No, Depression Hasn't Made Me a Better Person

 
It is two hours after the time I would normally want to be asleep, and I can sense that this is going to be a bad night, like last night.  As last night, I’ve taken a quetiapine tablet to calm my irrational thoughts as they chase wildly around my head.  As last night, it hasn’t made any difference.

Last night, I eventually took my quilt, a personal stereo and CD of relaxing music, box of tissues and a few other odds and ends, into the spare room so that I could let PDB11 get to sleep (and so that, if he was too warm, he could open the bedroom window without worrying that the hooting of owls would keep me awake).  I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the CD.  I didn’t think I deserved to listen to pleasant music.  Instead, I just lay there crying.  Tonight, I listened to the CD, but it didn’t relax me much.

Yesterday (Saturday) had actually been a cheerful day, until suddenly something in the evening shook me into emotional crisis.  Perhaps I had overtired myself on a long walk the day before.  Or perhaps the walk had just given me more time on my own to think about the way I had developed.

At any rate, as PDB11 and I went on with the book we were reading, Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Engdahl, I began to feel uneasy.  Thinking about the trials that the heroes had to undergo, I felt sure that I would never be able to trust the way they did.  I couldn’t understand why other people had the instinct to know whom to trust, when I had been born without it; or why the Stranger Danger campaign, with its principle of ‘You don’t know which strangers are enemies, so treat all strangers as enemies just in case,’ hadn’t made all my generation as paranoid as it had me.

So PDB11 and I argued for hours about this, and I grew more and more paranoid, insisting that all humans were evil.  I didn’t mean it; nothing could make me distrust PDB11 or see him as evil.  But we stressed each other out, with the result that neither of us got much sleep, and neither of us felt in a fit state to go to church this morning.

We tried to make Sunday as restful as possible, and I was starting to relax – until I saw a link to a post on John Folk-Williams’ Storied Mind blog called ‘Can Depression Make Us Better People?’ 

I think the answer is that it probably depends on what kind of depression.  If we are talking about my feelings of self-hatred – not sorrow at unkind things I’ve done, or frustration that I haven’t achieved more, but hatred of myself for existing at all, and the firm conviction that the only way I could make the world a better place is by killing myself – then no, it definitely doesn’t. 

Striving against depression, writing to convince myself that these ideas aren’t true, can encourage me to be creative.  Paying attention to other people’s needs instead of focusing on my own self-loathing can encourage me to be compassionate.  But to do this, I need to distance myself from depression.  If I ‘embrace’ self-hatred and despair, as so many people today claim we should do with all feelings no matter how toxic, then I don’t do anything except lie around crying, or run around hitting myself.

We are often told to ‘learn what depression is trying to tell us’.  But usually, what it is trying to tell us – for example, that I am evil and a waste of space and should never have existed – is what I already believe.  Also, it may not be true.  So what is the point in trying to ‘learn’ this message just because depression is telling it to us?

Folk-Williams refers to Tom Wootton’s book The Depression Advantage, which he discusses in more detail here.  According to the blog, Wootton sees depression as a response to being out of our comfort zone.  According to this model, after we have received treatment to help us through a crisis (say, a suicide attempt), we may try to manage our condition by retreating to a safer, more restricted comfort zone, but at the expense of having a boring life, so we need to be willing to expand our boundaries again. 

This doesn’t sound like me.  My depression is a mindset that tells me that I’m not allowed to have a comfort zone: that I am supposed to be miserable and should expect my life to consist of nothing but pain.  If such a mindset is ‘beautiful’ and to be welcomed as a ‘friend’, as some people claim, why would anyone try to recover from it?  Why go into hospital to seek protection from your self-destructive impulses?  Why not just trust your ‘friend’ depression when it tells you to kill yourself?

Some people say that depression has taught them to rely on God in their weakness.  But in my case, it is depression that has been teaching me, ever since I was a child, to see God not as someone who loves and supports us, but someone who makes impossible conditions so that he can damn us for not fulfilling them.  I know that, if there is a real God, then He isn't like the way I imagine Him, but because of my depression, I can't sense God.

Depression can work like an addiction, damaging us until we are incapable of maintaining jobs or relationships or friendships, or of being creative.  But where an addiction says, ‘You don’t need all that.  You just need the pleasure of me,’ depression offers no pleasure, but says, ‘You didn’t deserve anything good going on in your life.  You don’t deserve to get well.  Just sit here and let me beat you up some more.’

PDB11 is frightened by the thought that he might not be able to go on coping with my depression much longer.  I am frightened by the way that many of the depressed community on the internet seem to accept that their depression will never go away, and that they just have to learn to love it.  I am frightened because I fear that they may be right: not about depression being beneficial, but that it is inescapable.

I know that the kind of depression I suffer from has nothing good, and little truth, in it.  It is simply the sum of all the defeatist, despairing stories that I have been telling myself since childhood onwards.  I know that if I tell myself that I will always be depressed, then this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At least I’m tired now, and might sleep.  And even if depression doesn’t spur my creativity, at least anger sometimes can.