Gold Medalist Tommie Smith and Bronze medalist John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics.*
I know this will come as a shock to some of you, but I’ve been considering depression lately. Not its emotional resonance, the experience of it, but the reasons behind it.
Among the various philosophical camps I’ve found those who believe firmly in a genetic explanation, a sort of depressive’s predetermination. The unluck of the draw. Another camp holds it springs from our own beliefs, the accumulation of fetid thoughts. A subsect here gravitates to traumatic injury, victimization, expressed in the psychologist’s “anger turned inward” definition.
Then there’s the workout club and their physiological explanations. Diet. Allergies. Power lines. Pollution. (Per usual, some ultra-conservative religious thinkers still root into the muck of broken minds to find “sin” behind it all.)
With the malady at epidemic proportions, I hate to muddy the waters even more, but I’m compelled to offer one more explanation for depression’s prolific gestation: social injustice.
Now I was raised on tri-colored parades, colonial-era drums and flutes, pride in the Founding Fathers and that wicked thirst for self-determination that severed trans-Atlantic ties with a violent clap of revolution. While I haven’t entirely abandoned all of that, I’ve had to do some heavy editing to the history I was introduced to as a child, coming out the other side a far less black-and-white thinker.
This grayscale applies to searching out causes behind depression. With so much good material out there, I can’t figure why anyone would subscribe to just one theory, unless they’re trying to sell a book or a religion. I am wary of simple statements.
When it comes to simplicity, the political conservative’s credit for our nation’s wealth, for instance, still being placed at the feet of Providence is one of the nastiest. This ‘hallowed’-but-hollow narrative I’ve had to weigh against the bone-cold fact of early America’s genocidal politics responsible for wresting the already-inhabited land from others one broken treaty at a time. Against the millions of indigenous people killed in various military campaigns and taken by European disease.
Credit for the nation’s startling rise on the world stage overlooks the inconvenient fact that the wealth of the land was stolen from the Indians and mined from the soil with the capture and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of African men, women, and children, consolidated on the backs of the offspring who followed.
In short: The roots of our liberty were not just fed on the blood of tyrants.
I came to learn these things a few years after the close of the war in Vietnam, a few years before I listened to President Ronald Reagan announce that he had signed legislation that would “outlaw Russia forever.” A promise that U.S. planes would “begin bombing in five minutes.”
This is the same time I became aware of the chasm between the poverty of the many and the material comfort I enjoyed among the few (including a wealth of nature despite a nearly inner-city location: lush, sprawling backyard, a nearby park, and a wild creekway not too distant).
I was offended by political leaders who would joke about massive military strikes against civilian population centers. But more than that, I was deeply saddened to come of age with realizations that humanity had reached a point where the very thesis of warfare was not just a bloody win on the battlefield but the extermination of entire peoples.
Against the staggering reality, I became a speck of dust in the gloom of an approaching global internment camp.
Despite the collapse of the Soviet state and Cold War, the world continued to shrink even as the likelihood of our ultimate undoing rose with the specter of global warming and climate change. If it were just a matter of a handful of imbeciles running things, it’d be one thing. They could be dealt with. But we have an institutional dysfunction much more nuanced before us: a conspiracy, in fact, assuming one subscribes the most basic definition of the term: “collusion by those in power in order to maintain power.”
Psychiatrists would have classified my disorder at fourteen as depression surely. Few would have noted the illness’ links to my feelings of hopelessness and despair (that’s understood). None would have tracked it back to historical patterns of injustice or the ongoing global instabilities kept warm by those same institutional power structures.
Just something that’s been buzzing around my head since observing so many smiling photos of myself as a child. So many things I can track it to, my depression. My too-often-absent father chief among them. But my onset of depression was also a philosophical event that diagnosis has repeatedly given short shrift.
Today I answer the challenge of an intentionally destabilized earth with a simple pledge to tell the truth, to live that truth, to the best of my ability. I can’t tell you how many jobs I can’t work because of it, but I’d wager all the major banks and energy companies are on my personal black list.
