Death Denial, Death Drive

Content warning: suicide, depression

If you’re at all aware of my online presence, you’ll know that I have great respect for Richard Beck’s work at his blog Experimental Theology and in his books known sometimes as the Death Trilogy. (You may be more aware of this than you'd like to be, since I doubt a month goes by before bringing his work up in some comment thread or another.) In particular I appreciate his work on Terror Management Theory and how it pertains to religious authenticity, hospitality, and the creation of culture. He gets the bare-bones of his theory from Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, but adds to it using experimental psychology that was unavailable to Tillich. I’ll give a summary.

Humans fear death. We fear particular threats of death, but we also experience anxiety from the knowledge that we will necessarily die one day. In order to manage the terror of death, we create systems of meaning which promise us some kind of immortality. This might be a promise of an afterlife, but it might simply be the idea that our lives had meaning—we were remembered, or we descendants, or our actions contributed to the creation of some great cultural work (like the progress of science or what have you). However, these cultural projects, or worldviews, can only eliminate our fear of death if we believe in them fully. Therefore we react to anything which threatens our belief in these worldviews in the exact same way that we would react to the possibility of death, because the loss of our worldviews is identical to the loss of immortality. And the mere existence of other plausible worldviews might constitute a threat to one’s own worldview. This is why most people defend their worldviews and reject other people’s worldviews so violently; violent defense of worldviews makes things like hospitality, charity, and justice difficult or impossible. Even a religion like Christianity, which is founded on the idea that we should side with the oppressed, became and in some cases remains violently oppressive because of these forces. Some people, however, do not use their worldview and cultural projects to shield themselves from the reality of death. These people, instead, face their fears of death directly; they also face their doubts about their own worldviews directly (these are, after all, the same thing). These people are in the minority, but they exist. Thus there are two things a person must do in order to prevent themselves from violently defending their worldviews: they must be willing to face the possibility of their own death (which means they must be willing to face doubt, the possibility that their worldview is false and their actions meaningless), and they must try to adopt a worldview that is not easily threatened by competing worldviews (which doesn’t necessarily mean relativism, but at the least worldviews should be easy on people who don’t adopt them).

I find this theory very compelling, not just because Beck marshals a lot of evidence for it in his work but also because I can use it to explain so many things. In particular, it seems to explain why so many religious people can be so hostile, and why their hostility seems to come from their religion, but at the same time religion motivates others to be hospitable instead. The theory can’t explain why people choose one religion over others, but that’s OK: other theories can do that. Beck’s work simply explains why people need to choose a worldview of some kind (even if that’s not a religion) and why they behave the way they do in relation to their own worldview and in relation to other people’s worldviews. And it is powerful when it does this.

However, I think there might be a problem with it. It presupposes that all people fear death.*

Now, I readily admit that most people fear death, and that complaints that certainly cultures do not fear death simply confuse the effects of a highly successful worldview with the lack of a natural fear of death. But I do not admit for a second that all people fear death. Some people actively desire death (that is, they exhibit marked suicidiality), but others simply have neither fear nor desire for death. When my depression is at its worst, this is me: I am generally unperturbed by possibly dangerous situations (unsafe driving, for instance). Moreover, however my mental health looks, I feel no anxiety at all about the fact that I will inevitably die. This does not scare me; it relieves me. There is little that gives me more comfort that the thought that I will one day die. I cannot state this emphatically enough: the only emotion I feel when contemplating my eventual death is relief. Of course I realize this might be pathological, but it means I fit into neither of Beck’s populations: I am not a person who denies death and my fear of it, and I am not a person who faces my fear of death. I face death and simply have no fear. I am surely not the only one, either.

Perhaps you object that I do not fear death because I have a fairly successful meaning-making worldview. And I do think my life probably has meaning. But, if that were true, my response to doubt would be fear of death. Contemplating the possibility that my life might be meaningless should, if Beck is right, cause me to grasp for life more readily. But the opposite happens: when I contemplate the possibility that my life has no meaning, I am even less interested in living out the full allotment of my life. If I came to believe that my life was meaningless, I would probably tip over into actively wanting to die. That’s opposite the prediction you would make if what Beck said applied to me. And I’m in good company as far as that goes; Camus felt the same.

Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus as follows: 

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Notice that the question of life and death is contingent on the question of meaning and meaninglessness; if life is meaningless, there is no reason to live. If life has meaning, there is a reason to live. This exhibits causality reverse to Beck’s. Camus’s answer was peculiar to him, a last-minute dodge from nihilism: suicide is the refusal to face the meaninglessness of life, and we must face the meaninglessness of life. This smuggles meaning back into absurdism, however, and creates a contradiction.** Camus’s answer doesn’t interest me, however; what interests me is the fact that the absurdists and existentialists seemed to have experiences parallel to mine, which suggests that Beck’s theory cannot describe all people. That is, it does not apply to the admittedly small population of people who simply don’t fear death in the first place.

Of course, it doesn’t have to address those people (us). As a theory of religion and culture in general, its failure to describe a small subset of the population, one which has not had much hand in shaping either religion or culture, is hardly a fatal error. In fact, this disjoint explains the general hostility most cultures and religions have shown towards suicide (as distinct self-sacrifice): suicide, as a repudiation of the meaningfulness of life, threatens the culture’s worldview and thereby exposes people to the fear of death. And since worldviews are designed to assure people that death isn’t real, they don’t have much to offer people who mostly fear that life is worthless and all meaning is uncertain, except to simply insist on their own validity in a louder and angrier voice. Maybe this is why it is difficult to find resources in Christianity which are at all effective at dissuading people from suicide or ameliorating their depression without making things so much worse (fear of damnation, sense of shame, etc.).

