Emotional Understanding is My Anti-Depressant

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.