If only I could play and sing like Johnny.
-$-
While maestro Cash reworked the verses of “As Long…” into a mildly insipid love song for his wife, the version that landed on the album Bitter Tears ends with increasingly incensed verses and a chorus that challenges the listener.
And, yeah, it’s depressing to think those aren’t all the reliable metaphors for forever they once were. What are you going to do about it?
—
Note on the image: Australian silver medalist Peter Norman (left) joined the two Americans in wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge on his uniform to protest racial segregation in the United States and elsewhere. According to Wikimedia Commons, the source for this image, Australia’s railroad recently built a “noise wall” in front of the well-known mural “that now prevents rail travelers from seeing the work.”
This is really insightful. My daughter recently told me she is depressed because the world is going to end horribly anyway, so what’s the point? It shocked me to realize she has such poor hope for the future. You said it well here – None would have tracked it back to historical patterns of injustice or the ongoing global instabilities kept warm by those same institutional power structures. If I knew how to do a pingback I would.
that’s ping enough for me. :)
i hope your daughter comes to discover the magic of the world that is so far above and beyond any cruelty humankind can unleash; accept that this is the world and the time we were born into, possibly with purpose within us; and that (grand schemes aside) to be able to do a kindness for another in this dark time is to tilt the balance back toward order and beauty.
best to you both.
Oh i agree! I think all of life is an endless battle between good and evil, and we each have only to choose good to keep the darkness at bay.
The reasons can be straightforward or as varied as the stars in the sky as to why one is afflicted with depression. Being bombarded with ‘bad news’ can most definitely have an impact. I don’t watch it anymore. Oh, if there is a major event, I’ll hear about it soon enough. Funny how we always remember where we were when something ‘bad’ happened. (ie: JFK got shot, Martin Luther King was assassinated, John Lennon is killed, 911, etc.)
Do we remember the good times as easily and with as much recall? Interesting.
I take pictures to remember the good times. :)
I nominated you for: http://ramanda429.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/the-versatile-blogger-award-thank-you/
I hear you.
I was 10 when I visited Auschwitz in Poland. I saw the gas chambers, and the cases full of human hair, clothing, shoes, and glasses.
My grandmother bought flowers and asked me to lay them at the foot of the wall where the mass shootings took place at the end of the war and Hitler was in a hurry.
I came back home and researched and wrote essays and poster boards for school.
I also had nightmares. I also prayed to God that if people couldn’t stop being evil, he should just wipe us all out. I also prayed to God that I would gladly die in their place, if that meant he would spare everyone else.
I was 13 when the movie The Day After came out. I watched the entire thing, in horror.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
I went to school at a school where many kids’ fathers served at Kirtland Air Force Base and we lived in a place called Four Hills, in Albuquerque. Way past the fields in the back of my house was a electrified fence around the Hills – I came to do research not so long ago and found out it was Manzano Base. Back then we kids were warned to stay away from it and since the fields contained mostly tumbleweeds and probably tarantulas and snakes, I had no problem staying in my yard (or on my cinder block wall fence).
In September of 1977 I woke up to a huge explosion and saw an orange glow outside my window. When I researched what that was, I discovered this link:
http://www3.gendisasters.com/new-mexico/5474/manzano-base,-nm-tactical-air-command-jet-crashes,-sep-1977
A tactical jet took off from Kirtland AFB and slammed into the hallowed out hill that contained a portion of America’s stockpile of nuclear warheads. 20 people on board died. As a child I didn’t know that though. They didn’t tell us anything. We were really scared, though.
And being within spitting distance of nuclear stockpiles is probably a big part of the reason my sisters and I have all had some major health problems.
When I was 15, my high school history class read long essays about the Bolshevik Revolution and books like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and The Rising Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire. We had to write our own essays comparing and contrast the ideologies of other leaders with our nations leaders.
