Recently I had the privilege of speaking on the intersection of depression and hope to a group of about 250 people gathered at LUMINATE, a unique artistic event hosted by Creativity Catalyst meant to reveal the experience of depression, and to demonstrate the tangibility of hope through the arts, dramatic performance, and the spoken word.
Listen in and discover the ways in which depression can often be a necessary and appropriate response to circumstances that are not as they should be, and gain a fresh perspective on our culture's need to let go of the drive for constant happiness and uncover the unexpected gift hidden within the painful experience of depression.
TRANSCRIPT:
"There's no way to capture, in a few minutes, the fullness of the experience of depression, but I want to talk about ways that we as a culture have not done very well with it. And maybe we can give depression a little more permission to exist.
"As a culture, we don't do very well with depression. We don’t like sad things. We don’t do terribly well with grief, as compared to ways other parts of the world deal with it. It’s written into the fabric of our society that we’re after the pursuit of happiness. And we’ve decided, in fact, that depression is a mental illness - that it's a not-normal part of existence, something to be feared and avoided. And whether we say it outright or not, we - or the culture around us - can often treat it like it’s the depressed person’s fault.
"So I want to start by saying: we need to give depression permission to exist.
"You may often hear people say things like, 'We shouldn’t let our emotions get the better of us.' That the rational part of our mind is what should be calling the shots, and that our emotions are just distractions that are not based in reality. But the truth is, emotions are generated in our brain – from biological, generational influences, and in response to the real-world stimuli around us. Emotions cue us to the real dangers in the world that we have to be on the lookout for. They enable us to develop an affinity with other people, people we need for our survival and our well-being. Emotions are critical sources of information about our environment, and how we can try and stay alive – and thrive - in it.
"So if we’re talking about depression, one of the first places we need to look is not just at the individual experiencing depression, but at the environment surrounding the individual that gave rise to the depression.
"The truth is that often, depression is the most reasonable and appropriate response to a difficult environment. As human beings, two of the things that we need most at our core is the reassurance that we are loved, and the assurance that we are safe. When either of those things are threatened or denied, we understandably react. We get angry, or sad, or afraid. But often our environments – whether our families, our workplaces, the way life was when we were growing up, the experiences of injustice we’ve endured – those environments don’t always respond well to anger or sadness or fear.
Sometimes the response we get is that we just need to deal with it, that the pain we feel doesn’t belong, and that nobody’s going to accommodate us. We can begin to experience lasting injury to our confidence that can be loved or safe. And when the things around us don’t change, we can even start to believe that we are fundamentally to blame – that we are unloveable, or incapable, or flawed in some other way that means we’ll never be able to find love or safety.
"When you’re chronically struggling - with the generational effects of depression, in relationships, at work, with your family, with racism, with economic stress, with loss, with the overwhelming wrongness of what’s wrong in the world sometimes – your brain responds accordingly. When you’re in emotional pain, the same neurons are firing as when you’re in physical pain. It's no different. It is no less real. Depression is not irrationality, or weakness – it’s not a character flaw, or a lack of faith. Sometimes it is an honest and healthy admission that things are not how they’re supposed to be right now, or maybe they never were how they were supposed to be for you.
"Let’s give permission for depression to exist.
"When I was in school studying counseling, we learned about the fascinating role of the so-called 'identified patient' in a family. Often when families come in for therapy, it’s because they think there's something wrong with one of the children. 'Johnny is depressed. He’s not doing well in school; his behavior is falling apart - we really need something to fix him.' But as it sometimes turns out, Johnny, the identified patient, is the healthiest one in the family. He's giving emotional expression to problems in the family or in the environment that have not been successfully or honestly addressed by others. Johnny, in fact, deserves a little credit for being the emotionally honest one, responding to the dynamics or events in his life that others may have chosen to ignore, or never been aware of.
"American culture tells us we should be happy at all times and at all costs. That our worth is based on our productivity and our success. But we ignore a whole swath of the human existence – and of our deepest selves - when we falsely pretend that life is only good.
"And so what I want to offer you is this: hidden somewhere within the pain of depression, there is a gift. The gift of honest lament. Our in-tune-ness with the fact that things are not as they should be can actually be a freeing gift to others, because instead of forcing us all to play along with the sugarcoated lie that says, "Everything's great!", it actually points to the hope that it's not always - but we were made for more than this; that this world was set up for flourishing, and that withering and decay and despair should not get to have the final word.
"We offer a great gift when we are willing to not be OK, when we are willing to say, 'This is not how things should be' - because if we can hold onto the pain of that, it means we are also holding onto the hope that something better is coming, and that we can use our pain to join with the pain of others, to advocate for others, and to work side-by-side for the flourishing of the good world that we were all meant to experience."
© Rachel Engels 2019