It is worth noting that I do have a fear of death, but it’s a different one: I fear other people’s deaths. I fear the deaths of those who matter to me. Perhaps Beck’s theory can be applied to that? The attempt to understand another person’s life as meaningful, in order to deny their death? Or the attempt to honestly face another person’s death or our fear of it?

So my complaint is not that Beck’s theory is wrong because it omits the population of which I am a part; my complaint is simply that I find it difficult to use Beck’s theory to determine what I should do, in regards to my own worldview, or to predict or understand my own anxieties regarding the meaningfulness of my actions, the role of doubt in hospitality, and how to face my particular anxieties (of meaninglessness, but also of the deaths of people who matter to me) without harming others.

For more on my depression and assorted philosophy I've worked through in response to it, see this index post.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, please contact a local suicide hotline. In BC, call 1-800-784-2433, or 1-800-SUICIDE. If you are feeling depression generally, get therapy. I am serious about this: it helps so much.

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*There are other problems I can think of: for instance, Beck does not seem to account for a desire to believe that which is true. However, I won’t deal with it here; it’s possible that we do have a reality principle in our psychological make-up which competes with the meaning-creating and death-fearing components, but I’m not entirely sure that we do; if we do value truth for its own sake, that value is likely nonetheless a product and component or our worldview and appears after we choose a worldview to manage our fear of death. Beck, however, found some inspiration for his work from the American pragmatists, whose sense of truth is different from the intuitive one: a proposition which works, which bears fruit, which makes you the person you think you should be, is true and is true precisely for those reasons. Truth is not about correspondence between a proposition and an external reality or about coherence within a system of propositions. While Beck might not sign off on American pragmatist epistemology, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Beck’s work focuses on whether beliefs make you a hospitable or inhospitable person rather than on whether beliefs meet some other benchmark of truth.

**This paradox may be resolvable, in the sense that it may be cognitively impossible for us to truly acknowledge meaninglessness. Any attempt to do so might smuggle meaninglessness in somehow; an absurdist might therefore say that absurdism is simply the philosophical system which gets closest to acknowledging meaninglessness, even though it smuggles in the imperative “You must authentically acknowledge meaninglessness.” As it stands, I prefer existentialism to absurdism, since it acknowledges that meaning can be created and only asks that you acknowledge that you created that meaning yourself; it still contains the paradox (you did not yourself create the imperative “You must acknowledge that you created all meaning yourself”), but it contains a more hospitable version of that paradox.

He Hath Ever But Slenderly Known Himself

From Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression:

It is arguably the case that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world around them than do nondepressed people. Those who perceive themselves to be not much liked are probably closer to the mark than those who believe that they enjoy universal love. A depressive may have better judgement than a healthy person. Studies have shown depressed and nondepressed people are equally good at answering abstract questions. When asked, however, about their control over an event, nondepressed people invariably believe themselves to have more control than they really have, and depressed people give an accurate assessment. In a study done with a video game, depressed people who played for half an hour knew just how many little monsters they had killed; the undepressed people guessed four to six times more than they had actually hit. Freud observed that the melancholic has "a keener eye for the truth than others who are not melancholic." Perfectly accurate understanding of the world and the self was not an evolutionary priority; it did not serve the purpose of species preservation. Too optimistic a view results in foolish risk-taking, but moderate optimism is a strong selective advantage. "Normal human thought and perception." wrote Shelley E. Taylor in her recent, startling Positive Illusions, "is marked not by accuracy but positive self-enhancing illusions about the self, the world, and the future. Moreover, these illusions appear actually to be adaptive, promoting rather than undermining mental health. . . . The mildly depressed appear to have more accurate views of themselves, the world, and the future than do normal people . . . [they] clearly lack the illusions that in normal people promote mental health and buffer them against setbacks." 

The fact of the matter is that existentialism is as true as depressiveness. Life is futile. We cannot know why we are here. Love is always imperfect. The isolation of bodily individuality can never be breached. No matter what you do on this earth, you will die. It is a selective advantage to be able to tolerate these things, and to go on--to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. [...] Depressives have seen the world too clearly, have lost the selective advantage of blindness. (433-434)

While I understand the research is not quite so clear as all that, and while depression is capable of speaking lies, it is also the unfortunate case that depression sometimes tells the truth. Those with depression know in their bones that their automatic negative thoughts are true, and part of the practice of therapy is to learn to shut those thoughts out, but there's an equivocation there: do you ignore the thoughts, or deny them? Because, if we're going to be honest, some of the negative thoughts are true; the person with depression is right, and they know it. This makes it so much harder to identify the negative thoughts which are just lies your depression is telling you.

The fall-back position, I guess, is interpretation; change the metric and you can change the answer. I can say for sure that positive self-talk works (sometimes), but it's hard not to believe that positive self-talk is a ritual of lying to yourself. Maybe mental health is constituted by having more rather than less productive delusions.

Notes on Depression Index

As of this writing I still have depression, but I'm also certainly getting better. I think it's about time to gather the notes of depression together. There will likely be more of them; if there are, I'll update this index.

