Joy in Sorrow

Ender’s Game is possibly my favorite book of all time. Every time I read it I experience something profound, something somehow earth-shattering. It’s not about the outstanding quality of writing and character development (although those don’t hurt, either); it’s the tragedy. The story this book tells is heartbreaking; for it to have happened, even in fiction, leaves you feeling sick in your soul. But it was powerful enough to touch your soul in the first place.

The magic of those tragedies make a story stick with us, get it under our skin so we cannot forget. We seem to be drawn to things like this. Why is that?

Perhaps what is so alluring is the feeling of reckless abandon, of being overpowered by sorrow. A friend of mine once told me that sometimes she just enjoys “wallowing” in it, just allowing herself to feel the sheer force of it. This is something that I can almost understand; we so often shy away from feeling sad to keep up with the expectations of others and ourselves, so that to allow ourselves to freely experience it may be in some way liberating.

But I think it’s more than that. When I was caught up in depression in a bad way, I found a certain thought continuing to crop up in my mind: that I was choosing to be sad all the time. That all of my actions were inexplicably—but deliberately— hurtling into the depressive episodes. It felt like an addiction. Like this thing was damaging my life, but I needed a hit anyway. When we read a sad story or see a sad movie, we are safe from the events that occur. So we are safe to feel sad, so we enjoy it that much more. But, in our own lives and experiences, we are finding ways to enjoy it that are just a little more dangerous.

Why could this be? What pleasure could we find in sorrow? Perhaps It’s the power and intensity of the feeling. Perhaps an emotional low can be just as exciting as an emotional high. The chemicals surge through our brain, eliciting this incredible sensation of misery. How amazing! How enrapturing. How very, inescapably human we are, to feel this emotion that can enfold us in its long arms and carry us into that dark, forbidden place of our own minds. How incredible it is to be alive.


What do you all think? Am I totally off the mark here? Am I just weird and masochistic? Please share your thoughts and experience.

Maybe We Can Cure Depression All By Ourselves

The Medical Model and Why We Should Question It
Antidepressants. They're prescribed all over the place. They can even be prescribed by your local General Practitioner (i.e. someone not trained in psychiatry or psychology). They're basically what this generation is hailing as the "solution" to this rising epidemic. And this conclusion rides on the Medical Model of Depression: the premise that depression is the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain (a serotonin deficiency).

Most of us out there are just kind of assuming this to be correct. As I've mentioned, I take a Zoloft every morning myself. But recently a dangerous question has been posed: what if chemicals aren't really the culprit?

It's the question that plagued me in the throes of my depression: can I chalk this up to something that's out of my control, or... could it be my own fault? As you may predict, the notion that I was to blame for my disorder was frightening, demoralizing, and exhausting. For a long time, I clung to the belief that it was a chemical problem, suggesting an easy fix. "Magic pill = feel better".

New research is actually indicating that the Medical Model of Depression-- which we have thrown ourselves into headfirst-- is not as well substantiated as previously supposed. It turns out that these magic pills aren't significantly more effective than placebos. You've heard of the placebo effect: it's the notion that if we believe that something will work, it will work. It looks like that might be what's happening here: these pills designed to increase the serotonin in our brain-- thereby supposedly reducing the depressive symptoms-- are not working much better than sugar pills.

(Please visit this article for more information on this particular placebo effect, and this book review to sum up some of the arguments against the Medical Model.)

Could it be that simply believing we have the power to pull ourselves out of our sadness could be all we need?

As I described in my previous blog post on the subject of depression, part of the biggest problem is that we feel weak and helpless to make any changes. But it's a case of the chicken or the egg-- we are assuming that we feel powerless because we are depressed. But isn't it just as plausible that we are depressed because we feel powerless?

I have pondered this and come up with my own take on what exactly this process looks like. Much in the style of Aaron Beck (all around important guy in depression research), I have crafted my take on this in the form of a triad, which I am calling the Efficacy Triad.

