Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (2 page)

The Truth About Stress
²
said that spreading ‘stress awareness’ made people believe they were mentally ill when they were not, and that selling calm-down products and ‘expertise’ on the basis of this deception was profoundly immoral. It set out to dispel fears about negative emotions and their impact on health, offering empowerment and hope to millions of ‘stress’ sufferers.

DROWSY NUMBNESS

Unlike ‘stress’, which covers literally hundreds of different feelings and physiological states, ‘depression’ generally means just one thing:

A powerful, mind-destroying emptiness
that saps the strength and the will.

If you are depressed you feel as though a light has gone out in your soul. This is what the poet Keats called the ‘drowsy numbness that pains the sense’
³
and it is not only disastrous to life but dangerous to health. It should not be mollified with tea and sympathy, but faced down and defeated.

Unfortunately this will not be achieved by my sitting in a pool of tears with you and saying, ‘there there, poor soul, you are too delicate for this world – have another pill’. Routing your inner deadness will require courage and intelligence from you, and clear, practical, common sense, evidence-based strategies from me. Although you are unlikely to believe it until you are shown the evidence later on, ‘tea and sympathy’ and soothing ‘stress management’ may have helped to get you precisely where you are today.

Theories about abnormal psychology and psychiatry can lead to morbid introspection and self-diagnosis on the part of the patient victim, or the victimised patient. The sufferer may then be trapped in a cycle that confirms his or her status as a ‘mental patient’ and produces more negative thoughts, more anxiety, more symptoms and more treatment.

For anyone caught in this cycle, a new door is needed at the clinic that says:

WAY OUT AND STAY OUT!

This book will examine ‘depression’ in a new way. It will not make a syndrome out of your condition. My background is academic research and life skills training. I am not your therapist. You are certainly not my patient. You are therefore not going to be labelled with a medical-sounding name like ‘depressive’ or ‘manic-depressive’ or ‘bi-polar’ or ‘cyclothymic’. Your feelings will not be referred to as ‘flat affect’ or ‘clinical depression’ or ‘SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)’ or any other term beloved
of all those Head Help Honchos out there with authority over your psyche. The simple expression that past generations would have used is to say that you are dejected or ‘in despair’. And if you are in despair, you should not be seen as

•
a research project
 

•
a guinea pig for psychological theories and treatments
 

•
a market opportunity for ‘stress management’ firms
 

•
a target for giant pharmaceutical companies
 

•
a ‘hopeless case’
 

•
mad.

Interestingly, the UK government recently announced a policy shift over the next ten years that will take a more proactive approach to mental health issues, looking at ways of promoting emotional well-being and personal growth instead of trying to treat millions of syndromes. This book will have the same sunny priorities.

It will aim not merely to sympathise or tranquillise, but to exhilarate. I will offer alternatives to the fashionable calm-down culture that has seen ‘stress’ and ‘depression’ statistics skyrocket – creativity, courage, common sense and the sort of life skills with which, as a Department of Employment Restart trainer, I was able to help the long-term unemployed get their lives back together again. These will include techniques and strategies for 

•
self-empowerment
 

•
problem-solving
 

•
morale-boosting
 

•
improvisation
 

•
facing and conquering fears
 

•
exploiting nervousness
 

•
accepting challenges.

The graduated exercises will be based on research evidence linking mental and physical challenges with emotional health and resilience.

A number of the exercises will involve spontaneity and improvisation. Depressed people find it very hard to act at all, let alone naturally. Yet learning how to be spontaneous can revitalise one’s sense of wonder, hope and self-worth. The learning curve will reveal that nervousness is perfectly normal and natural, and that fear and desire are often intimately connected. We may dread situations that are nevertheless important to our goals. This being the case, the only real failure is not to try.

EMBRACING THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

By learning to conquer fear and anxiety rather than seeking to avoid or tranquillise them, you will gradually learn a higher level of emotional strength and self-determination, and you will be able to take a more gung-ho approach to life and life’s problems, reducing the need for either chemicals or therapies.

I shall go on to explain the science behind ‘toughening up’ or inurement, and encourage you to jump out of your present psychological box and accept challenges. Avoidance of fear, tension and pressure, although they may have become a way of life in our ‘stress managed’ age, are not a way to life. In fact everyone actually needs pressure in order to achieve emotional health and operate on all cylinders, and there is sound science to suggest that we live longer if we rush about. It maintains what are known as our heatshock proteins, responsible for keeping cells in good repair and prolonging our lives.

As we shall see, for some people accustomed to avoidance and helplessness, ‘depressed’ may literally mean ‘depressed’ – having insufficient pressure.

LOOK OUT: DEPRESSED PERSON BEHAVING BADLY!

How do you tell the difference between a person in despair and someone who is not, even before they open their mouths? The despairing person
behaves
differently. Do any of the following seem at all familiar to you? 

•
Sleep indiscipline
– sleep a lot, or in the daytime to ‘catch up’ on lost night-sleep.
 