Eerily enough, I also found many traits that my mother shared with Hitler.
I worked in forensics for 5 years. My work was DNA testing on sexual assault and homicide cases. My last case was the only evidence that went to trial on a serial killer.
My current depressions as because of the dysfunction within my own family of origin, and poor set against the bigger backdrop of this wide angle lens of really disturbing stuff.
I had nobody to help me process let alone articulate my fear of being wiped out anytime a world leader had his finger on the trigger.
I just read today that North Korea has it’s eye on Washington.
So…well, dang gum it.
Go ahead.
I’m pretty much done worrying about our planet being blown to smithereens.
drats…check your moderation cue…my last message got stuck there.
Anyway…you asked a question…
“What are you going to do about it?”
Random, I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. I just know that I’m going through a bit of a breakdown because of it.
Some philosophers had a pretty positive outlook for the potential of man (like Plato and later, Jean Jacques Rousseau). Others, like Hobbes, were extremely pessimistic. Hobbes claimed we were only looking out for our own self interest, even if it came at the expense of others. And even altruistic acts were only made because it benefited the person doing it. That there were no truly selfless acts and you could always come up with the self-serving act within any act of altruism.
Yesterday, this post and my response triggered a cascade of images in my brain. Images from childhood, details from horrific homicide and sexual assault cases I worked on that didn’t bother me at the time, so emotionally armored I was, and mistakes I had made trying to chase after a little bit of happiness (in the wrong ways).
Right now, I’m not DOING anything to help anyone else, but surviving these intense flashbacks through writing about my thoughts and dialoguing with other people struggling with these bigger picture issues. Like you.
Somehow, while it’s a challenge to my fragile mental health, I feel compelled to. Like there is a reason to keep talking.
I’m not registering emotion along with the flashbacks…so I’m grateful for that. But it makes me tired. But, my thyroid is screwed up, and I can’t sleep lately, so, there’s that to add to it.
There’s a growing body of neuroscience research that backs up how Buddhist mindfulness practices can train human beings to transform themselves into altruistic beings. And, what’s more, it focuses on the self to a great degree. Metta practice is all about lovingkindness and self-acceptance directed towards oneself and THEN turned outward towards the world.
You can’t give from an empty vessel (though dang it, we do try, don’t we?)…and so you fill yours up so that you can.
When you get better, I hope you can find an avenue to use your gifts and talents in ways that make you feel you are making a worthwhile contribution.
We may not save the world in time, but you just never know.
There’s got to be a tipping point somewhere. Tipping towards the good for a change.
Take a lookie-loo here. I know nothing about this Amanda Palmer’s music, but I am totally digging her philosophy in life:
“If you ask people to catch you, they will.”
check out the almost 14 minute video:
http://www.upworthy.com/an-8-foot-tall-woman-is-destroying-the-entire-music-industry
I think the greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of being ‘seen’.
I have known depression and the spell of the captor. Breaking the spell has helped to lift the cloud but it dissipates slowly. Peace to you in your journey.
World events lay like scattered sticky notes on our kids’ psyches. When the world trade centers came down and was being replayed on CNN 24/7 my six year old came to me and asked, “when will it stop?” They don’t know and when they do it’s too late. The stickies leave a little residue.
Peace.
Well said, DT.
What if it’s all of these things…and more (or less)?
Maybe we tend toward depression because we humans have not ‘adjusted’ (evolved?) to an extent adequate to cope with the increasingly rapid change in so-called society and technology. How can our most basic ‘factor’, our genetic make up, keep pace? It can’t.
Maybe we tend toward depression because we DO have fetid thoughts. How else could we be expected to respond to a world where we don’t ‘fit’ at the most basic levels?
Is it unreasonable to presume that trauma and victimization would be ‘normal’ in a poorly adapted human experience? And if diet, allergies, power lines, and pollution, each on its own upsets the balance only a bit more, wouldn’t that be rationally presumed to add to the general malaise?
