Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (7 page)

DEFYING ‘FATE’: DANIEL DEFOE

The Puritan attitude to despairers, financial failures and ‘castaways’ also appalled our ‘first novelist’ Daniel Defoe, who although he was a Puritan, felt that such a judgement on a living person was unjust and repugnant. Defoe, himself a bankrupt, suffered from bouts of dark despair and was keenly interested in the predicament of the ‘castaway’ (including the first Castaway in his own very sympathetic
History of the Devil
). In
Journal of the Plague Year
Defoe examined despair from a journalistic viewpoint, looking at the bravery, audacity and pragmatism of ordinary people surrounded by infection and death – a doom
they
believed was deliberately sent by God. The
Journal
shows Defoe’s contempt for the Calvinist ‘unalterable destiny’.

Several of his classic novels deal with characters faced with hopeless ruin but who eventually triumph over their fate. The most famous of these was the tale of his castaway
Robinson Crusoe
.

Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked and stranded on an island that he actually names ‘Despair’. Never intended to be a children’s book,
Crusoe
starts from the basis of bleak ruin and hopelessness. This is the spiritual condition on which Crusoe has to ‘go to work’ and from which he hopes by his efforts to be delivered. If the present-day ‘born loser’ were to sit down and read
Robinson Crusoe
as an allegory about self-redemption, its meaning will become patently clear. The book has the power seriously to raise your spirits. Daniel Defoe was one bankrupt despairer who rose like a phoenix.

Experiencing the great arts classics, whether these are cinematic, musical or literary, enhances the soul, especially the lost soul. Reading the masterpieces of those who have shared your experiences can speak to you with an insight and immediacy you won’t find in a doctor’s waiting room or a therapist’s surgery or from swallowing prescription (and non-prescription) chemicals.

Besides, present-day despairers are not like the Puritans with their foreboding fear of predestination. We are a bit more enlightened now and realise that gloom doesn’t
have
to turn into doom at all. If it seems that way, this is often because of a temptation to generalise bad feelings or bad luck and to attribute them to some outside source. Psychologists call this having ‘an exterior locus of control’ – giving power away to some other person or force that decides what becomes of us.

‘Castaway’ behaviour

People who are prone to helplessness and apathy have often ‘taken their hands off the steering wheel’ because they believe ‘others’ or some ‘other force’ controls their destiny. They wait in vain for these ‘others’ or ‘the fates’ to smile upon them. They tend to be superstitious. They have ‘lucky’ numbers and spend their money on lottery tickets hoping to be ‘rescued in the end’. If you keep leaving your fate to chance like this, you are sitting in your car waiting for an accident to happen.

Just drive!

Nobody is really a born loser. We convince ourselves that we are because of traditional ideas and beliefs that do not fit our case any more. You may feel bad now, but by your assertive actions and problem-solving skills you are not going to feel half so bad tomorrow. Read on, and find out how to become, not a castaway, but the captain of your fate.

EXERCISE

Think of a book or a movie that you have seen that ‘raised your spirits’. (You may need to refresh your memory by reading or seeing it again.)

1
How did it work its magic on your feelings?
 

2
Could it have worked if the hero (or heroine) had not gone through a terrible ordeal in the first place?
 

3
Was there a critical point at which the hero decided to fight?
 

4
Were you allowed to think all his efforts might fail? If so, why?
 

5
What do we actually mean by ‘raising your spirits’?
 

6
Does it have to happen by chance, or is it possible to do it deliberately?
 

7
What action would you take if you had to raise a team’s spirits, or an army’s, or a nation’s (for example during a war)?
 

8
Write yourself a pep talk. You can do it!

5

Mental illness labels

Despair is one of the worst kinds of human anguish, the equal of even the severest physical pain
. When a man cannot be bothered to get out of bed and walk over to the sink to clean his teeth because there seems no point to it, or when a woman keeps the curtains drawn and hides indoors because she can no longer face the world, talking about the validity or harm of mental illness classifications may not seem that important.

But they
are
important. Having been given a ‘condition’ can have an impressive effect on your mind and body. It can cause a cascade of symptoms, like this:

It starts by making you feel abnormal.

This makes you worry about your health.

Then if your label is psychological it makes you anxious about your sanity.

This anxiety in turn can cause physiological changes: over-alertness, raised blood pressure, palpitations, sweating, sleeplessness.

Suddenly you don’t just feel bad and have all the original problems that upset you in the first place.

Now you have an illness as well!

In the scientific literature this has become known as the
nocebo
effect.
¹
Unlike the
placebo
effect, in which positive beliefs about even sugar pills can aid recovery,
the nocebo effect refers to negative and morbid beliefs that
undermine
recovery and make the patient worse. They may even prove fatal.