This is organized chronologically.

1. A History of My Mood Disorders. As of 2 April 2013. It might be out of date. A decent place to start, though.
2. Why I Do Not Like Telling People I Am Depressed. What it says on the tin. Written during my Wild Iris phase.
3. Not Depressed Enough. In which I talk about the weird feeling I got trying to prove that I had depression. For some reason I wanted this post to be kind of funny, but I don't think that's how it turned out.
4. Being Unable to Value. What it says on the tin.
5. The Freedom of Labels. In which I talk about how using psychological or pseudo-psychological labels has  been helpful to me.
6. Splitting Planarians. In which I geek out about flatworms and talk rather badly about theodicy. (For some reason I forgot to label this a Note on Depression, but I should have.)
7. Hope, Remoras, and The Homeward Bounders. In which I talk about Romans 5:3-5, YA science fantasy, and the trouble with hoping for a better future. Includes a lengthy natural history footnote the topic of which made it into a title.
8. The Graveside Crowd. A much later post, about the death of my father and the social expectations that accompany mourning, or the presumption of mourning.

The following weren't really Notes on Depression, exactly, but they pertain so I'll put them here.

Envy for Sisyphus. In which I indulge quite a bit in angst of the "What can we really know?" variety. But I still stand by everything I said. Also, Camus. Also, a response to Eve Tushnet.
As for Me and My House. In which I talk about self-disclosure and the phrase "coming out as...". Not really so preachy as the title makes it sound.
Death Denial, Death Drive. In which I talk about Richard Beck's theories on death denial, meaning, and the creation of culture, and how those theories don't seem to apply to people who desire death or at least do not fear it; this is relevant to me as someone with depression. [Subsequent addition 19/08/2014]

Hope, Remoras, and The Homeward Bounders

A Note on Depression?

In my previous post "Splitting Planarians: Incomplete Thoughts on Theodicy (and Complete Ones on Certain Flatworms)," when I'm not geeking out about natural history, I complain a bit about that week's lectionary readings. "And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings," Paul writes in Romans 5:3-5, "knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." I was complaining about the suffering part of that verse, but I also want to complain about the hope part. Specifically, the bit where hope doesn't disappoint seems a little off to me, if by "a little off" we mean "lies from start to finish." Hope is fine-tuned for disappointment.

I have a troubled history with hope (link and link), but I haven't written on that recently. Depression is a wonderful reason to bring that old issue out again: do I hope that I will eventually be free of this major depressive episode? do I hope that I will eventually be free of mood disorders altogether? The former is likely; the latter is not so likely. I've also been struggling with the more immediate problem of my unemployment. If I do not get a job in Vancouver, I will be moving to Alberta for the summer to work there. It's not that I dislike Alberta, but I would far prefer to remain in Vancouver. Hoping for a job when I knew that I wasn't likely to get one in Vancouver's unforgiving job market was an almost physically painful experience. I felt like it would almost be better to give up on getting a job entirely, even though my self-imposed deadline was only nigh, not here. And yet I wanted a job in Vancouver, and had applied to so many promising-looking places, that I felt hope anyway, despite my better judgement.* (As of writing, the deadline has passed and I am still unemployed, so I will be leaving for Alberta soon.)

The good news is that I suddenly understood Diana Wynne Jones's The Homeward Bounders a few weeks after reading it. SPOILERS One of the underlying fantasy mechanics in that novel is that hope drains the reality from the world you inhabit: by projecting your efforts into a world you cannot access, you make your current location unreal. /SPOILERS "Hope is an anchor," says Ahasuerus, and he doesn't mean that it stabilizes you but that it impedes you.** Jones is right. Hope can drain the present of reality: when I was desperately hoping for a job I did not have, I was ignoring my present situation and, for that matter, not preparing for my probable future. And I'm sure most of us know people who use hope to delegitimize our current hardships; maybe the future will be better, but I need to know how to handle my suffering now. (Jamie, the protagonist, encounters Prometheus chained to a rock and wants to ask how Prometheus could have survived his torment, but doesn't ask because he already knows the answer: he had to.)

So is Paul completely wrong? I'm sure he's not, because he's talking about a particular hope (albeit one that hasn't paid many dividends for me quite yet), but we must be careful with this hope thing. I would like to not be disappointed by hope and I would like to know the love poured into our hearts, but so far I have no experience of any of that. I will let you know if I figure anything else out, and please let me know if you have any non-platitudes to say about it.

Also, I would like to direct you to Nadia Bolz Weber's post on the same verse.

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*Did you know that there is a word for acting against your better judgement? It's acrasia. Thanks, ancient Greece, for another useful word! Now if only you hadn't advocated misogyny and slavery.
**I think a better metaphor would be the kind of fish that is called a remora. Sometimes known as sharksuckers, whalesuckers, or suckerfish, they latch onto sharks and whales and, sometimes, boats. It is called a remora, which means delay or hindrance in Latin, because Pliny believed that enough remoras attached to a ship would slow it down or even hold it fast. This isn't true, but the name has stuck onto the fish about as much as the fish sticks onto sharks. (It is thanks to Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings that I learn this etymology.) Remoras are commensalists rather than parasites. (The kind of commensalism they practice is phoresy). It is at that point that the metaphor breaks down, because I don't think hope is commensalist.

