Beautiful, wise, powerful. I lost my twin brother to suicide nearly 40 years ago. So many of us have suffered from deep depression or know someone who is. This is a gift to us all. ― Molly
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On my patch of the planet, this is a season of both darkness and light—and for a while, the darkness extends its reach every day. For some of us, the darkness is inward as well as outward, as dwindling light triggers sadness and even depression.
As one who’s suffered from depression—and knows that millions of people do—I also know it’s a topic we must talk about openly in order to humanize it. There’s no shame in being human, so there’s no shame in being depressed—it's part of the human condition.
In fact, given what’s going on in our country and our world, I think that people who aren't at least a little depressed are the ones with a problem!
So today I’m posting an excerpt from an interview I did for a 2015 Sounds True book, “Darkness Before Dawn.” But there's light in this book, too. My interview and all the others aim to reframe depression as something with life-giving potentials for those who have the good fortune to survive it.
Tami Simon: Parker, I want to start our conversation by talking about redefining the journey through depression and your experience of navigating through the darkness.
Parker J. Palmer: I like your emphasis on redefining depression for a couple reasons. As a person who’s suffered three profound experiences of clinical depression—two of them in my forties and one in my mid-sixties—I’m aware of a couple of things. First, at the most basic level, our culture defines depression as something shameful. This angers me because it leads to a situation where millions of people are suffering not only from depression, but live in an aura of shame about it, as if it were evidence of some sort of personal weakness or character flaw. The good news is that recently there has been a more open discussion about depression, which is a sign that we’re moving beyond the taboo state of affairs in which people who experience it are shamed.
Another way we need to redefine depression has to do with the way it has become “medicalized,” which obscures the spiritual dimension of some forms of depression. I do not reject medical approaches, especially with respect to those elements of depression that are tied to genetic makeup and brain chemistry. I’m not against antidepressants categorically—in fact, I’ve personally been helped by them. In the short term, they put a floor under my emotional life so I could gain some clarity as to what was happening within me. My objection has more to do with the fact that many psychiatrists do not engage in talk therapy to help people make meaning of the experience, but simply prescribe drugs as the sole course of treatment. This tendency we have to want to reduce depression to a biological mechanism seems to me misguided and ultimately harmful.
So, redefining depression from something taboo to something that we should be exploring together in open and vulnerable ways; from something that’s purely biological to something that has dimensions of spiritual and psychological mystery to it; and from something that’s essentially meaningless to something that can be meaningful—all of this seems to me to be important.
TS: How were you able to make meaning from your three encounters with depression?
PJP: When I was in depression, making meaning was impossible—it was just an experience to be endured. For me, it’s a mystery as to how people survive that deep darkness. I’ve come, over the years, to say that depression is not so much like being lost in the dark as it is like becomingthe dark. In the depths of depression you have no capacity to step back out of the darkness, or move a bit away from it, and say, “Oh, look at what’s happening to me. What’s this all about?” When you become the dark rather than being lost in it, you don’t have a self that is other than the darkness. Therefore, you can’t get perspective and try to make meaning of it.
I often hear people say, “I don’t understand why so-and-so committed suicide.” Well, I understand why this happens, I think. Depression is absolutely exhausting when you’re in the depths of it, and people who commit suicide often, to put it simply, need the rest. The mystery to me is why some people come through to the other side and not only survive it, but thrive in the wake of it. I’ve wondered about that question a lot, and I’ve never come to an answer that fully satisfies me. All I can say is that I somehow managed to get through the worst of the worst of times—and every time, it was a very lonely journey. In each case I had some help from the medical side, I had some help from the talk-therapy side, and I had some help from one or two understanding friends who knew how to be present to me in that experience.
Unfortunately, many friends and acquaintances didn’t know how to be present to me. They were scared of me, I believe—they didn’t want to come anywhere near me, as if I had a contagious disease. Or, they offered me well-intended but inadvertently hurtful advice that allowed them to leave their version of a “gift” in my hands—and then get out of the room as quickly as possible. Of course, in this situation, that doesn’t feel like a gift at all, but a rejection, or even a kind of curse. So when people say to me, “I have this friend or relative who’s depressed—what should I do?” I usually respond, “Well, I can’t prescribe in detail, but I can tell you this: do everything in your power to let them know that you’re not afraid of them. Be present to them in a way that expresses faith and confidence that they have what it takes to make it through. Don’t come to them with cheap encouragement of the sort some people tried on me: ‘But, Parker, you’re such a good guy! You’ve helped so many people, you’ve written such good books, you’ve given such good talks. Can’t you fall back on all of that and pull yourself out of this hole?’”
Please continue this interview here: http://www.couragerenewal.org/welcome-to-the-human-race-an-interview-with-parker-j-palmer-on-the-topic-of-depression/
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