Let's Talk About The Dark, Part 3: Eric Maisel and An Existential Solution Suggestion

If you made it this far into this little series about being sad, well done and hello!!

Quick re-cap: Part 1 of this series told you the story of me and why I get depressed, how it feels, how I feel about it.  A personal tale, partial and leaving out loads of things, as any story will, not perfect; a human told it.  Part 2 had a quick investigation into the ‘medicalisation’ of some of our ills, and the labelling we accept from the medical profession, and those that benefit by them.  Whether these labels are useful or not.  This related to a segment at the start of Eric Maisel’s new book, Rethinking Depression, which is what has prompted this little series of mine.  I’ll return to the topic of labelling and its usefulness or not briefly, at the end of this post. 

This is the segment where I tell you a little bit about Eric Maisel’s ideas for how to cope with feeling sad, and how to live a better, more authentic life.  The clue as to where this will be going is in the word ‘authentic’ – it’s the catchword of Existentialists.  Existentialism is a philosophical line of thought; remember Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, France after the Second World War?  Ever read Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, heard of the Theatre of the Absurd?

The key idea of Existentialists is that there is no meaning to life and the universe other than what you give it yourself, what you make for yourself.  In your attempts to make a life of meaning, your own meaning for yourself and true to your own personality, you are attempting to create an Authentic Life. This is – clearly – an atheist philosophy; you’ll find no god concept here. (Though interestingly, did you have a partiality to a god or two, I think you can work this philosophy fine alongside any faith you have, working along the simple idea that my nanna told me, and all your nannas told you: God helps those who help themselves.  Pray to God sailor, but row for the shore.  End of aside for anyone of faith.)   

Sitting about, feeling rather confused and down and thinking: ‘Why am I here?  What’s it all for?  Does anything I do count for anything at all?  What’s my place in the universe?’  is a valid Existential angsty moment (or decade or two if you get really stuck with this)…Their answers would likely be versions of, as Eric Maisel would put it:

The most important shift for the contemporary person to make is the…shift from the despairing “Why do I exist?” to the bracing “I exist”.  She must stop pestering herself with the unanswerable questions that plague her […] and accept as her mantra “I am alive”. […]  We opt to really live the twenty years or the sixty years ahead of us.  This may be all that we have, but it is exactly what we have.  As nineteenth century philosopher Richard von Schubert-Soldern aphoristically put it, “To understand life, we must contrast it with death”.  We force life to mean because we are alive and not dead.  We force life to mean until death releases us from our responsibility to live authentically.  We say, “While I am alive, I can love”.  We say “While I am alive, I can learn a few things”.  We say, “While I am alive, I can create”.  We live authentically because we can. (pp.78-79)

Why would trying to live ‘authentically’ help a person feeling down?  What would an authentic life entail, what does it even bloody mean?!  I’ll set out Eric Maisel’s suggestions of an authentic life for you, with a small explanation of each, which will answer these questions, as we go along.  Now bear in mind and keep it there – this is a PHILOSOPHY book.  It might help you, you might find it in the Self Help or Psychology section of the bookshop, but I find the best thing about this, is that it’s a philosophy book.  It’s a way of thinking about stuffs in life that relates to the Real World, and action you can take there.

You Look Life in the Eye (pp.63-67) and You Decide to Matter (pp.75-81)

Basically, for anyone who has a love of film and pop-culture references, this is the metaphorical taking of that pill in The Matrix, and seeing that life is tatty and grey and really unattractive – and preferring the stunted nature of how things do actually seem to be than the shiny leather kung-fu lies of the Matrix illusion, because if you know the truth of the universe as you see it[1]: you can begin to work within it purposefully, to change your world for the better, according to values you will decide upon.  Your actions will mean something, because they mean something To You.  The first thing to do, he suggests, is to accept that things can be quite crap, regularly – for anyone.  Life can be horribly unfair, and our own and everyone else’s motivations are complex and ethically suspect, often (p.66).  He agrees it may not be less painful to admit to our failings than to deny them and feel (falsely) better (p.65).  A double-edged sword.  The thing is – I would say that most chronically sad people see this sort of reality anyway – and are badly confused at a lot of other people’s avoidance and denial of it.  So it’s a cheery message really:  Life IS terribly hard, you were right!!  Let’s accept you were right about all that pain around the place and the universe not caring about you or anyone in particular, and move on from that starting point (p.75).  Not going to argue with you about it…

You Investigate Meaning (pp.69-73)

If you are down and have decided to look life in the eye, and acknowledge all the sadness and awfulness around us – as well as all the beauty and joy – you may still feel that it’s all futile and meaningless.  But if you don’t try and have a go at making some meaning for yourself (are you not bored of waiting for it to come upon you, all this time??), he suggests you ‘will likely remain confused about and estranged from life’ (intro points, p.57).   He defines meaning as ‘what we value, how we construe our life purposes, what we make of the facts of [our] existence’, and he makes clear this will be ‘entirely subjective’ to each individual (p.71).  I would add that actions are never futile, they just sometimes don’t have the intended results, but trying is better than not trying for your sense of self worth, right?  Futility and meaninglessness are not the same thing.  What means something for one person (he gives an example of ‘watching ducks’ hopping about for an hour in the park (p.72) – something I would find very meaningful, cos I like that sort of nature watching), will have zero meaning for another.  Start to try and find things that mean something just for you, and try to populate your life with more of them.