As for Me and My House

On Disclosing Religion, Sexuality, Psychology

A few weeks ago I was speaking with a friend who mentioned that she and her fellow Catholics sometimes spoke of "coming out as Christian," confirming that I'm not the only one who has noticed a similarity between the kinds of stories people tell as Christians (which in Protestant circles, at any rate, are called "testimonies") and the kinds of stories people tell as LGTBQ folk. But I'm forced to wonder, first, why the comparison seems apt and, second, if it really is all that apt after all.

One of the things I didn't like about Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself is that it lacked examples which might make her subject clearer (and with Butler, clarity is often in peril). Giving an Account of Oneself is about the vexations one encounters when narrating one's own account. For instance, I cannot narrate my exposure in part because my narration would expose me in new ways, and were I to narrate that exposure, I would yet again be exposed in a new way. I remain partially opaque to myself and cannot narrate those parts I cannot see. Any account I give is shaped by my audience and by certain norms that my context determines without my consent. I think it's clear that Giving an Account takes coming-out narratives as a typical species, as it were, but Butler never explicitly states what kinds of accounts she is describing.

In trying to find examples of account-giving, I discovered that Butler's discussion seemed to apply equally well to the fumbling accounts I've had to give to non-Christians of my own Christianity (and, for that matter, of the fumbling accounts I've had to give to Christians of my uncertainties, unorthodoxies, or heresies). The vexations are appallingly similar: the sort of self-description you're giving doesn't fit in with your context's expectations of a self-account, and the kinds of questions that your audience has asked you don't set up very good answers, and giving the account changes the very situation you're trying to describe, and anyway you don't perfectly know why you feel what you feel or believe what you believe. In this way, it makes some sense to say that you can "come out as Christian."

There are other reasons that the comparison seems to hold: religion and sexuality* are often invisible and therefore secret until you choose to self-disclose; religion and sexuality can shape your decisions in important ways; in many cases people can be both apprehensive and celebratory when describing their religion or their sexuality.

But I worry that Christians (or straight ones, anyway) maybe ought to avoid using the language of "coming out" to describe their own religious self-expression. It seems to me like a form of appropriation, and a darkly ironic one at that: certain Christian reactions to homosexuality have been and still are one of the reasons that coming out as queer can be so dangerous. To take a phrase from queer culture that is inscribed with Christian oppression of homosexuality and then use it to describe a certain Christian identity could be very disrespectful, even if you are a Christian that supports LGTBQ identities whole-heartedly. And then there's the fact that Christians are not exposed like LGTBQ people are exposed; whatever the squawking you hear, there is no systemic persecution of Christians on par with that of LGTBQ people (or, for that matter, atheists).

Of course, it isn't hard to find accounts which put the two together: if the accounts I've read are any indication, queer Christians are asked to account for themselves as Christian and as queer simultaneously or near-simultaneously.

The reason I'm interested in comparing the testimony and coming-out genres is that another comparison is suddenly relevant to me: I have frequently been called on to give an account of my depression. It is beset with the same vexations that Butler has described. While the average person's acceptance of mental illness is improving, there is still the threat of stigma or potentially damaging incomprehension. (That said, I'm sure that in academia disclosing my psychology would be somewhat more successful than disclosing my religion.) A major difference is that I do not have much cause to celebrate my depression, nor do I have  much desire to make depression a part of my identity (though I think there are good reasons for saying that it is part of my identity nonetheless).

Last time I posted I spoke of genera and species, and I think that sort of taxonomy might be helpful here: "coming out story" is a species of the genus "account." I guess I wish there was a better, more specific, and more popular synonym for "account."

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*Also, asexualty and irreligion.

Envy for Sisyphus

I do not often write emotionally; as I've said before, I rarely feel the need to express my emotions to other people. But today my soul cries that its anguish be spoken and my soul's anguish happens to be on topic. I apologize in advance if this emotional display is unseemly.

Eve Tushnet suggests that I seriously underestimate the dangers of paralysis in the face of making a decision. Her concern with critical thinking is that it will keep you in the anteroom when you hate being in the anteroom. (Seriouly, go read the post.) This is a fair but false accusation. It is fair because, based on anything I've written, you wouldn't know how familiar I am with the agony of uncertainty. But the trouble is that, for me, it does not matter whether I've accepted or not, whatever that means; the doubts, as Eve notes, never go away. There are many many times that I would give anything--ANYTHING--for certainty. I feel lost, perpetually. I sometimes feel as though I have no purpose; this may come from the fact that I no longer know what career I want to pursue. I want a quest, you know? I want some sort of project that will give meaning to my decisions: I don't care whether I find a career or write a novel or take up a cause or fall in love or whatever. I am jealous of those children who stumbled upon Narnia, yes, but I am jealous even of Camus's Sisyphus; he may be faced with a meaningless task, but it is his meaningless task, and he knows he must do it and how it is to be done.

I know that my depression is making this worse right now. Stephen Greenblatt writes in "Invisible Bullets" that Shakespeare's Prince Hal is a reverse Midas, that everything he touches turns to dross. That is how I feel right now; any project to which I turn my hand appears worthless soon after I begin. But it's not just a recent thing. I've always felt this way, to an extent. In my undergraduate I met many people who believed that God had a special plan for them and they had some access to this plan; they claimed to feel the voice of God within the stillness of their souls. Try as I might, I could never hear this voice, but I wanted a special plan so badly (even though, really, I suspected that they were all fooling themselves). I convinced myself that my special plan was to develop a spirituality for those whose only experience of God was as a terrible and ringing silence, because such a task could only be completed by someone who had no personal experience of God but nonetheless believed (ie. me). In the end, though, I couldn't even believe that sorry sort of plan: if God has a plan for me, I do not presume to know what it is.

