More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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26 October (Tweets added, 1 December)
Dunno what it - the word 'depression' - might mean to you...
One thing is that you could be unable to sleep, or conversely - which is my experience - sleeping all the time (or wanting to sleep), but the thing that links us is this word (and the use of this word) :
The reason being that the sleeplessness is not positive or sparky or creative in the way that being unable to rest / stay asleep might be with mania or psychosis or paranoia (at the beginning, at least), but just an inability to get away, into sleep (or stay there), from what feels bad or wrong or uneasy at some level, maybe because of recriminatory or accusatory thoughts or guilt or some deep feeling of guilt or doom or despair - or of worthlessness and nothing mattering, even the people or things who did matter before, irrespective of knowing that they should matter.
For those who can - generally - sleep at such times, it is just that the sleeping feels a whole lot better than all of those alarming and frightening thoughts and feelings / absences of feeling, and so the experience of those who cannot sleep / stay asleep are mirrored - if I stay asleep, I might feel safe, and I can pretend to myself that those things are not there (unless they come crashing in, and I cannot sleep).
For some, a word to cane others for being (without, probably, knowing what it is) - the irony being that one can be depressed without being aware that that is what one is experiencing, because it is a highly inapt, non-descriptive word...
For others, something that they - rightly or wrongly - think that they see in others, and offer advice that might be trite, might be the right thing at the wrong time, whereas comfort, kindness and - above all - not 'concern', but the care that the other asks for, are better ways of being a friend or relative to the person whom you say that you like or love.
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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10 August
To my mind, such of the mental-health community as has been lashing out at Giles Fraser's article Taking pills for unhappiness reinforces the idea that being sad is not human has missed the point :
Typical comment on Twitter says that Fraser does not know what depression is, whereas I believe that those readers have not troubled themselves to understand what he is saying, and, therefore, he is just as misconstrued as those who experience / have experienced depression often are.
Far be it from me to defend Thatcher, whose beliefs and policies I despise, but I no more believe that her There is no such thing as society speech was given a fair press* than this article :
1. Fraser's first two paragraphs, i.e. setting the context for the rest of what he talks of, are about his behaviour at school, how children who behave like that now may be diagnosed with ADHD, and may even be prescribed ritalin.
2. Anyone who has watched the documentary Bombay Beach (2011) will have seen Benny prescribed with anti-psychotics, which I find even more horrifying.
3. The third paragraph I come back to, though the effective point is that, just as diagnoses of ADHD and prescriptions have risen sharply (there are nearly four times as many in just eleven years), so have prescriptions for anti-depressants.
I do not read what Fraser says here as saying that his experience amounts to depression, but the opposite, i.e. that it does not.
4. The fourth paragraph talks about how chlorpromazine (thorazine in the States) and other medications came to be used for the purpose of altering mood in psychiatry, and were originally used for treating infections.
I see nothing much wrong in inferring that, if a medication can be licensed, manufactured and prescribed for some other purpose, then the pharmaceutical industries have a motive for promoting them.
5. Fraser does not report them, but some recent studies have been quoted where it has been shown that the effect of anti-depressants is no better than a placebo. If true, that not only casts doubt on why the NHS spends money on them (or we take them), but also strengthens what Fraser is actually saying.
6. In his final two paragraphs, he brings together the industries' desire to make and market products with that of GPs to do something for patients (either because the patients are distressed and ask, or because, in any practice, there will be GPs who are 'more interested in' the physical side of health, and who maybe do not know better than prescribing when others would not).
7. Fraser has been demonized as if he does not know what depression is, whereas I follow him as saying that maybe things that are not depression are treated as if they are.
No one who knows how little training GPs (primary health, as it is called) are required to have in mental health would :
(a) Go to his or her surgery without establishing which doctors lean towards it, or
(b) Believe that the fact a doctor has prescribed means that it was appropriate, or that a referral to secondary mental health services, pressed as they are, would even be accepted.
To suggest that Fraser's article is really of a Pull yourself together kind is, I think, a hasty and ill-judged reading, stemming from anger and disappointment at believing depression to have been written off.