And as for the ‘religious root’ . . . wouldn’t we expect a declaration of ‘sin’ to be at the root of ‘maladaption’? Isn’t religion the way ‘we’ gratuitously explain the inexplicable?
My main question to you is: How, or why, would we NOT expect to see rampant ‘social injustice’ as a prevalent expression of the troubled human race? I don’t think your explanation muddies the waters at all. I’d say it’s a commentary on already existing muddy waters. And those muddy waters are ‘expressed’ through humans in all kinds of vile and painful ways.
My great-grandmother was Cherokee. Several more generations back, my genes got a shot of African chromosomes. So I don’t like our history of exploitation/genocide any more than you. But it happened. If it were over and done, it would be one thing. But the exploitation and genocide continue in our world. Throughout history we find countless examples.
Global warming and climate change are only ‘specters’ if we make them specters. The thinking person would remind us that Earth has undergone many fairly ‘drastic’ changes in climate. Who is to BLAME for the massive global warmings that took place to end the ice ages of the past? And who do we blame for the global cooling that brought on those ice ages?
Of course the purveyors of Psychiatry would put the burden of your angst on to you as being a ‘depressed one’. Of course they would not consider any broader philosophical or existential causes. It’s not their ‘job’. The modern ‘medicine of the mind’ is a dog and pony show that exists to tame the masses — not to comfort or heal them. They can’t.
What am I going to do about ‘it’?
I used to wish that I could play and sing like Johnny, too. Then I realized that I’m not Johnny. The only person that I can play and sing ‘like’ is ME. So I’m going to sing my song.
I’m going to realize that I can experience indignation and acceptance, pain and pleasure, happiness and sadness, lightness and darkness. All those things. Simultaneously.
I’m going to use my ability to think for my good.
I’m going to accept that a while back I inhaled, and that at some point coming I’m going to exhale. Life is one big breath, and I have choice! I can choose to feed my ‘depression’ . . . or not.
I can LIVE rather than complain about all of the things that make living ‘hard’ or uncomfortable.
I choose NOT to live in delusion. To see things for what they are. Not what I wish they were.
Social injustice DOES feed depression. All I can do about that is to make my contribution of justice to society. If I can. Where and when I can. And let the rest of it take care of itself.
Thanks for the beautiful prompt.
Pappy -
You never cease to amaze me with your clarity and insights. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.
“I’m going to realize that I can experience indignation and acceptance, pain and pleasure, happiness and sadness, lightness and darkness. All those things. Simultaneously.”
Amen.
That reminds me something good old Hermann Hesse said, which I’m sure you’ll remember:
“The only thing that stood between old age and youth, between Babylon and Berlin, between good and evil, giving and taking, the only thing that filled the world with differences, opinions, suffering, conflict, war, was the human mind, the young, tempestuous, and cruel human mind in the stage of rash youth, still far from knowledge, still far from God. That mind invented contradictions, invented names; it called some things beautiful, some ugly, some good, some bad. One part of life was called love, another murder. How young, foolish, comical this mind was.”
and
“There was not a thing in the world that was not just as beautiful, just as desirable, just as joyous as it’s opposite. It was blissful to live, it was blissful to die, as soon as you hung suspended in space. Peace from without did not exist; there was no peace in the graveyard, no peace in God. No magic ever interrupted the eternal chain of births, the endless succession of God’s breaths. But there was another kind of peace, to be found within your own self. It’s name was: Let yourself fall! Do not fight back! Die gladly! Live Gladly!”
:)
Yeah. My man Hesse. He says it a lot better than I. :D
It is written in all the sacred scriptures that man shall live and die by the sins of the fathers. Meaning these sins are passed down from generation to generation until someone recognizes it and stops it through the sovereignty of God.
The blood ties each generation to the other and eventually someone’s got to pay the debt.
Just saying….
I too am wary of simple statements. Great post. I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog.
i am very glad. it’s good to have the company.