So if my reaction to what pretty much anyone else is saying on this seems, I don't know, bitter, it's because I am a little bitter. Not toward God, who I don't think has an obligation to explain himself to me or anyone else, but toward anyone who has made me feel like I need to be certain of things (or, to anyone who has acted like I have an obligation to explain myself to them). Maybe there is something in our culture which reprimands people who are overly certain, I don't know, but our culture isn't homogenous and there absolutely is something in our culture which has no sympathy whatsoever for those in the anteroom or, for that matter, those like me who presume to be in the main chamber without having a clue what they're doing there or whether they are even in the right building. It's not just that that's an uncomfortable position to be in; quite a lot of people make it an uncomfortable position to be in. I don't begrudge anyone their certainty, but I have seen so many people use their certainty to shame others, or at least justify the shaming, that I fear certainty makes it easy to weaponize beliefs. So the thing behind my tentativism, maybe, is terror. Terror that I will be excommunicated for my heresy, terror that I will be steamrolled by someone else's special plan, terror that I might be the one trodding on another as I pursue my own glorious purpose, terror that someone might hallucinate the voice of God demanding my sacrifice. And horror too that many people are experiencing these things even when I am not. And maybe I'm wrong, but I cannot imagine that any of these things would happen if the perpetrators were just a little less sure of themselves.

So I say I would give anything for certainty, for a purpose, for a quest, but this is not true. If there is something I am certain of, it is that I cannot tell anyone else's story, that I have an obligation to do no harm (or at least as little as possible), that I have an obligation to empathy. I will take on whatever agony I must to maintain these principles, and so if this means that I suffer uncertainty--for there is suffering in uncertainty--so be it.

This is what I say when I feel brave. The other side of the coin is that uncertainty seems to be part of my disposition. It is not a thing I chose in the first place. Do I think I am a better person for my uncertainty? Yes: the less certain I am, the less of a jerk I am. (Though I take Eve Tushnet's point that uncertainty doesn't combat oppression very effectively, and it should be noted that I am certain about some things, especially w/r to feminism and environmentalism and other causes that don't have handy names.) Do I think the world would be a better place if pretty much everybody was more willing to concede that they might be wrong? Yes, I do. But I will not pretend to have chosen this for myself; all I have done is accepted it, or owned it as they say. And I really cannot blame people for abandoning an openness to truth as they grasp for certainty, because I know as well as anyone how miserable uncertainty can make you.

But I know I have also celebrated uncertainty and postmodernism and so forth in the past, and while I have trouble celebrating it at this moment I still know that it is worth celebrating. In a way I've written about it a bit already when writing about fantasy novels. There is a joy not just in discovery, but in knowing that there is more to find than can ever be found. And instability can be just plain fun; when things are open to change, you can play with them, you can create, you can experiment. There is suffering, and today my soul screams for the kind of certainty others have and I do not, but if the possibility for certainty was extended to me, I would be tempted to take it and I would still turn it down. And I shall try to remain the joy it can give to keep me through until I am better able to experience that joy again.

Now, look, other people can write all they want about this, but for the time being I'm utterly sick of the topic so unless I've already told you personally that I'll answer your questions, I reserve the right to ignore your question. I'm not saying I will ignore it, just that I reserve the right.

Note: When I say "certainty," I mean more than just certainty about particular facts. I mean something closer to "metanarrative," or "certainty in a worldview," or "an idea that you know how to live a good life." I don't mean "feeling like you know all of the answers," but I do mean more than the sense of certainty in saying, "I am certain that there is such a thing as gravity." So I acknowledge that I'm not even sure myself exactly what it is I'm objecting to, and I promise I'll think about it, but I don't promise that I'll come back with answers. I can't promise that at all.

The Freedom of Labels

A Note on Depression

For the most part I am used to hearing people discuss labels as limiting devices. For instance, when discussing sexuality, labels are boxes in which we put people; this limits the kinds of behaviours that we expect from them. However, I have also heard people discuss how labels can be liberating rather than limiting. Elizabeth Esther, on her eponymous blog, frequently identifies as ENFP, and has explained how personality typing has legitimized her behaviour. When Richard Beck criticized the Myers-Briggs personality test on empirical grounds (and, incidentally, I support his criticism), he received a lot of backlash from people who found that personality typing to be hugely helpful (however, I cannot find that post again because I think the criticism was buried in comments somewhere; sorry). What's going on?

Among other things, personality types help legitimize certain cognition and behaviour. I have found that identifying as an introvert has been incredibly helpful in understanding my own emotional responses and explaining them to others. In many cases, explanation has the force of justification: what was previous seen as an overreaction, a sign of poor mental discipline, is now a facet of my personality. The labels that personality tests provide, even if empirically unreliable, can be a way of insisting on cognitive diversity. When my interlocutors assume that everyone should be like them, I can use personality labels to insist that I am not like them and do not need to be like them. (When I assume that everyone should be like me, my interlocutors can use personality labels to insists that they are not like me and so on.)