Here's how I define efficacy: our ability to accomplish what we set out to do. It is regulated by our relationship with ourselves.



What we require to possess efficacy is 1.) Self Discipline, or the ability to prioritize our needs and our wants in a healthy way, and then direct our behavior accordingly, 2.) Self Esteem, a true love and appreciation for ourselves, as well as a healthy understanding of our strengths (weaknesses too, but that is really a given in depressed people), and 3.) Self Confidence, or the belief that we can accomplish what we set out to do. It's the perception that we are strong, capable agents in our own lives. These three areas all affect one another, and so lacking one will often lead to a lack the others as well. When these deficits become severe enough, they may result in depression.

Basically, we become depressed when we have this poor relationship with ourselves, leading to a lack in efficacy, meaning we are no longer effective individuals in our lives. And isn't this, in a nutshell, what depression is? The inevitable despondence that comes with a poor self-image, resulting in no longer being able to function well, leading to further lowering of our self image.

That's my theory. So why does it happen? I have a few answers.

I think-- particularly in America-- there exists a sense of entitlement. Written into the core of the "American Dream" is the notion that we can accomplish anything, and, moreover, that we deserve to accomplish everything. If we are thoroughly enough imbued with this philosophy, imagine the existential crisis we face when we fail. Not only will we feel profoundly disempowered, but worthless on top of that, because obviously if we can't have the exact kind of life we want, we must not be deserving of it. There's a host of philosophical implications in this progression that I won't get into now, but it's well worth some pondering.

Another way of conceptualizing it is actually rather Freudian: consider the expectations we have regarding what we "should" be like. Now picture what we tend to actually be like. When an individual is forced to internalize both of these concepts, they may be faced with a terrible psychological conflict. We have to struggle to reconcile the disparity, because it creates a dissonance that is psychologically uncomfortable. When we fail to reconcile it, however, we may be faced with depression.

So, how on earth can we treat this?

I believe that, since the depression was caused by a lack of efficacy, it can be reduced by bolstering the efficacy one possesses. Makes sense, right? So what does this look like? Well, predictably enough, each of the three parts of the triad need to be addressed to ensure a strong sense of efficacy.

Self Discipline has been often conceptualized as a muscle-- it can be trained. In practicing control over our negative thoughts and impulses, we can build up the power to have control in other areas of our life.

We can increase our Self Esteem by making a daily emphasis in our minds of our strengths, rather than our weaknesses. We can spend time developing our existing skills. We can interact with loved ones who will love and support us, and help remind us of what's good about ourselves.

Finally, we can increase our Self Confidence by putting all of these things into practice and starting to see change wrought in our lives. As we watch ourselves progress and move beyond our disorder, we will most likely begin to feel as though we have power over our lives, and the ability to change our own emotional fate.


This is why I believe embracing a model of depression which emphasizes our own responsibility for our difficulties is actually the perfect way of addressing the problem. While it acknowledges how our failings can cause trouble, it also highlights and power to bring about real, tangible improvements for ourselves, which is exactly what we need to get better. We need faith in ourselves as people and as free agents, not slaves to our imperfect minds and bodies.

So I never got to some of the things I wanted to address-- notably, depression as addiction. But honestly, I think the little dissertation I've composed here is more than enough for one blog post. If you have the patience to conquer this monster of a post, please tell me what you think! My experience is rather limited, and I am curious to know whether anybody else sees truth in these theories. What do you think?

The Insidious Face of Depression

One of my main interests in psychology is, at the moment, depression. This wasn't the case until recently, when I was finally told that I had it. All of a sudden, this "common cold" of mental disorders that I had been learning about for years, which never really interested me before, turned into the issue I devoted all my energy into understanding.

Depression is deceptive in its simplicity. At first blush, it is someone being unhappy for a long time. The predictable consequences of this are lethargy and lack of motivation, meaning the person is doing less in their lives that might make them happy. Therefore, they continue being unhappy. Bam-- you have a case of depression!

