The wife of Robin Williams announced the other day that he was in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease. I suppose to a lot of folks, that made his suicide more understandable. I hope it also didn't also convince some that Depression is only a function of having a debilitating condition. Plenty of people reach that moment of "I can't live any longer" without Parkinson's or anything that might sound like a clear rationale. Plenty of people also, of course, live very decent, sunny lives even with degenerative diseases.
I received a number of messages on all these topics and I thought I'd share a few. The folks who sent them didn't specify if I should include their names or not but I think I'll leave them all off. Here's the first one…
Mark, with all due respect, what you describe as feeling in your blog article is not depression. It's grief. Two completely different things that result from and in completely different brain activities and chemical actions. It seems to me you're trying to use this anecdote as a way to empathize with those suffering from depression and to say, "here's how I deal with what I think depression is like."
Mark, depression is not grief. It's not something that you can "snap out of" by watching a TV show. Grief passes with time, depression is a medical condition that is rarely "cured" without medical intervention. Yes, some people recover from depression spontaneously just as some people with cancer go into unexpected remission. But clinical depression, the kind that's so bad it causes suicidal ideation, cannot be alleviated by "thinking" or "feeling" your way out of. That was the point of "Mike's" e-mail: it's not that you "avoid" depression by compartmentalizing. The very fact that you can compartmentalize means that you don't have depression. If you did, you wouldn't, like Mike, be able to until a medical solution to the chemical imbalance was found.
Actually, your attempts to empathize seem to me to be based on the myth that depression can be "thought" or "felt" away, that with the proper will power, one should be able to "pull oneself out of it." And I hope you agree, Mark, that this is the very worst message that you can give a person in the hell of depression. Depression is a medical condition: it needs to be treated by a doctor, not by platitudes.
I agree, which is why I made clear that I'd never suffered from a real, prolonged depression. I also said, "I do know though that one should not rule out medical advice because a depression may have more to do than you think with the kind of thing a doctor can correct. Or it may not. The point is that if it's beyond your ability to solve, get help. Do not think you've failed if you have to get help. That's what help is there for."
If I didn't make it clear enough that I was not likening my few days of grief to the kind of genuine "down" that consumes people the way one apparently consumed Robin Williams, I'm sorry but this guy seemed to get it. I'm redacting the name of the drug he mentioned because I don't want to publish recommendations for specific drugs here. If you think you need a medication, have a doctor prescribe it. Don't figure out what drug you need from a weblog that also discusses Groucho impersonators and the evils of cole slaw…
Thank you for the story about coping with the loss of your friends. I have been through more extensive, serious therapy than you can imagine about similar problems and I need to be reminded constantly of something my therapists tried to emphasize. That is that even when everything seems bleak in your life and dark, it is usually possible to solve some part of some problem. Remembering that is one of the few reasons I am still here today.
Depression has a lot to do with believing that things are hopeless on every front and that every possible situation will end in the worst possible way. At times in my life, I refused to believe that I could solve any problems and that even when good things happened, they would eventually turn into disasters and negatives. It took [name of drug] to get all of my problem under control but it also helped that I was able to place individual elements on it in context and as you say, proper size and deal with them that way.
Lastly for now, this…
You wrote something that I have in the past discussed extensively with my doctor and his P.A. I have always felt that the root of my depression is that I am not successful and rich and famous. I was looking for doctors to give me a temporary fix for this because I believed that I was caught in a vicious circle. I was depressed because I was not successful and I believed I would be successful if I was not depressed. If I was able to function, I could finish and sell my novel.
I finally connected with a doctor who understood what I wanted but he cautioned me that it might not work out that way. I might overcome the depression and not be able to finish the book or I might finish it and not be able to sell it or I might get a publisher and then see the book not be a hit. As it turned out, even after I got over the black mood, I was not able to finish the book to my satisfaction. I have been able to deal with that. I think it has a lot to do with realizing that success was not a cure-all for depression. I am sad about Robin Williams but it is a good reminder to me that being successful may not solve my problem. I have to deal with it as I am.
I think I've strayed from the comfort areas of this blog so this may be the last post on the topic. All I really wanted to say was that if you're depressed or even just down, try to deal with it as a solvable problem. If it turns out not to be that, get thee to a doctor…and really, any doctor should be able to help you. If all you have is a dentist or a podiatrist, don't be afraid to tell him or her. They may not be able to treat you but they probably know someone who can, maybe even in the same building.
We now return to sillier subjects…