depression

Another sad day

It is very sad news for America and the world that Donald Trump has been elected president. I view him as a dangerous fascist with regressive values about every aspect of society from gender to sexuality, race to disability and an agenda that will restrict human rights in the interest of big business and the super-wealthy. He is in it only for himself, and it is shameful that such a superficial and offensive campaign connected with people in large enough numbers to elect him. I feel nearly as sad as after the referendum, although slightly less surprised. We truly are in a post-truth era, where lies and rhetoric mean more than evidence or experience.

As Caroline Lucas put it “Today is a devastating day. On this dark day we extend the hand of friendship to people in the USA who wake up in fear – we know that you are not defined by the hatred espoused by your new president. It’s at times like this when we need to unite, learn, and resist more than ever before”.

Of course this time round many people viewed it as a choice between two candidates that were both far from ideal. I didn’t see Clinton as any worse than most politicians, and viewed her as head and shoulders more palatable than Trump, but I’d much rather have Michelle Obama as the first female POTUS than Hillary. She has much more charisma, passion and colour to her character compared to the bland establishment figure and stand-by-your-man tradition that Hillary represents. Plus I just love the way Barack looks at her, and the nature of their relationship and family. Of course I wish they’d been able to do more to push through healthcare reforms and gun control, and to close Guantanamo and stop the drone programme, but compared to anyone else in politics in my lifetime they are downright inspirational. I hope that over the next few years new leaders can rise up on both sides of the Atlantic so that we can have a better result next time round.

So why did this happen? I see a number of different factors coinciding – the impact of an increasing wealth gap, the impact of two party first-past-the-post politics, white men fearing the changing power structure in the world and a generation of right-wing media propaganda. Hopefully the Brexit vote and Trump being elected are the last death throws of white supremacism.

And what can be we do about it? We need to regroup and to learn from what is happening. I’m inclined to agree with Corbyn when he says “Trump’s election is an unmistakable rejection of a political establishment and an economic system that simply isn’t working for most people. It is one that has delivered escalating inequality and stagnating or falling living standards for the majority, both in the US and Britain”. The world we live in needs reason and critical thinking. It needs education systems which encourage integration and mutual understanding, as well as showing children the value of caring for the environment and evaluating claims based on evidence rather than opinion. We also need to actively teach and reward empathy and kindness, and seek these qualities out in our leaders too.

I’ll give Caroline Lucas the last word, “I will never believe that people are inherently closed minded, or insular, but I do believe that people, the world over, are scared and angry – and are kicking back in ways that nobody predicted… I have a message for those people who will try to stir up hatred, and fear. Where you try and divide us we will stand firmer together than ever before. Where you try and pitch our communities against each other, we will build stronger bonds between ourselves and our neighbours… This is no time to mourn – instead we must organise like never before to keep our communities cohesive and our climate safe. On this dark day we extend the hand of friendship to people in the US who wake up in fear. Solidarity is a popular word, but we have to make it mean something. It’s at times like this when we need to unite, learn, resist and hope more than ever before. Today, in whatever ways we can, let’s light a candle rather than curse the darkness”.

Talking about depression and seeking help

Someone I know emailed me this week, saying he was feeling depressed. He was very self-critical about it because objectively his life was the best it had ever been (after a lot of difficult experiences in his childhood and early adult life he is now employed, in a relationship, with a nice home) and therefore it felt ungrateful to complain about anything (like social anxiety, work stress, sleep disturbance, niggles in the relationship, having to care for a dependent parent) as he should be happy. He felt perpetually exhausted and like therapy and medication was for people with ‘real problems’ and talked about wishing he didn’t exist. This was my answer:

There is no ‘should’ with feelings. They just are what they are. We can learn to challenge our thoughts or change our behaviours, which can have a positive knock on effect, but feelings we have little control over. So just be mindful of them, and try to deal with the stuff that underlies them when you are feeling well-resourced and supported.

I read a rather naff explanation on facebook today, but it has a germ of wisdom in it:

I held up an orange and asked a boy in the audience “If I were to squeeze this orange as hard as I could, what would come out?”

He looked at me like I was a little crazy and said, “Juice, of course.”

“Do you think apple juice could come out of it?”

“No!” he laughed.

“What about grapefruit juice?”

“No!”

“What would come out of it?”

“Orange juice, of course.”

“Why? Why when you squeeze an orange does orange juice come out?”

He may have been getting a little exasperated with me at this point.

“Well, it’s an orange and that’s what’s inside.”

I nodded. “Let’s assume that this orange isn’t an orange, but it’s you. And someone squeezes you, puts pressure on you, says something you don’t like, offends you. And out of you comes anger, hatred, bitterness, fear. Why? The answer, as our young friend has told us, is because that’s what’s inside.”

It’s one of the great lessons of life. What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside. It doesn’t matter who does the squeezing—your mother, your brother, your children, your boss, the government. If someone says something about you that you don’t like, what comes out of you is what’s inside. And what’s inside is up to you, it’s your choice.

When someone puts the pressure on you and out of you comes anything other than love, it’s because that’s what you’ve allowed to be inside. Once you take away all those negative things you don’t want in your life and replace them with love, you’ll find yourself living a highly functioning life.

Now, I’m not totally on board with filling yourself exclusively with love and light (because I think negative feelings are pretty normal and have their value too), and I’m not sure that anyone can ever respond only positively to life’s pressures, but he is right with one thing – your response under stress reflects what you have learnt and experienced in your life up to that point. If you are filled with the poison of being bullied at school or denigrated by your parents, with the wounds of failed relationships, with traumas and losses, then that becomes your norm. It will tarnish your view of yourself, the world and others, and it has the potential to leak out in unhelpful ways. When you carry that baggage and aren’t buoyed up by positive experiences and relationships it becomes much harder to be resilient to the day to day stressors of life. It becomes harder to feel you deserve a better life and to seek out positive experiences for yourself, and you can instead end up avoiding or sabotaging them.

Therapy is there to help you recognise that skew, and to separate the result of negative experiences from your innate worth as an individual. It can help you to challenge your thinking, to change your behaviour, to give yourself opportunities to test and refine your beliefs about yourself, the world and others. It can help you reflect on the patterns in your relationships, why you keep replaying the ones that are not helpful and how you can begin to change this. And sometimes when you are feeling so hopeless and worn out that even the idea of therapy is too much to manage, medication can help to give you the energy and optimism back to allow change to be possible.

The biggest problem of depression is that people can see it compassionately in others, but we are very critical of ourselves for feeling that way, and unable to recognise that the stuckness and self criticism is part of the depression and – importantly – eminently treatable. If you read back your email to me and imagine someone else made it, I think you’d be a lot more compassionate to that person than you are being to yourself. The problem is that you are trying to measure the objective situation with a subjective (and in fact distorted) tool – yourself. And that distortion increases when you are depressed. So be kind to yourself, and allow others to help you. You don’t have to be stuck with feeling sad just because you can’t pin a reason for it on something specific or because there are other people who have bigger problems in their lives.

You said that you sometimes wish you didn’t exist, but I am very glad you do, and I am sure that there are lots of other people who value you and would miss you if you weren’t around. When you are depressed it is hard (if not impossible) to imagine that life can get better. But it can get better. Not only that, but it does get better for most people with depression. Most people who are depressed or even suicidal go on to happier times and to be glad they didn’t act on those thoughts. So please, seek help and don’t give up. Call the Samaritans if you feel like you might harm yourself, and speak to your GP about medication and/or a referral for psychological therapy. After all, 90% of people who turn up to therapy start to feel better, and you can too.