But when you delve deeper, you begin to see how treating it can look like beating your head against a brick wall, with, understandably, few results other than "Now my head hurts". In other words, one of the aspects of depression that makes it particularly dangerous is its self-perpetuation, even when we are trying to address it. In many ways, working towards "fixing" depression can actually worsen the depressive symptoms.

The core of depression is, I would argue, in the rumination: the tendency to chase negative thoughts round and round in your head, until they seem worse and worse, and impervious to solution. All of the time you spend telling yourself "I am intelligent and I don't have to be beaten by my depression" serves only to feed into the misery you feel when you are, in fact, beaten by your depression.

To put a real face on this issue, let me describe what happened with myself: I spent months and months making mental lists of all the reasons I was miserable. It was isolation at work, it was family drama, it was relationship drama, it was my social failures, it was my lack of academic motivation, it was my lack of self esteem, it was my lack of life direction... the list literally seemed to never end. I attempted to address each of these, but found myself unable to bring about any major changes, until eventually I could add "inability to make progress" to my list. No amount of thinking about these issues could do any good, because my depression was serving as a barrier between myself and personal improvement.

Have you ever had a depressed friend? Based on the statistics, we all probably have at one point, whether we knew it or not (research is showing that close to 40% of the population will experience significant depression at some point in their lives, even if they are never diagnosed). I can absolutely sympathize with the frustration that I'm sure many people feel when faced with someone going through depression. I believe there is a formulaic process that a bystander of depression tends to undergo: first, compassion and sympathy, feeling genuinely sorry for them that they are going through such a tough time. Next, attempts to help, and improve their situation, reminding them of things to be happy about, trying to please them however possible. Next, the inevitable irritation when none of the efforts are successful. You start thinking that the person is doing it to themselves, and just refusing to be happy. Finally, you start to resent them for being so dramatic and stubborn, and find yourself less able to feel that initial compassion/sympathy for them in any subsequent episodes they may go through.

Does this sound familiar? I know I've gone through this, myself. It wasn't until I, myself, became depressed that I started to understand how little sense this makes. No amount of telling someone to "snap out of it" will do any good, no matter how much we think it should work. When I was in a deep depression, feeling unable to be truly happy, and unresponsive to any logical reasons to cheer up, I finally got it. It's not something you can wish away, and it feels impossible to pull yourself out of-- particularly given depression's tendency rob us of energy and motivation, leaving us feeling utterly disabled by inertia! For this reason, it's a double whammy, which is why depression has some mysterious element of stability that makes it so resistant to change.

My own story with depression, at this point, has a happy ending, for which I am incredibly grateful. It was a painstaking process, however: when attempts to reason my way out of it failed, I turned to therapy. When therapy failed (I call seeing five different therapists with no improvement failure), I finally turned to medication. And, either because I really did have a serotonin deficiency or because the placebo effect is awesome, I felt substantially better after two weeks. I felt like myself again. I went to my therapist one more time after that, found that re-starting the process of examining my misery was only making me miserable again, and told her goodbye and thank you. I am still on my meds, and I suppose will eventually have to see what life is like without them. But I have a lot more faith in my ability to cope now that I have been pulled out of the pit.

However, I know that my story is actually rather uncommon. Many people continue to struggle with their depression, finding no help in therapy or medication. Which is why, in a forthcoming post, I would like to discuss some of the more philosophical aspects of depression: what is it, really? Why does it happen? Why are depression rates rising beyond anything we've ever seen before? Is depression unique to humans, and why? In addition, I will explain my new theory of depression as a form of addiction. Stay tuned!

Until then, please share with me your experiences, either as a victim or bystander of depression, or just someone who is interested in the topic. What do you all think about this issue?

If you're more interested in this topic, this blogger lays out the issues of depression much more clearly than I do. And be sure to check out this blog in particular if you're interested in the pitfalls of trying to think yourself out of depression.