Campaign Against Living Miserably infers that someone living with depression is living miserably, and that may sometimes be true, however miserable is not a word often used to describe the experience of living with depression. Depression is depicted as something darker and more bleak than misery. I don’t know maybe ‘living miserably’ actually understates the unfeeling numbness that often accompanies depression. I don’t like the term or the images it conjures.

Miserable makes me think of a wretched pitiable condition, the word seems heavy with negative judgement. I don’t mean to say that depression is enviable or not in some ways a miserable state, it is just not helpful for someone to be labelled as miserable. It is dis-empowering to be pitied, I much prefer some kind of strength based perspective. I get caught up in the semantics of depression and suicide, and I do because ill thought-out language comes loaded with meaning and connotations that serve to reinforce rather than dispel stigmas.

Michael Leuning calendar April 2012

A foundation’s name has a lot of influence on community attitudes, and it’s not possible to convey the nuance of Michael Leunig’s work in a few words. Organisation names that are less judgmental and less negative than Campaign Against Living Miserably are possible:

- beyondblue
- headspace
- sane Australia

Woody Guthrie was “…out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.” Support efforts need to do something similar and not only be against living in a certain way but also be for something – for support, for growth, for living a different way. Rather than struggling against a darkness imagine gently amplifying and nurturing the tiniest, tenderest essential parts that lie quietly at the heart of even our deepest darkest being.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html

If you, or someone you know, needs emotional support call Lifeline on 13 11 14 in Australia. Crisis counselling is available around the world.

Men involved Movember’s fundraising don’t shave for a month. They are visibily changing the face of men’s health. My friend is the founder of FilmDude; the grey dude (I’m the red film reviewer). He’s fabulous, even before Movember he was quietly fabulous. Not shaving this month means he is also hairier than he was at the start of last week. I wonder if not shaving might prove more difficult than it looks? I am guessing that it will, starting with the itch he has described.

There is gallery documenting the awesome not shaving effort. See here to view progress and to donate in support to a couple of worthwhile men’s health causes.

Pooh-poohing not allowed.

Hope filled yellow brick roads and darkened country roads travelled without hope, one with rainbows and one without. Where one exists the other must too, and there might be too many songs about rainbows, Kermit.

Hopelessness and helplessness are evocative terms. I just read them described in David Webb’s book on suicide, a book that grew out of his PhD research on the topic.

I know how little talk of suicide can be tolerated in general, so it is relieving right from the preface to read of the risks of speaking out and at the same time hear Dr. Webb urging us to engage in community conversation about suicidality. I wonder if suicidality is his word, my spell checker doesn’t recognise it and neither do I. Maybe our conversations and subsequent understanding are so constrained that we don’t yet have a complete language for suicide.

David Webb describes the silence as toxic and he notes that missing from the discussion is the first person voice. The person with experience is not present in the mental health support systems, and as a consequence he sees a failure to really understand what suicidality means to those who live it.

His is another first person account of a place without rainbows; “Hopelessness to me is the ‘black hole’ of despair,or sometimes a profound feeling of utter emptiness inside. And helplessness is the belief that this empty, black hole is forever, that it could never be otherwise. An image I have of this is of being at the bottom of a very deep well, a black hole of meaningless emptiness. This is the hopelessness. And the exit from this deep, dark well is so far up that it can’t be seen; and the wall are so dark and smooth and greasy that it’s impossible to get any hole on them at all. This is the helplessness.” Webb, D. (2010). Thinking About Suicide: Contemplating and comprehending the urge to die. Herefordshire,UK; PCCS Books Ltd.

Crisis counselling is available around the world. In Australia Life Line 13 11 14.

Her description of suicidal intent affirms the understanding I’ve gained after wrestling to comprehend what I didn’t understand; “I know that, inconceivable as it may be to loved ones who believe that their love alone is enough to save someone, sometimes a person decides that the stopping of the pain must be permanent. In this situation, suicide is not a selfish, deliberate act of cruelty against loved ones; it is a frantic final act against continued anguish. If there is a rational thought in choosing suicide, it is that the sufferer hasn’t the strength to live through that agony again, much in the way that a cancer patient may not be able to withstand another bout of chemotherapy. Mental anguish can be as unruly as any terminal illness. It can, unfortunately, orchestrate its own end.”