However, he would have done well to make clear that he is not disputing that depression exists, only that treating people as if they have clinical depression (i.e. without their having symptoms such as anxiety, waking too early or sleeping too much, not feeling much - or anything - emotionally, etc.) is not really doing them a favour.
End-notes
* Since I gather that she meant just the opposite of what people claimed - still, it all helped remove her.
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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2 November
If you've had chicken-pox, can you remember what it is like ? Or something else that you can compare with, say, having a bad dose of the flu ?
Does it make sense to compare one illness with another, so why is it a truism that depression isn't like a broken leg, because people can't see it ?
If you had appendicitis and had to have your redundant works removed, it's true that people wouldn't claim that you were shamming and just had to buck your ideas up, since you'd been admitted to hospital and they can credit that you have had surgery. Or wouldn't they ? Maybe they had ideas about how quickly you should be recovered, and didn't value how you or your medical advisers said that you should be acting and what you could or could not do and when?
So is a broken leg just a different case altogether from clinical depression, just because whatever the modern equivalent of a plaster-cast is on your leg and can be seen ? That as against feeling no value or warmth in the world, that you are worthless, and that there is nothing to live for.
Yes, we can see that your leg isn't (fully) functional, that you are using a crutch, but some officious, judgement-making person will - sooner or later - enquire how you came to break it : woe betide you, in the sympathy stakes, if it was on a skiing-trip, because you've clearly - the judgement goes - got too much money, and got what you deserved by doing something dangerous. (Forget the circularity that thinks what happened is proof that skiing is inherently dangerous, rather than any statistics as to how many broken legs per 1,000 novices.)
Because, with health, we all Get what we deserved - not quite, any longer (more often than not), in the This is God's punishment sort of way, but because (call it karma or come-uppance) we superstitiously and almost subconsciously believe that Things happen for a reason : whole films have been based on the premise, let alone novels or plays, or bigoted newspaper-columns.
Taking this back to the question broken leg versus clinical depression:
1. Assertion : people can see a broken leg
Well, when you've first fallen, or whatever happened, you might suspect a broken leg when there isn't one, or be surprised to be told that it is broken - it's a medic telling you whether it's broken or not that clinches it.
Same with depression. Someone who is depressed can quite typically, if it's never happened before (they've had glum days, as we all have, but nothing like this, this absence of feeling), not know that it is depression either. Maybe just been dragging oneself into work, but feeling really cold and isolated inside, and starting to drink to cope with it.
2. Assertion : because people can see a broken leg...
I have no idea what it is like to have a broken leg - the pain, the immobility, the disablement, etc. Sure, I know what a shooting pain in my back feels like, if I've put it out, but does anyone else who isn't a back-sufferer (albeit a part-time one) have any notion?
I have dropped descriptions above of what clinical depression is like : the sense of feeling an outsider to one's own life, of looking on one's family, responsibilities and hobbies and not caring about them or being able to derive any pleasure from thinking about them, of - depending on how it catches one - sleeping for England, or being so anxious and screwed up that sleep will not easily come.
These feeling, sensations, hurts, as with the other person who once broke a leg or once had or does have a bad back, will only mean much to anyone who has experienced them.
3. Assertion : because they can see a broken leg, they know what it's like
Really? If you've never had to use a crutch or a pair of them, you have a perfect conception of what becomes difficult, painful or impossible? I don't think so, and no more do I think so with depression.
Maybe not the person on crutches, or the person going through the hell of nothing mattering and everything viscerally feeling like rubbish, but someone who's been through that can tell you, the observer, what it's really like. If, as the observer, you love that person, maybe, with imagination, compassion and a lot of thinking yourself into someone else's shoes, you can understand what it's like:
Not ask the person with a broken leg to do something that is going to hurt a lot, or expect the person who is depressed to be as chatty as you are and be pleased to be alive, but be with that person where he or she is, not where we think that he or she ought to be.
That is caring in its full sense, not the cheapened one that wants to feel better about someone else (whatever he cost to him or her), and that is what it really means, using that other much misused word, to be concerned about him or her : to put those persons' feelings, needs and interests first, whether they cannot bend to reach something, or cannot get out of bed to-day to save their life.
Broken leg = visible suffering? No, I don't think so.
