December 18, 2004
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topic: phases of life part 2
I figured out what drives me. Truth…or something like that. I think once you’ve been programmed with some form of logic, and you see something in the real world that slaps you in the face as being bogus and absurd, something emotional gets triggered (if only i were in a freagin’ school that would let me run with this idea and study it…one day i’ll be in a cool masters program that will, i’m sure of it)
Anyways…what re-triggered me this morning, was an article on depression. Depression is a mental illness characterized by loss of energy, changes in appetite, irritability, sleep problems, feelings of worthlessness, difficulty concentrating, and suicidal or morbid thoughts according to the American Psychiatric Association.
Shit…than I must have been depressed. I’m sure 100% of Americans at some point in their lives could have been diagnosed depressed. Just as 100% of public schools are expected to be labeled as failing by 2014, unless every single student in every single public schools get 100% on every standardized test, if we’re describing depression by such common characteristics as loss of energy, irritability, and feeling worthless, than I’m sure we could diagnose 100% of Americans. Not to say that is the intent of either schooling or psychiatry, but, clearly we can see how that is the path we’re on, and we can see how there are people who stand to benefit from both. In the latter (or is it ladder) case, drug companies and therapists make a bundle.
So, I’ve now analyzed my brain. It gets excited when by what I’ll call the bullshit detector, getting set off. Labeling so many people depressed…i’m calling bullshit on it. It’s not an illness, the same way being unhappy isn’t an illness. And…while my goal is to see everyone being happy, and if therapy and meds help, that’s fine by me, but slanting the issue of happiness/depression towards psychology, and disregarding the source of all depression, being society, does a great disservice to those who aim to change out culture.
According to the National College Health Assessment, 39.4 percent of Washington University students felt so depressed at least once in the last year that they could not function.”
Almost 40%…what an absurd number, and what an absurd way to talk about depression, saying that “students felt so depressed.” It’s not like cancer, where you either are or you aren’t sick. It’s more like having the flu, where you feel shitty, but it might just be a cold.
Anyways…why is my bullshit alarm really getting riled here, why are the chemicals in my brain firing away, telling me this way of thinking about depression is bogus, well…the real reason is because I’m depressed. That’s right…when I think about depression, it makes me feel hopeless and purposeless, irritable and angry, my appetite changes. I’m not suicidal, but I occassionally have thoughts that life doesn’t matter. But…instead of popping pills or going to therapy, I just say, “i’m going to write about this stuff, and when i’m not writing about it, i’m going to not worry about it and watch the Giants lose to Pittsburgh today.”
And, here’s a typical way a college campus will help address depression.
“We’ve increased the number of counselors and psychiatrists,” Glass said. “Counselors from SHCS are actually assigned to residence halls so they develop a good working relationship with staff and students.”
I think that’s what I haven’t found yet. An education initiative aimed at reducing depression. If I can show the strong relationship between traditional, “do i have to go to school,” education, and depression…
Comments (7)
hm. i don’t really see your point. maybe you should go get the happy pills.
depression obviously runs rampant in almost all american society… the preoccupation with independence and efficiency instead of strong relationships and living life destroys us. ever since i saw that trap, i have yet to be depressed again. however, i do have an entire holiday month alone in st. louis… so we’ll see.
if your point is that we should not focus on treatment but rather on prevention, then i 100% agree with you. counsellors and pills do work… but as with your flu analogy, why would you put yourself in a position to get an illness like this? school/work/whatever your doing, should not make you depressed, if it does, something is wrong. maybe the school should investigate ways to keep students happy instead of how to treat them once they’re sad… after all, 40% in a given year is a HUGE number. i don’t know what the base rate is for college students but i don’t think it should be anywhere that high… so what’s the difference? probably everything our school does to us to poke and prod us trying to make us the best they can without realizing that we are simply young kids… why do we have the pressure of a NY stock broker dealing millions of dollars worth of stocks in a day… the type that jump off the building when they eventually push themselves too hard, make a bad decision, and feel like they can’t overcome it (since they are so focused on independence and efficiency again…)
meh… depression is a big topic for me, i could go off on it for a long time. i realized when i began studying psychology just how depressed i was for most of high school. to the point of scariness actually… well, i’m going to stop here before i write a book. but yeah, alarms went off when i read that article too.
this is a comment for the post below this one:
stop thinking so damn much! go occupy yourself fully in the world. play games, whatever.