But ultimately I find that even personality labels come with limitations that outweigh their freedoms. One of the most insidious aspects of dysthymia is that those who have it often do not know they have it. Rather than knowing that they have a mood disorder, they think that they are simply melancholy individuals or that they are subject to varied but constant bad luck (see my history with dysthymia). When I had dysthymia, I believed both that I had assorted personal flaws and that I was repeatedly in unhealthy situations. It was only in discovering the term dysthymia that I was able to understand my problem not in terms of personal flaws or external forces but in terms of a specific and treatable mood disorder. Or, even if it is not treatable, to claim the term "mental illness" can be liberating in other ways. I felt the stigma of mental illness, certainly, but psychiatric (and pseudo-psychiatric) labels were helpful in understanding my behaviour and giving it an etiology outside the realms of blame and persecution (cf this post). In this way, I consider the labels of mental illness even more freeing than the labels of personality.

Of course, my experience is not generalizable. I might be in a minority. The label "mentally ill" has been used to disenfranchise people since the inception of that term (cf Foucault). I assume labels are liberatory in proportion to how much control the labeled have over them.

Being Unable to Value

A Note on Depression

Having depression is strange. It is likely the case that any mental illness will produce a breach in a person's sense of self, at least if they are self-aware enough to notice. What makes depression strange is that I find myself unable to value things. Or, more specifically, I am unable to trust my ability to value things. Because I am depressed I do not feel that many activities or goals are worth pursing. Activities that I may once have found satisfying no longer satisfy me. I suppose my seratonin levels are down. (I don't actually know that; I'm basing this on my rudimentary knowledge of psychology.) I am aware that my current feelings about certain things--for instance, my academic discipline, artistic endeavour, social encounters--are not the same as they would have been a year ago or will be a year from now. This puts me in a strange epistemological position; while I can trust my regular sensory and rational abilities (I'm not hallucinating or delusional), I cannot be sure my value judgements are accurate.

Because I cannot be sure what I will value in the future, I do not want to make many/any long-term decisions right now. In a lot of ways I have been stalling, waiting for treatment to start working before I look beyond my immediate treatment. However, I am reaching a place where I need to think about what my goals are. This period I am in is an opportunity to make changes in my life that will help me be a healthy, effective, and productive member of society. It seems I am in a bind: I find it difficult to make the value judgements that will be necessary for me to become mentally healthy again, which is a (perceived) requirement for making those value judgements.

In the last few years I have increasingly learned more about myself, a process which has made my own opacity to myself increasingly apparent. That is, by learning about myself, I realized that if I had anything to learn it must mean that I am ignorant about myself. Perhaps what is new is my realization that what I have to learn about myself is chronological as well as, say, unconscious. Being depressed has made very clear to me the fact that I am not who I was nor who I will be, and my decisions now will impact my life in the future. Normally I would see no problem in making those decisions according to my values in the present: I do not usually have a reason to suspect that my future values will be drastically different from my present values.  (I should clarify that I do not mean "values" in a moral sense but rather in the sense of gaining satisfaction from activities.) Right now, however, I do know that my future values will differ from my current ones. Further, those future values are inscrutable. Perhaps this bind is true at all times for all people, but it has only become apparent to me in these extraordinary circumstances.

Not Depressed Enough

A Note on Depression

On taking a medical leave from my studies for depression, I had the unpleasant and bizarre experience of trying to prove that I was mentally ill. To an extent the process felt like it might have been more of a formality than an actual determinant in whether or not I got my medical leave, but it still had a strange psychological effect on me. I had a number of appointments with representatives from different institutions in the university, including Health Services, Counselling, and Access & Diversity, and the purpose of these appointments was both to seek professional help overcoming my depression and to secure documentation to support my medical leave.  In other words, I was not just trying to get help from these organizations, but convince them that I had depression debilitating enough to warrant leave.

During this process I was highly conscious of the fact that the process is in place to prevent people from getting leave fraudulently in order to avoid the consequences of poor academic performance. I was aware that someone who, like me, was appealing to the doctors, counselors, etc. for documentation could be faking depression. So I worried about how to perform my depression persuasively. How do you prove that you have a mental illness? How do you show that you actually have an illness and you are not simply repeating the common symptoms of that illness for cynical ends? While I assume it would be difficult to fake it for long, I do not know that I spent enough time talking with those professionals for them to be really sure.

The epistemological problem of identifying real from false mental illness is not my main concern, however. Maybe because I also have anxiety issues, I became worried that I was not sufficiently depressed to warrant medical leave. While I was applying for leave I felt some of the secondary symptoms of depression (poor memory, poor concentration, low motivation, disrupted sleep, lethargy) very strongly, but I did not feel especially sad or melancholy. It became an issue not just of trying to prove to the officials that I was sufficiently depressed, but also an issue of satisfying myself that I was depressed enough to warrant a medical leave. I certainly did not feel up to doing much at all, but days would go by in which I was not particularly unhappy. If the weather was nice, I might feel positively enthusiastic. Even I was unsure of whether my inactivity was a moral defect (laziness) or a psychological one (the decrease in motivation and concentration consistent with depression). Whenever I felt happy for too long (ie. a few hours), I would begin to feel worried and guilty, as though I was committing the fraud I was trying to prove I was not committing.