THE ‘I NEED A SYNDROME’ SYNDROME

Life can be very cruel. It can be outrageously unfair. We all get hurt and disappointed and we all suffer life’s ‘slings and arrows’. But we don’t all suffer from ‘depression’. So does depression
only
strike those who have suffered the highest number of bad events or the most severe misfortunes? The research suggests not. The survivors of an air crash, for example, may actually be more positive and well-balanced than they were before.
²
The majority of people exposed to distressing experiences do not go on to develop mental illness. If they did, we should all be mentally ill.

In my own experience, ‘depression’ and severe experiences do not necessarily happen to the same people. Some individuals I know have gone through the most horrendous ordeals and yet maintain a positive outlook.
³
Yet others who have suffered relatively minor misfortunes have turned away from life, sunk into inertia and ‘given up’. As I am known as a Heartless Bitch, please don’t take my word for this. You can test the theory yourself.

Objectivity test

Without telling anybody or showing them the list you are about to make, write down the names of people you know well. Next to each name, write down bad things that you know have happened to them in the past. For every terrible life event, give them one point. Then add up their scores (be honest and don’t manipulate on the basis of your personal preferences). Now, look at the high scores. Are all of those people ‘depressed’? If not, why not? Are all of the depressed people you know high scorers? If not, why not?

Many people
believe
they suffer from ‘depression’ or ‘clinical depression’ simply because they are grieving over one of life’s maulings, don’t know what to do to feel better and think it might help if they had a label for their bad feelings. The
label acts like a baby’s dummy or Linus’s security blanket – he sucks his thumb and holds it to his ear in times of trouble, though it doesn’t actually serve any useful purpose. We all use the term ‘depression’ willy-nilly, and as the media constantly spice up their health pages and programmes with it, the word becomes difficult to avoid. But it is important to remember that this label is not a cure, and that it may demoralise you.

Give your psyche a bad name and you may get stuck with it.

Why do some of us like to be labelled? Why do people willingly undergo diagnosis or self-diagnosis? Because it confers certain advantages:

1
The label becomes a kind of lucky talisman to ward off the unknown.
 

2
It places the scary disorder within certain parameters.
 

3
It ring-fences the condition so that it doesn’t get completely out of hand.
 

4
It suggests science is ‘on your case’.
 

5
It suggests that scientists and psychologists ‘understand’ you.
 

6
It suggests that there is a medical cure.

You may think: ‘Oh, somebody has nailed down what’s wrong with me. They know all about it. Science is onto this. They’ll be able to cure me now!’ But this is mere superstition. Mental illness diagnoses don’t actually help recovery. They don’t even accurately identify the problem. In all likelihood, they make sufferers feel worse, especially if they are accompanied by reliance on mood-altering chemicals that further erode their sense of independence and self-esteem. People generally do not feel good about having a ‘mental complaint’ or having to alter their minds by pushing drugs in their faces.

Once patients are officially labelled ‘depressed’ – or, heaven forbid, ‘clinically depressed’ – it tends to be written in invisible ink across their foreheads and may sap what little energy they had left to get off their bottoms and set about changing their outlook on life. Some of them, in an age seemingly obsessed with the milder forms of mental illness, then wear their label like a badge of honour and mention it at every opportunity. The more unscrupulous ones use it to get time off work, claim benefits and curry favour with friends. Celebrities seem not at all bashful about their depressive disorders. They even appear on chat shows to discuss their symptoms and syndromes, and bore into them in ghosted autobiographies. Publishers call these ‘misery memoirs’ and a lot of these ‘sorry ass’ books are bestsellers.

Of course it is our moral duty as a society to care for and protect the genuinely mentally ill. But in the current stress management age, our emotional lives are routinely managed and medicalised. Classifying millions of people with impressive-sounding psychological ‘conditions’ and then applying mental illness labels to their feelings can harm them. Not only may they be trapped in a diagnostic prison and fall victim to a syndrome that they are supposed to have and never get out. The situation is worse than that.

Doctor, doctor – my label’s fallen off

In November 2008 BBC TV’s flagship science programme Horizon conducted a two-week experiment in which a panel of mental health ‘experts’ tried to identify six disorders – schizophrenia, social anxiety, eating disorder (either bulimia or anorexia nervosa), depression, bi-polar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder – among ten volunteers after watching them perform a series of challenges. Five volunteers had been assessed as ‘normal’ and five were suffering from one of the named conditions. The three experts, Professor Richard Bentall, psychologist Ian Hulatt and Dr Michael First, were able to match just two conditions to their sufferers. They landed several people with conditions they did not possess.