•
Avoiding fitness
– not exercising, apart from walking from the car to the shops, school gate, etc. Eating lots of comfort foods containing fat and sugar. Deliberately ruining one’s body to show how bad one feels inside.
 

•
Avoiding work
– can’t work, dread work, taking ‘sickies’ or duvet days.
 

•
Escaping tasks
– putting off tasks that are difficult, annoying, scary or challenging. Using displacement activities – doing
other
things to avoid the tasks you can’t face.
 

•
Helplessness
– waiting until help arrives, waiting for rescue.
Not
taking the initiative.
 

•
Self-protection
– avoiding situations that make you feel worried, nervous or ‘emotional’.
 

•
Submissiveness
– allowing yourself to be treated as a doormat.
 

•
‘Eyes down’
– looking at the floor when talking, or the footpath as you walk outside, staring into the little pool of sorrow at your feet.

CHICKEN AND EGG, OR JUST CHICKEN?

Which came first, the strange behaviour or the despair? Depressed people say they behave this way because they are desolate. But habits like these increase feelings of desolation. They may even
cause
them. If normal people adopted these habits, many would almost certainly become depressed.

Now let’s look at the comparative
non
-despairing behaviour:

•
Regular sleep
– getting up at a set time each day (with an alarm clock if necessary) and going to bed at more or less the same time each night.
Avoiding
daylight snoozing (known as ‘practising sleep hygiene’), even when tired. Most people experience sleepless nights occasionally while the brain works on a particular problem. The more regular sleep rhythm returns in due course.
 

•
Embracing fitness
–– not to sculpture the body to some ideal shape but simply to
feel
healthy. Exercising at home, taking regular walks or going to a gym, ‘park and walk’. Eating lots of fruit and vegetables, cutting out fatty and sugary foods.
 

•
Embracing work
– taking a pride in one’s work, doing the best job possible, thinking of new and better ways of doing one’s job, enjoying being useful, finishing what one has started.
 

•
Tackling rotten tasks
– ‘getting on with it’, getting things done and dusted, getting them over with.
 

•
Self-reliance and self-rescue
– Taking the initiative. ‘I’ll do it myself. If it’s something I can’t do by myself, I’ll ask for assistance. I’m not just sitting here waiting for rescue, as this would annoy me.’
 

•
Embracing challenges
– doing difficult, scary things that make you excited and exhilarated because they provide a buzz when you’ve done them.
 

•
Assertiveness
– saying courteously and considerately what you want and when you want it. Saying ‘no’ if you don’t want it. Courteously repeating yourself if they didn’t get you the first time. No need for growing resentment or aggression or ‘scenes’ if you are assertive in the first place.
 

•
Eyes on the world
– looking at the person you are speaking to, looking around you when you go out, looking at people’s faces, having a curious approach to what’s going on out there.

By slowly switching from the first set of habits to the second set, you will notice your mood begin to lift and lighten. You don’t have to try them all at once – just one or two that capture your imagination. Human beings were never meant to be negative and avoidant. That’s why we were given brains.

Avoidance and indiscipline may be fashionable, and there may be more opportunities for avoidant and sloppy behaviour now than previous generations enjoyed, but escapist and lazy habits don’t make people emotionally more robust, or more content, or more cheerful. They make them more scared and cowardly and miserable, because they destroy the brain’s interaction with the world.

This is your Heartless Bitch talking. Straighten up and fly right!

NOTES

1
. Zoe Williams, ‘All too much’,
New Statesman
, 13 February 2006.

2
. Angela Patmore,
The Truth About Stress.
Grove Atlantic, 2006.

3
. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, John Keats.

The Author

For nearly four years Angela Patmore was a life skills trainer with the Department of Employment’s Restart programme for the long-term unemployed in Colchester. During her tenure the small company for which she worked, Mojo Associates, enjoyed a better outcomes record than all of the region’s other training providers combined.

She is the author of books on a variety of subjects but is mainly known as a social issues writer. She produced one of the earliest books on sports psychology in the UK,
Playing on their Nerves
, and was the official biographer of Britain’s first and most famous agony aunt, Marje Proops. As part of her research Angela was given access to Marje’s two million readers’ letters stored in the
Daily Mirror
archives.

Her last book,
The Truth About Stress
(Grove Atlantic, 2006) was shortlisted for the MIND Book of the Year Award.

Angela is a former International Fulbright Scholar with a first-class honours degree in English and a Masters from the College of William and Mary, Virginia. As a University of East Anglia research fellow at the Centre for Environmental Risk (a World Health Organisation collaborating centre) she worked with scientists to produce a meta-analysis of the research literature on ‘stress’ that gave rise to the 1998 London conference, ‘Stress – A Change of Direction’. The conference attracted over sixty national newspaper and television features and brought together critics of ‘stress management’ from medicine and the sciences, from psychology, the emergency services and the arts.

Under the chairmanship of former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens, she has also served as a member of the External Experts’ Advisory Group on ‘stress’.

Part 1

Conquering depression: The knowledge