As it turns out, I got the medical leave and my mood decreased dramatically in the next few weeks. What troubles me is that I was relieved about both events. Of course I should be relieved about getting leave, but it is probably detrimental to my well-being to feel that I should or must be unhappy or hopeless. Obviously the university's requirement that I document my depression is not entirely responsible for my worry that I was not sufficiently depressed, but it does feel like something a depressed person should not have to deal with. I'm not sure how to fix the system, but it is troubling.

Why I Do Not Like Telling People I Am Depressed

A Note on Depression

I see it is with you as with the birches:
I am not to speak to you
in the personal way.
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

A comprehensive list of the reasons I dislike talking about my depression would be far too long, so I'll pare down to the most relevant.

1. This one only applies to blogging about depression. I was (am) hesitant to discuss my depression on this blog because I do not want to offend any IRL friends who might find out about my depression from this blog rather than from me. I also do not want anyone to feel offended because I am willing to write about this stuff when I'm not willing to talk about it. But I think both concerns are faulty because a. I cannot be expected to notify absolutely everybody about my depression and b. if I feel more comfortable writing about depression than talking about it, than that's how it's going to have to go. I don't need to justify my hesitation to discuss it with people in person. But I'm also probably not going to talk about feelings on this blog very much (see #2).

2. I never really want to talk about feelings anyway. By this I do not mean that I am actively unwilling to talk about them, but instead that I have just never felt the need to talk about feelings. Contrary to what some people might think, I am emotionally aware, both of myself and others. I admit my emotions to myself and take my emotions into account when making decisions. But I've never really felt like talking about them. I don't find talking about my own feelings very interesting and I usually assume that other people don't want to talk about my feelings, either. Maybe some of my disinclination is a gender role I'm performing, sure. But some of it is also that I don't equate self-expression with emotional expression. The self I want to express, generally, is the one composed of my decisions, not the one composed of my impulses. So when I want to reveal myself to people, I talk to them about ideas or books, I do thoughtful things, I help them and ask for help, or I do stuff with them. Emotions rarely have anything to do with it, at least not explicitly. But this means that I do not have much of a habit of talking about emotions, and since emotions are bound up with my illness, I can hardly talk about one without at least implying the other.

3. I am worried what people will think of me once they learn I have depression. I do not want people to think I'm weak, of course. That's not unusual. But I am weak, and I'm trying to admit that. What's even more galling than the idea that people might think I am weak is that people might fail to think of me complexly. I am probably being uncharitable, but I keep imagining that people have this complex, robust idea of who I am, yet as soon as they find out that I have depression they will start imagining that depression is the most important thing there is about me. They'll attribute all of my behaviour to depression. Then they'll probably not want to spend time with me because when they see me, all they'll see is depression. Who wants to hang out with depression? I know this is unfair, but becoming two-dimensional to other people still scares me, even more than appearing weak.

4. Of course, if we're being honest, most of my life and all of my decisions right now are impacted by my depression. In that sense I am kind of two-dimensional. So if we're being really honest, I'm afraid that I'll see myself as weak, as two-dimensional, as entirely defined by my misery, if I tell other people that I have depression. I do not want to see myself that way. It's easier to pretend that I'm OK if people don't treat me like I'm not OK (or if I'm not imagining that people are treating me like I'm not OK).

5. Weakness is a kind of power, and I don't want to wield that power over other people. I do not want people to feel obligated to treat me with particular kindness. Telling people I have depression feels like a kind of imposition. People might not be honest with me because they do not want to hurt my feelings. People might resent me because they feel like they have to do things for me they would not otherwise do. The kind of power weakness would give me is not a kind of power I am interested in. Of course weakness gives me other powers than just obligation: it could give me the opportunity to affiliate with people. That's a kind of power. But I can't access the second kind of power when I'm much too afraid of the damage I could accidentally to do my relationships with the first kind of power.

6. I don't know how to talk about depression! I am getting better at it, but in general I haven't figured out how much information is too much information. I don't want to make people uncomfortable; I don't want to violate social norms.

But you know what? I do want to violate social norms. I want to lessen the stigma of mental illness. I want it to be OK to not be OK. So I am going to try to talk about having depression more often. Or at least write about it.

Notes on Depression: A History of My Mood Disorders

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

I have depression.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about whether I would blog about my mental health, and it is with great hesitation that I have decided to go ahead with it. From my experience being depressed I have learned a bit about epistemology, about the mental health system, about myself. Since I am not yet cured I will likely have more experience and will likely learn more. Some of these topics should be discussed publicly and I guess that job is left up to me. I am not sure if this blog is the best place to discuss them--I have lost most of what core readership I once had, I am ambivalent about continuing with this blog at all and have been for years, I am not sure whether a semi-anonymous or poorly-anonymous platform is the best one--and I am not sure that now is the time to make these topics public. But I do not know of a better platform and I do not know that there ever will be a "good time" to release these ideas. Perhaps I will never generate enough writing (or good enough writing) to justify trying to publish a proper book on the subject. So I'll blog about it. (And, let me be clear, I am terrified by this decision.)

I have already written a number of notes on depression which I will post over time. For now, in preparation, I want to write a brief history of my mental health. (Do not worry; all of my other depression-related posts written to date are much shorter.)

