Helen's Book - Depression Can Be Fun
An Excerpt from Helen’ s Book
Posted on: Feb 02, 2009 - 02:58 PM
My husband often tried to reassure me that my negative thinking was ‘The Black Dog’ taking over and not to believe it. Even now when I find negative thoughts creeping into my head, I automatically think of his voice saying, ‘That’s the Depression talking’, or ‘That’s the Black Dog talking’ and it helps.It was Churchill who described his Depression as his ‘Black Dog’. I think that this analogy is very clever as it suggests both familiarity and mastery. Depression is a beast that needs to be fed to survive. It sinks its teeth into a person but it is, after all, only a dog, and it can be trained, controlled and locked up! You can learn how to be its master and train and control it. You can learn what it thrives on and how to starve it by looking closely at your own needs.
Your life does not have to stop. It does not have to limit your life. Many people who suffer from Depression learn how to control it and lead full and successful lives.
Many ‘leaders’ have suffered from Depression. Yet they have done and achieved so much. Look what Churchill achieved while fighting against Depression. Look what many people have achieved while battling Depression. Alexander the Great, General Paton and Napoleon and many more had their own battle with Depression. Artists and writers such as Geothe and Tols suffered from Depression. They didn’t have any of the help that we have available to us today. Some of the funniest people on the outside have had or are suffering from depression. Just look at Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Roseanne Barr and Spike Milligan.
I have met many successful business men and women who are suffering from Depression. It is a shame that they are not enjoying their lives and their success. Do not think that because you are depressed, you will not achieve anything in your life and if you work on getting better too, how great would it be to be able to enjoy your achievements, your success, and your life?
Anyone can suffer from depression unless they learn to redirect it.
We try to medicate people because they are not happy rather than find out the problem. Medication does not take the problem away. Medication treats the symptoms not the cause.
Many people ‘self medicate’ with drugs, alcohol or food (as I did!) or sex as they feel that these things make them feel better or ease their mental pain – for a short time anyway. However these ‘drugs’ give very short term feelings of euphoria and make the depression worse. They are always followed by a terrible crash and the need for another ‘fix’ and yet another. This vicious circle only serves to deepen the Depression. Often people who use alcohol to ease their pain and unhappiness are labelled ‘Alcoholics’ and people who take drugs to ease their pain are labelled ‘Drug Addicts’ and people who overeat are labelled as ‘fat’ and judged as not taking care of themselves and sexaholics are just lucky. I dabbled in them all and recommend none of them.
These vices that are so shunned by society are in fact desperate measures by these individuals to cope or hide behind and pretend that their problems don’t exist. Many feel and think that they could lose their job and/or people may look at them oddly or unfavourably were they to admit that they suffered from Depression. There is still a stigma attached to Depression and mental illness due to a lack of understanding.
Many people don’t live their lives today. They just live through what shows up. It makes them unhappy. Depression seems to be a phenomenon of the affluent 21st Century we find ourselves in. Studies show that there is 10 times more Depression in people born after 1945 than in those before.
Depression has now replaced back pain as the number one reason for taking time off work. So much so, that it is referred to as the common cold of mental illness and is the form most frequently seen by psychiatrists, psychologists and physicians alike. The figures show that 1 in 3 people will experience depression at some time in their lives today.
If you are suffering from depression, you should be patting yourself on the back for even picking this or any book up. I really mean that. I didn’t read anything apart from glossy magazines for the first 4 years of my depression and even then all I did was look at the pictures. That’s why you’ll find lots of glossy pictures in this book! If you cannot read the book at the moment, the pictures tell the story. My husband worked out that I was spending £50 a month on magazines. This was money we couldn’t afford to be spending given that I had no income and my husband’s income was practically non-existent due to all the time he took off work and jobs he cancelled to care for and support me. I just couldn’t concentrate on anything.
Efforts by my husband to console me were often thwarted by my violent thrashing of arms and legs and screaming but it didn’t stop him from trying again and again. Most of the time I would sob into my pillow distraught or rock back and forth in my seat or rub my legs repeatedly and think that nothing mattered in my life any more; I had lost everything and everyone that mattered. I lost my job and with that all my qualifications that I had worked so hard for, my career, my life and friends in the City, all my income, my dignity and my pride. I’d lost me. My life was just nothingness. I enjoyed nothing, loved nothing, did nothing and achieved nothing.
I basically sealed my own fate for the next 7 years with the meaning and emotion that I gave to my situation. I convinced myself that NO THING or NOTHING mattered. It makes sense that the emotion you live with is the quality of your life. With such negative emotion, how could I be anything other than Depressed?
So you know what, its fine. Anything you can do right now is fine! Please believe me. Depression is bad enough to deal with without putting additional pressure on yourself. That does not give you permission to stop trying. It just gives you permission not to be disillusioned while you are trying. Frustration is good as it encourages us to keep trying. Feeling like there is no solution is Depression.