Anita Darcel Taylor writes of reading William Styron while listening to Donny Hathaway on a train. Either one on his own would induce melancholy in me, let alone as a duo, brave woman.

She writes a hypnotising paragraph about train platforms, never feeling really safe, and seeing ways she might die in every situation. Her revealing essay is truly awe inspiring.

This post is for Anita Darcel Taylor and anyone who doesn’t feel safe from themselves, while standing on a train platform.

Crisis counselling is available around the world. In Australia Life Line 13 11 14.

Tin Man, there is something about depression that, like the Tin Man, has no heart, no feeling. With all that he was experiencing and feeling Mottsu was convinced he couldn’t connect with anyone, that he couldn’t feel anything. Not knowing how to reassure him and feeling confounded about how be in any way helpful I cast myself as the Scarecrow with no brains, no ideas. Wally, our timid terrier, was the Lion without courage. Shortbread was just going to tag along, our own Toto.

I didn’t appreciate how helpless the Tin Man was or the depth of what must have been a hopelessness. I was a bit consumed by my own helplessness, I didn’t know what to do. His despair bought him to a crisis and left him isolated and without hope. I couldn’t make things better with a story, not even a cute one where we might dance down a yellow brick road.

I can’t quite reconcile that he didn’t feel anything, that’s what he believed and I don’t know for sure. I do believe he was overwhelmed as the full force of his feelings were all turned inwards back onto himself. Unknown dark feelings. There is a line from a very odd song by America that has been playing in my head “But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man, That he didn’t, didn’t already have… “. The dear Tin Man in my life had no way of knowing what he already had, he was convinced that he was malfunctioning and he was wretched. I couldn’t reach him, and he in turn didn’t find the words to tell me how it was for him.

Dr Linehan’s approach, when faced with a suicidal Tin Man, is acceptance, she has “…found that the tension of acceptance could at least keep people in the room: patients accept who they are, that they feel the mental squalls of rage, emptiness and anxiety far more intensely than most people do. In turn, the therapist accepts that given all this, cutting, burning and suicide attempts make some sense.”

By understanding and accepting as she listens to her clients experiences, maybe Dr Linehan restores their voices, and in doing so provides some hope.

Crisis counselling is available around the world. In Australia Life Line 13 11 14.

As I think about depression, I would like to feel it as both an inner and outer experience. First as an inner experience: it is a dark feeling or mood that drains my colour and leaves me without enthusiasm. Pallid, grey and exhausted.

The outer experience of the same persistent state is different: I imagine being diagnosed and labelled with depression. Saddled with it. Others might start to notice or think that I am not myself, and I could believe I’m not me and be knocked off balance.

As the inner and outer experiences merge I am enveloped in an atmosphere of depression and it starts to become an identity, at least a way to identify – how I am becomes who I am. Overcome by the experience, depression itself turns into something to overcome. The battle makes me a victim or sufferer.

From the perspective of a victim the experience is harrowing. Things happen to victims, we have so little power and nothing to call on. At it’s worst I could lose the rest of me, and be consumed by darkness. What else?

My experience is incomplete and so I stop struggling for a moment. I let go and stop fighting allowing myself to just be depressed, while wondering if it’s possible to feel something positive. A little something, it would be small as I have dulled senses and only a detached sort of sensitivity, to feel with. Detached? I start to feel a sort of wakeful, not sleeping if not exactly wakeful, detached inert expert. A wakeful detached expert of what – of giving up? The feeling of being gripped, even if not struggling, creates an urgency to solve and resolve while still being unable to move beyond the condition, disempowered…

The sense helplessness coupled with a loss of hope pushes against the boundaries of what’s endurable, and I start dreaming that I don’t belong here. I can’t think of how to live and love the misery of depression.

