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| You can not be happy without inner peace. |
We
tend to think of depression as a disease. The depression virus will
infect you and there is nothing that you can do to prevent it. Once
you catch the virus, there is no known cure, only the hope to
suppress the depression with an ever-increasing array of chemical
treatments to numb away the part of your mind that is the source of
all your mental anguish. This is sadly akin to discovering a skin
lesion on a child’s knee and immediately injecting Novocain in
preparation for an impending leg amputation. If only we were to dig
a little deeper in order to discover and understand the source, we
would find that the mysterious skin lesion is nothing more than a
scrape from a relatively harmless tumble on a rough sidewalk, and the
only treatment needed is a little Neosporin and a Spongebob Band-Aid.
Just as our ancient ancestors once regarded thunderstorms as a cruel
punishment reflecting the malice and anger of the gods, we give
depression a mystical aura as this dark cloud looming over us at all
times, waiting to swallow us up in a storm of despair. Perhaps it is
our fascination and fixation on depression as an incurable disease
that is the real problem, our lack of understanding is what regards
it as a dark and magical entity. But just as lightning has gone from
being the work of the Gods to a simple static discharge, depression
will traverse from being regarded as a destructive unavoidable plague
to a common emotion that will soon pass if we have the patience to
simply wait it out.
I
have never been diagnosed with
depression of any sort, but I have certainly lived through my fair
share of depressing events. I have many solid reasons to be
depressed, but I am not. At the age of 6, my parents went through a
divorce. It was troubling for me, the uncertainty of what was to
come, but that was grown-up stuff, I just had to accept that it was
beyond my control. A couple years later, my father, who was also my
best friend, was killed in a car accident. The morning I woke up to
hear the news was burned into my memory, I can recall in perfect
detail every emotion that I felt, every second of silence that
passed. It was the single worst day of my life. That day and every
day in the following 3 weeks felt like a nightmare that I couldn’t
wake up from. Nothing was real, nothing made sense, and yet somehow
I had to keep on going. I had to make sense of the world and try to
find my place in it. Overnight, I had gone from being the child of
divorced parents to “the man of the house” trying to learn
responsibility and trying to act like a grown-up for my mother, who
spent all of her time working to support herself and me, and as a
result, the majority of my time was spent alone with my thoughts. At
that point I had a choice to make: either let my emotions get the
best of me, or try to detach from them in order to see and understand
them from a much grander perspective. I opted for the latter, not
because I wanted to distance myself from reality, but because I was
able to recognize that the emotions were not going to disappear, and
I needed to learn to go on with my life regardless of the pain.
There is an unspoken belief that people share, “bad things happen
to other people, not to me.” The truth is bad things happen to
everyone. No one is immune to this reality, but while people are
fixating on all the negative events in their lives, they fail to see
the good things that happen. So why am I not depressed? Because I
refuse to let negativity control my life.
Because
of the nature of emotions, the experience associated with them is
very abstract. There are no fancy visual charts to assess and
categorize the maelstrom of sensations that stampede around inside
our minds, identification is usually only possible through the
outward expression of emotion. A smile, tears or shouting can be
excellent indicators of individual emotions, but we rarely experience
only one emotion at a time. After an exceptionally hard breakup, I
turned to writing as a process to help me sort through the confusion
in my head. I wrote the following passage in my journal as I was
sorting through the emotional chaos.
Everything stopped and there was emptiness.
Slowly, the hurt sank in; a dull throbbing that seemed to come from
everywhere at once. When that faded into the background, I found my
hate again, sharply focused on one person. Love was somewhere in the
background screaming incoherently for some sort of reason,
understanding and logic, but the feelings were too confused and
broken to make any sense out of them. Hatred won out at that moment,
it was there in the beginning and it was there in the end. Not a
vengeful, murderous hatred, but a disgusted and baffled hatred,
hating her for what she had done, but also hating myself for not
seeing the warning signs.
