August 21, 2004
-
Topic: New York Times Magazine article on depression on Japan
If you get your hands on the article, it’s an interesting one to read. I don’t have it in front of me right now, but i’ll try to tell you what i remember and got from it. First of all, up until recently, Japan didn’t even have a word for depression. The word they have now translates to something like a leaky soul, since they’re a more spiritually based society. Anyways…while any society is going to have “depressed” people, and i don’t mean in any way to simplify the symptoms of what depression is, but it’s interesting how America has taken the lead in labeling it a disease, a medical condition. Japan is catching up quick, and while it is true that meds can help depression, many will recognize that there’s no clear-cut way to determine whether being in a bad mood leads to a chemical change in the brain, or whether a chemical change in the brain leads to being in a bad mood (again, bad mood is simplifying the problem, i apologize).
The problem w/ the medical boom is that it takes attention away from some soceital aspects of depression. People feel lonely and get diagnosed depressed. Perhaps our living environments need to be more carefully examined. People feel depressed as a result of low self-esteem caused by comparing themselves. Maybe our competitive society, and a society that dictates what’s acceptable to do and not do is to blame.
Let’s look at depression another way. You pop some happy pills, as a clinically depressed and occassionally suicidal friend of mine has called them. At the same time, what are you doing. You’re either sitting in therapy, or worrying about school most likely if you’re under 22, or you’re worrying about what 9-5 job you’re going to work if you’re over 22. I’ll tell you, the people I met while traveling, people who are willing to live on a dime, but are also living on vacation for an extended period of time, are some of the happiest people i’ve ever met. I mean, if you want to diagnose depression as a medical state of being, than people who travel should be diagnosed as being happy as a medical state of being. It’s a completely different lifestyle, free of any of the pressures that never leave our back in normal society.
So…that’s my diagnosis for depressoin. Lifestyle change. One person in the article on depression in Japan stated how going on a fast in the woods helped cure his depression. It’s not like curing cancer, curing depression has to be done through a change of mindset. It requires something spiritual and natural like being in nature, like a fast, like a break from the society that has both caused and diagnosed the problem.
I remember spending an entire day in Hermanus, a coastal town in South Africa, just staring at the waves crashing into the cliffs. If I was there this fall, I’d be privilaged to see tons of Southern Wright whales all along that coast, but, although it wasn’t the right season, I was still sitting along one of the most peaceful and beautiful stretches of S. Africa I had seen (actually, I wouldn’t call it one of the most, the entire coast of S. Africa is beautiful). Anyways…i remember thinking to myself, “this place is a cure for depression.” You sit for as long as you want. You move when you want. You eat some of the $1 yet delicious raisin loaf that you bought whenever you want. You go back to meet interesting people at the hostel whenever you want. And then the next day, you guessed it, you do whatever you want. While Harvard scientists will explain the science of depression and produce the medical cures, it’s going to take more of the penniless and more of the thirsty for lifers to produce the real cures for depression.
Comments (2)
You are right on. I think the depression problem in the U.S. is a spiritual problem. I always wonder why it is that we look inside ourselves for our problems and outside for our solutions. We need to turn that practice around and start looking more closely at what is going on outside of us. We live in a fragmented world that itself needs to be “examined,” like a patient, and we need to begin to spiritually reconnect ourselves to that world. The problems are not only within individual human beings, as the mental health system would have us believe. They are also outside, including within that same mental health system that judges our health. Individuals cannot continue to bear the burden of the blame. We will not become whole until we begin to examine the whole.
dan, thank you for posting about this. i have been battling depression/anxiety for many years now and i feel like sometimes it consumes my life. but then i can just take a trip to go visit my grandmother and i can seriously just sit with her all day and watch game shows and be completely content. i think it has to do with expectations, the fear of letting someone down, wondering why you’re not good enough, and asking why instead of just coping.