Part I: Dysthymia

I have probably had a mood disorder for most of my life, but until recently I was unaware of my disorder because I never knew another way of being. I always attributed my unhappiness to my situation (high school, roommate problems, being romantically single, etc. etc.). Every time my situation changed (I started university, I moved, etc. etc.), I expected that the change in my circumstance would initiate a change in my happiness. It never worked. Finally I moved to Vancouver, and despite a very promising start my mood did not improve at all. I became more miserable than I ever had been before. I was so miserable that I felt I was sure I would not survive for much longer. When it got even worse I realized that in fact I would always survive. Somehow I had imagined that after a catastrophic implosion I would emerge from the ashes as a new and healthy person, but eventually it occurred to me that the accumulated damage might never annihilate me so efficiently. Instead I would just go on the way I was, but with increasing pain. The prospect of such a survival was so horrifying that I felt like that kind of life would not be worth living. That's not to say that I felt suicidal; rather, I became motivated to effect a change.

Around the same time I encountered the phrase "chronic low-grade depression," and for the first time I found a psychiatric term that adequately described my mental landscape. I had never entertained the possibility that I had depression because I knew the symptoms of depression and I did not have them. (While my diet was not the best, it wasn't disordered; I slept well enough; I had an excellent memory, decent concentration, and acceptable motivation.) Other mood disorders, including cyclothymia and bipolar disorder, also failed to explain my condition. So when I was re-reading an essay by Maureen O'Hara and Walter Truett Anderson and encountered the term "chronic low-grade depression," I was excited to find a term to describe me. (When I first read the essay, I was not looking for a self-diagnosis.) I Googled it and found the term "dysthymia," and while it does not exactly describe what I was going through, it was close enough that I felt I could act on it.

I went to UBC's Counselling Services in August 2011, was diagnosed with a mood disorder (Minor Major Depression, according to their schema), and enrolled in a mood disorder workshop. That workshop helped somewhat, but in October-November I was feeling like I still needed a lot more help, so I sought out a referral from Counselling Services and started seeing a therapist. Because I had a mood disorder since (from what I can tell) Grade Five or so, I needed to re-learn how to think. That takes time. With a deal of work, and the recognition that I probably had an anxiety disorder as well as a mood disorder, I felt healthy enough to stop my therapy in late February 2012. (My therapist agreed that I no longer needed therapy.) By the summer of 2012, I was happier and more emotionally capable than I ever had been in my life.

Part II: Depression

My first term of library school (September-December 2012) was a mediocre experience. I blogged a bit about my frustrations, perhaps tactlessly. I was bored for most of that term and struggled with feelings of arrogance. At the beginning of my second term (January in my program), however, I was no longer bored and superior but instead aggressively miserable. I felt out of place, I had difficulty connecting with the people around me, and I was constantly tired. I could not get to sleep at night, and then could not get up in the morning (or at least not as early as I wanted). I had trouble concentrating on my work and I was not motivated. I started skipping classes because I hated going so much (though I was a little bit sick too, so maybe "skipping" is the wrong word). I also began noticing that my memory was not as good as it usually was: I was forgetting assignments, and when I was counting collection after church on Sundays, I could not remember simple sums or do mental arithmetic.

I had started a vegetarian diet in January, so I suspected that some of these mental effects were a result of low iron or low vitamin counts. However, when I was discussing my symptoms and my dissatisfaction in my program with a priest (not the one at my church, but a UBC chaplain), she suggested that I might have depression. I thought it was unlikely because I had had a mood disorder before and this felt different: my frustration was clearly directed to an object (my program) rather than diffuse, and I did not previously experience the cognitive symptoms. However, in the first week of February, not long after talking with the priest, I had a catastrophic burn-out while trying to complete a work-intensive but otherwise innocuous assignment and I realized that she was right: I had depression, and this time it was not minor. Surviving the term was impossible given my mental state; before the month was out I would be flunking assignments.

I immediately stopped attending classes and told my supervisor that I was dropping out of the program (I had looked on-line and it did not appear that the university would grant leave after the add/drop date). He told me that dropping out was not the only option and helped me get started with a medical leave. In order to get that leave I visited a number of UBC services (Counselling, Student Health, Access & Diversity), which also helped me get started on treatment. I started seeing my therapist again (is there a way of phrasing that that is not parallel to a romantic relationship?). After a few rounds on the bureaucratic carousel, I finally got my medical leave. I am now looking for work, but my primary focus is on recovery. I am not looking to the future very much at the moment.

While I have been unable to get a professional diagnosis (that can only come from a psychiatrist, and the waiting list for psychiatrists is six months), all signs indicate that I have moderate depression. My bloodwork came back normal, so the problem is not chemical or dietary. I am not sure whether my depression is situational or clinical, but the former seems more likely. I now suspect that my program was not so bad after all and my incredible misery was a consequence of depression, but of course it is possible that I am not well suited to my program and the resulting stress caused my depression, at least in part. I still do not really know what caused this bout of depression, and I may never know. My treatment is on-going. I am hopeful that I will eventually be free of big-d depression, but I am not hopeful that I will ever really be free of mood disorders in general: it is likely that disordered mood will recur throughout my life.

There is of course a lot more to say about both experiences with mood disorders, and I will do some of that in later posts. Some of it I won't discuss with you at all because it is more personal. But I still think it is helpful to have this history written out somewhere in a reasonably complete form if I want to blog about mood disorders.

(My gratitude to Eve Tushnet, whose writing on addiction has encouraged me to write on depression.)