that we think of as typically male — difficulty with intimacy, workaholism, alcoholism, abusive behavior, and rage-are really attempts to escape depression. And these escape attempts only hurt the people men love and pass their condition on to their children. Real reveals how men can unearth their pain, heal themselves, restore relationships, and break the legacy of abuse. He mixes penetrating analysis with compelling tales of his patients and even his own experiences with depression as the son of a violent, depressed father and the father of two young sons. Go to a video of Terry talking about men and depression

What to Do When Someone You Love is Depressed – Mitch Golant and Susan Golant

There are few circumstances in life as hard and at the same time as important as being a friend to a person who is suffering from depression. What to Do When Someone You Love Is Depressed offers guidance to the friends and family of a depressed person on how to keep one’s own spirits up and at the same time do what is best to help a loved one get through a difficult time. Read an excerpt here

HONORABLE MENTION

The Zen Path through Depression – Philip Martin

Extremely accessible to people with little or no Zen experience as well as to longtime students of Buddhism, The Zen Path through Depression shows how the insights and exercises of Zen offer relief for those suffering from depression. Read an excerpt here

Beyond Blue – Therese Borchard

In this part memoir/part self-help, Therese Borchard, who blogs about depression at her site, Beyond Blue, endears herself to the reader and then reduces even the most depressed to laughter as she provides a companion on the journey to recovery and the knowledge that the reader is not alone. Go to her popular depression blog now

Get it Done When You’re Depressed –Julie A. Fast and John Preston, M.D.

When a depressed person can’t meet the expectations of society, the depression becomes worse and a vicious cycle begins. The goal of Getting Things Done When You’re Depressed is to break this cycle. Readers will learn how to prepare themselves mentally for working while depressed, how to structure their environment so they can work more easily, how to work with others and how to prevent depression. Go to an interview with the author

The 10 Best-Ever Depression Management Techniques – Margaret Wehrenberg, Ph.D.

What I like about this book is that it provides an overview of the some of the best techniques out there that scientists and therapist are using to help and heal people from depression. As Margaret Wehrenberg explains, you must first understand your brain. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience research presented in a reader-friendly way, Wehrenberg skillfully describes what happens in the brain of a depression sufferer and what specific techniques can be used to alter brain activity and control its range of disabling symptoms. Containing practical, take-charge tips from a seasoned clinician, this book presents the ten most effective strategies for moving from lethargy into action, taking charge of your brain, and breaking free from depression to find hope and happiness. Read an excerpt here

The Ghosts of Depression

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work, but I believe only in this moment of well-being. Unholy ghosts your are certain to come again – Jane Kenyon, Having It Out with Depression.

Halloween has always been one of my favorite times of the year. A time for remnants of Snickers bars still stuck between your teeth the next morning, carved pumpkins of the edge of decomposition and a chill in the spooky night that reminds you Winter is to come all to soon. As a child growing up in the country, my hooligan friends and I relished the chance to go knocking on the doors of neighborhood mothers’ in aprons doling out nocturnal goodies.

When satisfied with our sugar-laden sacks of booty, we would scamper to our local graveyard full of old tombstones. Once there, we would dare each other to run through as fast as we could, each privately fearing the claw of a bony hand that would pop out of a grave to drag us to some subterranean place where the dead lived and ate small children.

Walking home, we would walk by a neighbor’s house and swear that we’d seen Edgar Allen Poe looking out the window at the full moon.

A Paranormal Force

Ghosts don’t strike us as happy beings, unless it’s Casper The Friendly Ghost. They frighten us, haunt us. Depression has been referred to as a vile creature, an entity of sorts in our popular imagination. You have to look no further that the National Book Award winner, “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression” by Andrew Solomon. When I had depression years ago, I was told by a friend he understood that I had to “fight my demons.” As if I were the little girl possessed by Satan in The Exorcist. But he didn’t understand, really.

Depression is like a paranormal force, not something inside of our brains, but something outside of it. In a way, depression is a world inhabited by ghoulish ghosts that haunt us. They sporadically interrupt our lives and won’t leave us alone.

Ghosts are always people that have passed away. Often, these ghosts are haunting others because they’re not at peace. Maybe because they left something unsolved in this world. Or, maybe, because we have not let them go.

The Ghosts of Our Childhood

I think this is a crucial aspect of depression: the trouble letting go, the problem of forgiveness of those who have wronged us in the past.

Depression is a pressing down of sadness. A strategy doomed to failure if ever there was one. While many think of it as only as disease born solely of genetics, its archeological origins seem to have begun in the ghosts of our childhoods.