At
the time this except refers to, there was no clarity in what I was
feeling, so I mentally boxed up all that emotion and set it aside for
later. Usually we are told not bottle everything up inside, and
while I agree with that statement, sometimes it has to be done. The
trick is to not keep it locked up inside forever, but to know when to
release it. After a couple of months of getting used to living
without her, enough time had passed for me to go back and take a
second look at all those emotions that I had boxed off. It was not
an easy thing to do, some may view it as emotional masochism, but It
is something that had to be done. Slowly, I brought back memories,
one by one, by looking at old photographs, reading through old
letters I had received, taking the time to understand exactly what I
was feeling at that moment and trying to make a connection between
that feeling and what I had gone through two months prior. The
passage of time from the original emotional onslaught that took place
inside my head allowed me to bring specific emotions to the front
line and work my way through them with a clear head.
So
why is it that we are seeing an ever-increasing epidemic of depression sweeping through modern society, and as a result, an
ever-expanding assortment of anti-depressant drugs? This may be
attributed to society’s desire for instant gratification. The
current trend of prescribing medication in order to keep an
individual’s emotions in-check demonstrates that there is strong
desire to balance the varying mental states we humans have, but there
is often little emphasis placed on self-awareness or emotional
understanding. While it is true that in some cases, prescription
drugs do help people to regain a sense of control over their lives,
it is arguable that they are only moving sideways. Removing the
oppressive symptoms of depression in order to clear a space for the
only slightly less oppressive routine of regularly consuming
anti-depressants is like trading a ball and chain for a slave-driver.
However, considering how busy we have become as a society, that may
be the easiest solution for many people, but I think there is a
better way.
Society has a tendency to look for simple answers and solutions to
its problems, what some would call “Band-Aid fixes.” This
mentality places more importance on surface appearance than inner
functionality. Going for the “quick-fix” instead of being
inconvenienced with a more lengthy and thorough repair such as only
settling for some minor bodywork and paint to fix a car that crashed
head-on into a tree. Sure, it may look okay on the outside, but
there’s still major damage under the hood. The complex chemistry
of the human body cannot be repaired by a simple pill, there are many
interconnected factors that contribute to human emotional states, and
there is a very delicate balancing point. But
if there is a chemical imbalance in my brain, shouldn’t I add more
of the missing chemicals to try to get everything back in to balance?
Not directly, no.
Like
all complex systems, the human brain is an unimaginably intricate
piece of hardware that requires all of its trillions of neural
connections to work in harmony. The mind, which is the source of all
our emotions, is the software that manages the brain and allows us to
interact with it. Like a computer, you have hardware and software.
Let’s imagine that I’m sitting at my computer typing up a paper,
and it suddenly freezes. The problem could be caused by a small
power surge in the circuitry, some sort of voltage imbalance in the
CPU, but even if I knew exactly what was going on inside the
hardware, I wouldn’t open up the case and hook a pair of jumper
cables up to the circuit board in order to pump up the voltage, that
would be ridiculous. My operating system (Windows) is in control of
all the physical stuff inside that big metal box, so I need to start
digging in to my software in order to solve my problem. Now I can’t
possibly continue this discussion without referencing the philosophy
“mind over matter.” The mind is in control of the body on a much
deeper level than simply moving your arms, legs or telling your heart
when to beat. The mind is actually capable of inducing measurable
chemical and physiological changes within the body. I’m not
talking about fictional Jedi mind-tricks, the human body’s ability
to fix itself is something we’ve known about for years. In fact,
we believe in its authenticity to such an extent that we use it in
all modern clinical drug trials. What is this mysterious phenomena
that I’m referring to? The Placebo Effect.
In
common knowledge, a placebo is an inert pill that does not have any
effect on the body. Basically it is the equivalent of a Tic-Tac
without the fresh breath. During clinical trials for drug testing,
subjects are often given placebos instead of the actual drug as a
control. At the end of the trials, the percentage of people who
recovered from their illnesses due to the new drug is compared with
the percentage of people who recovered while only receiving a placebo
to determine the effectiveness of the drug in contrast to people who
will just get better on their own without the help of medication.