ya, i know what you mean about the typing thing… i actually had the idea about making a keyboard that plays music cuz it wouldn’t take long for typists to learn. typing has become a 2nd language to many of us, we only have to think and it shows up on our screen almost as easily as speaking. it’s nutty. what’s really funny, soemthing dorky i like to do… type with your fingers just one letter off homerow and then decipher it later. it’s quite easy to type like this actually, even though the screen will show complete jibberish. also, i like to lazy type… where when i’m writing to someone, i’ll write in weird syllables that don’t belong… but you get the idea even though the words really don’t make sense… heh.
os i wil dtalk yoau lter.
first of all…i’ll never medicate myself. i know what makes myself tick, i’m very much in tune w/ myself. the ebbs and flows of my happiness i’m able to recognize as being caused by my environment. the point was, as you said, prevention, rather than focussing only on the cure.
the flu analogy was in reference to depression being a subjective disease. you know how you get the sniffles, and you’re not sure if you’re sick with the flu, or a cold, or just have a runny nose. to some extent, diagnosing depression has become the same way, as opposed to cancer, which you either have, or you don’t. although i do recognize that depression for many isn’t temporarily feeling depressed, it’s always feeling that way (something i’ve never encountered). still…the official medical definition of depression allows for people who just have low self-esteem and hate school, and therefore do poorly in school and then further hate life, to be diagnosed depressed. It’s those cases that worry me, because clearly it is the school, or the job, or whatever that is the cause of the depression, rather than the depression being the cause of emotions.
you say, “why would someone choose to be in school/job if it makes them depressed,” and that schools should look into making sure their students are happy…or something to that extent. The problem is our culture doesn’t think about happiness. It thinks about success. For more on this, read Mitch Albom’s book, Tuesday’s With Morrie, a hugely popular book you may have even read already. The problem of wide-spread depression in our culture, in my opinion, has 100% to do with our culture. They say depression is triggered by stress, and both depression and stress are high in college. Why? Is it the workload? To some extent, it is, but if you were doing work you loved and were truly passionate about, work that stemmed purely out of your personal interests, as opposed to work assigned to you from the limited classes you had to choose from, you wouldn’t be as stressed. So…it’s not so much the work, but the fact that what college students are forced to do is to dedicate four years of their lives to pursue activities that are not all personally meaningful. The moment I finished college, this huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. All the rules and regulations of college cause unnecessary stress and unecessary depression. After college, there’s still rules, but for the most part, you can create your own rules and your own culture. Most people don’t know this. That’s why there’s this new awareness of the quarterlife crisis. People don’t realize that most of the stress they feel is because they’re pursuing success in the eyes of society, rather than pursuing their own ideas of success, and pursuing meaningful personal realtionships.
regarding your second comments…as much as i do think a lot, i have some great outlets. i need to start playing some more yahoo chess though, sometimes i forget how to relax. but…that’s why i’m going to be working in a career mostly as an outdoor educator, surrounded by people, and playing in the outdoors.
that shit you wrote at the end gave me a headache…but i have seen some cool things that are entire paragraphs written w/ type-o’s, and the paragraph is about how we’ve come to recognize words by site, rather than individual letters, so you can misspell words, but our brain automatically spell checks as it goes. pretty cool stuff.
ya, i know the reference you’re talking about… as a psych major i entirely understand how it works, but i also know the exceptions to the rule… (sigh). but i think we’re on the same wavelength here… our culture is a sad one indeed when you can ride a bus with lots of other people and not talk to anyone ya? that’s what i hate so much… the ego, the barriers created between people that shouldn’t exist. when i’m in a good mood i like to break these down. how many times are you walking down the street and see someone you don’t know and then that person glances at you once, then averts their gaze as they walk past you? i like to go out of my way and stop them by talking and look them in the eyes. i can usually get a smile and a hello, and that is enough to put me in a good mood. and when the opposite happens, when someone new says hi, it is very envigorating for such a small and near meaningless event.
my post count will be rising a lot too soon with all the time i have… alone… in st. louis. *sigh* let’s hope i stave off depression this time around. i usually get SAD (seasonal affective disorder, which is like depression solely over the winter months), but we shall see…
isn’t depression only really depression if it lasts 2-3 weeks or more? because everyone gets in ruts and feels depressed sometimes (we can’t be happy ALL the time, dan, though i know that you would LOVE that!) but it’s only clinical depression if you can’t ever snap yourself out of it (a reason I was never put on meds) and it lasts a significant period of time.