Researchers now know that many with adult-onset depression have had troubled childhoods of neglect or abuse. The nervous system is spooked by trauma and/or neglect which changes our neurochemistry and even the structure of the brain. Ghosts take up residence in the attics of the brain where they lounge around sipping tea cups of neurochemicals that we all need to feel happy. But just as importantly, trauma creates a well of sadness, terrible loss and wounding of the spirit that lives on with us into our adult lives.

Children who come out of such childhoods often spend a lot of their adult lives feeling like a part of them is missing. It’s a leak in their soul which can’t be plugged.

Elizabeth Wurztel, in her best-selling book, Prozac Diary, describes the difference between sadness and the zombie-like state major depression can create:

“That’s the thing I want to make clear about depression: It’s got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal—unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature’s part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.”

Psychologists can act as mediums at seances, seeking to welcome the dead into our presence so we can have it out with them and heal. We can finally let their voices go and live a life that is uniquely defined by the choices we make rather than the ones’ thrust upon us.

Psychiatrists strike me as more like Ghostbuster’s with ray guns of medication designed to blast the depression out of us.

In her book, Unholy Ghosts: Writers Write on Depression, Nell Casey has assembled various writers who write about their experiences with depression. The theme running through many of the writings is the dark, blank state of depression where the pain of it is actually the absence of feeling. One psychologist wrote that the opposite of depression isn’t happiness, it’s vitality. It’s the capacity to experience the full colorful palette of emotions that make up a normal human life.

For those who’ve experienced depression, they often run from it because they themselves fear becoming unholy ghosts.

But it’s ultimately in turning and facing the ghosts of depression that these phantoms lose the capacity to scare us, to truncate our emotional vibrancy. We can learn to see them for what they are: voices that aren’t true. Voices that can be left for dead.

The Weight of Advice

Each of us is a Dear Abby to the world. We dish out advice and opinions whether asked for or not; me included! Much of this is harmless; some necessary and kind. Then there’s the stuff we dole out without knowing what the hell we’re talking about. Where we should tread carefully, we plod along.

For better or for worse, there’s tremendous power in words. When we are vulnerable – as we are during a depression – the critical or misguided words of others take on the ring of gospel. Some may blame us for our depression in a ploy to get us to snap out of it. In one poll, 54% of Americans said that they thought of depression as a “moral weakness”.

Years ago, when I first told my four law partners that I was diagnosed with depression and would need to take time off, they sat there stunned. After a moment of awkward silence, one partner said, “What in the world do you have to be depressed about? You’ve got a great job, wife, family and friends. What do you need, a vacation?” This is an all too common response. His school of thought would argue that it was a lack of gratefulness that was at the root of my distress. Carried to its logical (or illogical) conclusion, we have control over our depressed state and if we only try harder by thinking positive thoughts, it will all go away.

In the book, Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression, author Susanna Kaysen says:

“The Failure of Will theory is popular with people who are not depressed. Get out and take your mind off yourself, they say. You’re too self-absorbed. This is just about the stupidest thing you can say to a depressed person, and it is said every day to depressed people all over this country. And if it isn’t that, it’s, Shut up and take your Prozac. These attitudes are contradictory. Conquer Your Depression and Everything Can Be Fixed by the Miracle of Science presuppose opposite explanations of the problem. One blames character, the other neurotransmitters. They are often thrown at the sufferer in sequence: Get out and do something, and if that doesn’t work, take pills. Sometimes they’re used simultaneously: You won’t take those pills because you don’t WANT to do anything about your depression, i.e. Failure of Will.”

These observations capture some of the angst – and yes, anger – of depressives. When I was struggling with other’s judgments about my depression, I thought, “What do I have to do to be worthy of their mercy?” In retrospect, it wasn’t a question of worthiness, but ignorance. Some people (friends, family and business associates) will never be able to overcome the inertia of their own ignorance. They’re not bad people. It’s just the way life is. And we have to learn to be okay with that. But then there are others. These precious souls – and there don’t have to be lots of them – who have our back. They truly want to understand and help. Mother Teresa was once asked by a hard-boiled reporter what God expects of humanity. I think the reporter expected some stock answer. Mother Teresa, in all her gracious dignity, said that all God really wants from us to be is a “loving presence” to one another. There are those in our lives who want to be that presence to us. Give them the chance to be that light.

Tag: Nell Casey

Other People’s Judgements About Our Depression

Dan’s Top Ten Depression Books

The Ghosts of Depression

The Weight of Advice

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