The problem with Depression is that it does not make you feel like trying. Your negative focus and feelings make you not feel like trying anything. That negative momentum is paralysing. Wherever your focus goes, energy flows. When you feel negative, you feel paralysed. Just like when you feel the negative emotion anger, you suffer. If you look for pain, you will find it. If you give to get, you feel empty.
We are so clever that we can actually filter the world to confirm our belief that everything is so negative so that we don’t seem to be lying to ourselves and we don’t even know we’re doing it. All day we ask and answer questions to ourselves. Thinking is nothing but a process of asking and answering questions of our subconscious or conscious. Apparently the average human being has 65 000 unique thoughts in a day. The only problem is that 95% of those thoughts are the same ones as yesterday. I’m sure it’s not true but one of my male friends assures me that it’s only two for a man: the last time they had sex and the next time they will get it. They are not counted as sexaholics though as they don’t think about it, they do it.
“Why does it always happen to me?”
Negative questions generate negative answers. Ask a lousy question, get a lousy answer.
Whatever you focus on feels real to you. When we attach words to it, it gives it meaning. It becomes our experience. Who do we talk to most? – Ourselves. Need I say more! Depressed people often doubt themselves and their abilities in all kinds of ways, but seldom in their judgment about their own interpretation of things! Be conscious of words that create your emotions. If you say certain phrases often enough, you believe it. You can always find a way to back up what you believe. If you say something to yourself enough times, you believe it.
When you are depressed, you believe that you are not in control of events in your life. If you can’t control what’s going on in your life, control what’s going on inside you. It is this sense of control that is so important. We often find ourselves in situations where we have little control – such as waiting for the result of a medical examination, waiting to learn whether someone still wants to be our lover, waiting for exam results. What can we do apart from eat chocolate, have a cigarette or bite our nails?
The only control we have during these times is internal. By exercising control over how and when we act or react, we can retain a sense of control. It has been proven that this is how many victims survived the horror of concentration camps by surviving in their minds. It is survival of the mind. They had no control over their enemies’ actions or what they physical suffering their enemies put them through but they maintained internal control. For example, they would decide when they would eat the food that was given to them and when to scream from the pain of the torture. The fact that it works in extreme life or death situations shows how effective it is. It really does work.
A piece of advice that I had to pay a lot of money for and didn’t listen to at the time but you might find it helpful at this time is: ‘to take a limited number of days in which you will not dwell upon nor mention your depression or the cause of your depression (if you know it) for more than the briefest moment’. An addition to this piece of advice that my therapist wrote in brackets that makes me smile is ‘just enough so as not to be rude anyway’. He also recommended ‘putting aside a period in which to problem solve of one or two hours per day, rather than worry around and about whenever thoughts come into your head’. ‘And finally to become a mistress/master of ones own emotions, rather than be at the beck and call of the circumstances and other people’. I like the sound of that and it all makes sense. I wish it had made sense at the time and that I could have acted on it sooner but I obviously wasn’t ready. It is all good advice. I can see that now. Maybe it will help you one day too. You can always make a note of it. One more note on one more piece of paper to add to your clutter I know. Maybe not then!
The power of thought/s is incredible, both positive and negative. Just think where we’d all be if we spent as much time thinking positive thoughts about how to deal with our situation instead of negative?
Negative thinking can actually affect the chemical composition of our brains. The more negative you are and the fewer things you do that give you pleasure, the lower your serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline/norepinephrine levels in your brain. These are the natural feel good factors or happy hormones in the brain. I really do believe now that you become what you think and negativity attracts negativity. The way we think actually changes our cellular chemistry.
YOU BECOME WHAT YOU THINK: We have a need to remain consistent with how we define ourselves. Do you define yourself as a winner, or a player or a loser? Even if you hate how you define yourself, you will find a way to become it. Nothing is more important than self definition. If you try to not be what you say you are, it makes you sad, depressed and angry.
THE WAY WE THINK CHANGES OUR CELLULAR CHEMISTRY: When we are depressed or grieving, the number of our white cells decreases. This has been proven through studies of elderly married couples when one of the partners has died. We need these important white cells. They are part of our immune system and help our body to fight off illness and heal itself from diseases. It has been proven that the positive emotions OPTIMISM/HOPE/FAITH/LOVE/HAPPINESS (just in case you’ve forgotten what they are! I know I did) are totally linked to a strong immune system. Negative emotions and feelings (which I won’t write in capital letters as we don’t need those reinforcing!): helplessness, anger, depressive, pessimism, hopelessness and sadness are related to greater vulnerability to illness and a poor immune system.
TO BE PUBLISHED THIS YEAR BY CHIPMUNKAPUBLISING
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