Not yet…

“We all fear our symptoms and want to heal them. We go to all kinds of healers not realising that our worst problem is not the sickness but that we are hypnotised by culture into believing that what we experience is bad and has to be repressed and healed instead of lived and loved.”

Mindell, A. & Mindell, A. (1992, p. 34) Riding the Horse Backwards: Process Work in Theory and Practice. London, England: Penguin Books.

Crisis counselling is available around the world. In Australia Life Line 13 11 14.

The Icarus Project is a mental health movement characterized by the view that many phenomena commonly labeled as mental illness should actually be regarded as “dangerous gifts”. The name is derived from the Icarus mythology and is metaphorically used to convey that these experiences can lead to “potential[ly] flying dangerously close to the sun.” Wikipedia

Describing depression is not easy when you’re in it and that’s not necessarily why depression is misunderstood and misjudged. It might be a part of the silence. I don’t know. Here are lots of little descriptions posted on the Icarus Centre’s site by many people describing their depression in 20 words or less.

Depression in 20 words or less written to publish here by someone who knows what they’re talking about and who can place you right inside their experience:

A low slow slide down a glacier, only to fall off the face into the freezing water way below.

Driving at night out in the country towards a town, headlights out, and can’t find the switch, trusting the road is straight.

I am starting to know it – that dark morose ‘it’ we label as depression.

I remember reading of research about typical responses in the workplace to someone admitting they were depressed or suicidal. It was depressing research, with ‘get over it’ and ‘buck up’ being the regarded as most helpful by colleagues of someone with depression. Those same responses were probably regraded as least helpful by those affected by the condition.

A person with depression can’t just get over it or snap out of it. Rather than being helpful, those types responses highlight a lack of understanding about mental health conditions. Lack of understanding and misconceptions about depression contribute to the stigma associated with it, and to the isolation of those afflicted.

Reading the responses from readers posted against the Stephen Fry article I am dismayed. The research was many years ago and I thought, I hoped, we had made some progress. Maybe not. Reading those comments I can see the stigma around mental health is as pervasive as ever.

Stephen Fry was asked about his bi-polar condition in an interview and he was frank, realistic, in his responses. Empathy, it seems,from we the readers, is still too much to ask for.

*I have written about what you can do if a friend is suicidal. There are links to information about what to say, what not to say and how to support a friend in need.

Crisis counselling is available around the world. In Australia Life Line 13 11 14.

I have written a lot about crippling effects of a deep depression, the crushing lows and isolation. I have read a lot and there isn’t any source where there is a hint of selfishness. In his journal Mottsu wrote of struggling with something “ terrifyingly unfathomable” a “debilitating life in my head” that prevented him from feeling “normal”. They’re not the words of a cowardly man but a strong man balancing on the the cliff edge of life and facing death.

Scientific American described suicide as “an attempt to escape from oneself”. The suicidal mind is described as “unbearable”, burdened with a “crushing intolerable weight”. The same article says “Feelings of worthlessness, shame, guilt, inadequacy, or feeling exposed, humiliated and rejected leads suicidal people to dislike themselves in a manner that, essentially, cleaves them off from an idealized humanity. The self is seen as being enduringly undesirable; there is no hope for change and the core self is perceived as being rotten.” That’s not the mind of a narcissist. Is it?

In anger at losing someone to suicide you might feel abandoned, you might wonder how they could leave so abruptly, you might think lots of things about the person who has died, and I hope you remember them well, and not think less of them for their decision and actions. Compassion and understanding make the world an easier place to live in, not anger, blame and stigma. Don’t let the way someone dies change how you remember them living. Please don’t think badly of someone who dies by suicide.

This conversation and a debate we should have more often, so that the negative emotional urgency that motivates (many instances of) suicide is not confused with a selfish desire for death.

“There is but one true serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning” quoted in Oates, J. C. (2011). A Widows story:A Memoir. New York NY:Harper Collins

Crisis counselling is available around the world. In Australia Life Line 13 11 14.