i think depression is a terrible thing to have to deal with and I agree that it is far too rampant in society. But also consider history here. Ever since the industrial revolution depression has been a regularity. In fact, you can say that misery has pretty much existed always, even during serfdom and feudalism. It’s just the state of hte world. As human beings it takes much more energy to be happy than sad, so it is our natural state to be slightly morose. and once slightly morose, full-blown depression is only a hop-skip-jump away.
i think sometimes it helps to look at things with a little bit of a broad view and then hone in. I too am terrified by the seemingly rampant nature of depression. But one more thing to consider is this: depression wasn’t even a medical diagnosis until about 30 years ago (give or take). statistics (in my opinion) are fallible and developed by humans for humans. in this case, could it be that the statistics you’re viewing are actually slightly skewed assessments based on inaccuracies of questionnaires, the ridiculousness that comes from qualitative research, and the ownership of the pharma. companies of everything that isn’t nailed down? Could it also be that depression is on the rise because we didn’t know about it 30 years ago, so naturally there have been increases in diagnosis? There are many things to consider here to give you a broader picture.
PS – did you notice that I LOVE to challenge everything you say. I swear I’m not doing it out of malice – it’s just this uncontrollable urge to play devil’s advocate. I’m so sorry!
all good stuff dara, always enjoy a little back and forth. i’m still gonna push ahead with the idea that we should all be happy all the time, and if not, that it should be our general state to be closer to happy, than morose. i think your view that the history of the world shows that people are closer to depression than bliss, is a Western world view of both how we live now, and our history. It’s not biological that we be depressed, it’s cultural. Perhaps if we were more spiritual (in tune w/ ourselves, vs. religion, yuck religion, which i think many people use as a crutch instead of truly being in tune w/ the world), maybe then we could all be happy in dan’s world. you said, “As human beings it takes much more energy to be happy than sad, so it is our natural state to be slightly morose.” I couldn’t disagree more. or rather, i’d insert, “As human beings in American culture…” i was reading a bit about the therapy given to people suffering depression, and they talk a lot about correcting “wrong thinking,” and what they’re referring to is that depressed people have a way of viewing the world that leads to their depression. this therapy implies that it is our natural state to think in a way that leads us to happiness, and it also reveals that we can live in a world of bliss as easy as in a world of depression, merely by developing a pattern of thinking that leads to bliss.
i remember life changing for me after my soph. year in college. some douche bag stole my bike seat when i was working at applebee’s, off my brand new bike, the first expensive thing i’d bought myself. and it immediately dawned on me to not worry, worry achieves nothing, and only leaves to further worrying, stress, and depression. since then, anytime something has gone wrong, i quickly assess whether it’s something i’m going to fix (for the bike, i went and bought a new seat next day, and the situation was over…my other option was to not have a bike seat, and to ride with a pole up my ass, no fun…so the loss of money became irrelevant). by looking at situations as either a) i can take action or b) i just got fucked, but there’s nothing i can do about it, so i’ll accept the fact, i’ve been able to cut down the stress in my life.
i also agree that depression is “on the rise” because we’re diagnosing it, and charting it, and medicating it. i don’t think we’re more or less happy than 30 years ago, i think we’re more aware that people are unhappy, which could lead to cultural change, but instead has resulted in big pharma making big profits. The problem is the very nature of how this issue is being discussed, as “a rise in medical depression”, this shows that we’re really not more aware of the problem of people being unhappy, the problem that is as old as the industrial revolution and beyond. if we started seeing headlines, “unhappiness on the rise,” and articles that make people realize that our isolated world, the one heblucas talks about when you walk right by people on the street, or never talk to people on a bus…i think then we’d be able to truly address the problem of depression.
China didn’t have clinical depression until about 5 years ago. They called it, “having a leaky soul.” So…i believe curing depression also involves changing the way we think about it. Like many things in society, we’re moving faster and faster the wrong way. As we come to view problems of thinking as medical (although genetics apparently has a role) and as we come to view the solutions as medical, we’re heading down a road where soon, 100% of this world will be depressed, and those who claim to be happy, will be seen as crazy. what a strange sci-fi world that would be.
It’s the unrealistic but genuine “Save-the-world-and-ride-off-into-the-sunset” syndrome. We all encounter it when we assimilate into the post-university mainstream adult population. Tragic though.