That is the primary purpose of a placebo, but the “placebo effect”
refers to the phenomenon of people who mysteriously get better while
on a placebo when there is no medical reason why they should. For
instance, imagine a cancer patient who has several large aggressive
tumors throughout her body. She doesn’t know or care what all the
technical jargon means or where the tumors are actually located
within the body because it is all too scary to think about. She is
told about a clinical trial for a new drug that may help to reduce
the size of the tumors. Without knowing exactly what the drug is
supposed to do, our patient decides that the possibility of recovery
is enough for her to base a decision on, so she signs up. She
doesn’t know it, but she is selected to be part of a control group
and will only be receiving a placebo, not the new drug treatment. At
the end of the trials, she is happy to learn that the new drug worked
and her tumors have shrunk to almost nothing, some have even
disappeared. That’s wonderful news, except she never received the
drug, nor did she even know exactly how it was supposed to work, so
how is this possible? “A concept of a successful response to a
drug was neither necessary nor sufficient to initiate the actual
changes observed in response to being administered a placebo pill”
(Frenkel 67). That’s the placebo effect. The belief in an
outcome is enough to elicit real physiological changes within the
body: mind over matter.
So
the mind in in control of the body, but who or what is in control of
the mind? Ideally, we are all in control of our own minds, and
because of that, we are in control of our bodies. This seems both
obvious and paradoxical at the same time. If my mind is what makes
me who I am, then that means that my mind is in control of my mind?
Bingo. The first step for me to be in control of my mind, is to be
aware of myself. I think most of us have that covered at a basic
level. But there are many levels of awareness and understanding,
being able to ask an answer the question “Why?” is perhaps the
most important aspect of comprehension: “Why am I sad?” The vast
majority of us would answer that question with an external reason: “I
am sad because Julie was mean to me.” That response will fulfill
most needs in society, but it’s not really addressing the real
reason. A much better and more insightful answer would be “I am
sad because when Julie called me gumpy, it stirred up my own
insecurity about feeling awkward and clumsy.” What makes that a
much better answer is that it shows an understanding of how my
emotions can be affected by those around me. The ability to
comprehend emotions is called emotional intelligence, and it refers
not only to a person’s ability to perceive and understand their own
emotions, but also the ability to identify the emotions of other
people around them. A person who does not develop an understanding
of their emotions or how they have an effect on focus, drive, stress
or physical health will more likely become victim to their emotions,
feeling like a child, helplessly kicking and screaming against
responsibility and self-control.
Ongoing
research is starting to point toward low emotional intelligence as
the root-cause of most types of depression-related disorders. More
specifically, depression is the result of a failure to understand
emotions and how they are connected with reality. The
Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, an ability-based
test, centers around four interrelated criteria for defining
emotional intelligence: “perceiving emotions, using emotions to
facilitate thought, understanding emotional information and
regulating emotions” (Emotional Intelligence and Mental Disorder).
It is important to note that the results of this test do not make any
assumption about cognitive intelligence or social ability, nor is it
intended to be a reflection of personality or character.
A
new trend in emotional education is known as social-emotional
learning, or SEL. Noted scientific journalist Jennifer Kahn recently
published an article in the New York
Times examining the implementation
of SEL in American public and private schools, detailing its
promising results due to its grander goal “to instill a deep
psychological intelligence that will help children regulate their
emotions” as opposed to the Band-Aid prevention programs that only
direct their focus on the outcomes of emotional instability.
According to Kahn, “attributes like self-restraint, persistence and
self-awareness might actually be better predictors of a person’s
life trajectory than standard academic measures.” So while the
majority of time in traditional education is spent on learning
cognitive skills such as math, science or literature, hardly any time
is devoted to teaching children how to understand and use their own
minds. For those children who are lucky enough to already have their
emotions figured out, or are exceptionally good at those cognitive
skills, this isn’t much of an issue because they will be able to
skate through their schooling without much difficulty. But for those
who are less cognitively-inclined, trying to master those subjects
can be the source of a great amount of stress and frustration, making
those children feel like second-rate citizens who will never be
good-enough in the view of society. Following that train of thought,
it is easy to see how many children can have a head-start towards a
life supplemented by a constant flow of anti-depressants by the time
they reach adolescence.
It will be
interesting to see if SEL will continue to become more present in our
lives as time goes on, and what effect it will have on the quality of
our lives. The real key to its success lies in our own ability and
desire to implement it successfully, and our patience to stick with
it long enough to see some real and definitive results. Because
social change happens slowly patience is the real requirement here.
We must be patient with SEL and give it time to work, just as we must
be patient with our emotions and give them they time they need to
evolve, not try to force them into complacence by popping some pills.
While we’re waiting, why not examine them a little more closely
and try to understand why it is that they work the way they do. I
bet your discoveries will surprise you.
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