 You Accept Your Obligation to Make Meaning (pp.83-88)

He points out that faced with a decision to make personal meaning most people opt out in some way, choosing religion, selfish hedonism, indifference, obsessive seeking or simply crumbling into despair at the mammoth nature of the task (p.84).  He suggests that maybe people stumble so early because they feel arrogant at making their own meanings: we have had other people’s meanings pushed onto us all our lives.  He suggests that thinking of it as an ‘honourable’ thing to do, to live by principles you have decided on, is a better way, and need not suggest a superiority of attitude to anyone else (p.85).  He makes the incredibly relevant point that ‘we object to a universe where meaning has to be made’ for ourselves (p.86, my italics), and where it will, by that nature, never be settled once and for all – it will shift as we learn and live (p.88).  And linked to that, that it’s very hard work, and ‘we know ourselves too well’: we will let ourselves down and constantly – which will generate massive anxiety (pp.86-87).  He suggests that we view it as the ‘epic’ story of our lives, the ‘loving work of self-creation’(p.87) – if you think that sounds pompous, could it be because you don’t think you deserve to matter, only other people do? Why not just try and see, and keep trying – we already, all us sad people, know what it feels like to give up, get up, try again, give up, get up, try again…

You Decide How to Matter (pp.89-96)

This section is quite vital, and is about how you make decisions in your life, acknowledging that you often have whole cartloads of semi-conscious desires and prejudices within you as you do so, so that there is no such thing as a pure intellectual, or even pure emotional decision – there is just trying to do the right thing as you see it, at any time.  He describes it like this:

You weigh your actions against a vision you have of the person you would like to be, the person it would make you proudest to be; you take action, you learn from your experience to what extent you guessed right; and you make use of what you’ve learned as you weigh your next decision.  We can give this a shorthand name: the principle of personal pride.  You use the principle of personal pride to make your meaning.  This may be the beautiful, imperfect, harrowing way – the way of making meaning. (p.96)

(Me speaking to sad people:  This idea should work, I reckon, even in nasty twisty decision scenarios, for the reasons I give in footnote 1 – that you can only ever work with the info you have at the time, if mistakes are made due to lack of information or due to misjudging information all you can do is learn: becoming mired in a pit of blaming yourself is understandable, should an error occur, but you need to try and tease yourself out, and look clearly again.  The next decision awaits, as does your life, of course.  You will learn, and sometimes having learned is all you can take from a situation that has harmed you greatly.)

You Negotiate Each Day (pp.163-168)

I personally, hate any Trying To Help Me book, that gives me loads of good ideas, but then leaves me there, like the real world and its constant demands aren’t something that will really bother me, now I have reached a higher level of perception.  This book doesn’t do that.  This is a lovely chapter – and it gives many examples and many different sorts of choices you can make for each single day, be it working day or free day, or a mixture.  From the minute you get up to the minute you sleep it gives you ideas on how to get through that day without feeling so wan and despairing, if you do feel that way:

Each day is a special sort of negotiation.  You make decisions about where you will invest meaning, how you will handle activities that hold no particular meaning, when you will take your vacations from meaning, and so on.  You make a daily bargain with yourself that if you hold to your intentions you will find no reason to doubt the meaningfulness of that day. […]  You do not aim for some unattainable perfection. […]  You accept that you need daily vacations from “the whole meaning thing” [as well as] adamantly demanding of yourself that you put in that hard hour …doing the thing that you’ve been avoiding, because that is your prime meaning-making activity on that day. (p.163)

I think these chapters are the core of the book – the rest is incredibly useful elaboration on these ideas, and back-ups, things to help you integrate the ideas into your life more and more closely, with many specific scenarios and examples for thinking with.  There is quite stringent help on how to formulate values without feeling you are contradicting yourself or not allowing for wants and needs as well, for example (pp.97-104).  Prepare to really feel like your head is getting bent trying to work that one through! I ended up questioning some values I thought I held (and I have few, very few), and adding some I really did not think I had sympathy with (oddly, things make a bit more sense with them in the mind-mix).  As usual, all these things are provisional, we’ll see how they go. 

There’s a section on pages 125-8, in the section on You Focus on Meaning Rather than Mood, which describes quite heart-breakingly why we can feel so constantly up against the experience of ‘the void’ in our daily lives, despite all our scientific progress and civil society: its almost poetic.  He suggests that because we are so used to this experience of scary disappointment, and the ‘taking the temperature’ of ourselves (p.128), checking in on our moods and seeing it as ‘bad’ during these moments, that we have slipped into a sort of trance, ‘convinced that an unlived life is less painful than reality’ (p.129).  A trance where we live only half awake, because it’s the only bearable way to get through, say, a dead-end job (or even a great job that just isn’t satisfying us anymore – the guilt!!).  The trance is aided by the advertisements coming at us all the time, trying to get us to buy something, the lifestyles we see on TV or film, all over the place (on p.131 is an absolutely brilliant rant against advertisers).  He makes it clear, as he does throughout the book that you need to rebel, against trance and culturally induced desires for unimportant things (my friend Mr Hooting Yard would call this The Man), against allowing all that to constantly derail you in your attempts to live life by your own principles.  Earlier, he says:

This is the dynamic, unavoidable tension that adds unwanted stress to every contemporary person’s life: even as she is poised on the brink of meaninglessness, she must repeatedly fight her way back to meaning (p.79).

He gives several chapters of attention to how to fight back if you feel your meanings slipping – how to get it back; or make new meaning for yourself: to understand it’s not a static thing – you will grow and change, and so will your ideals, and your meanings you make (pp.169-206).  It reads both fierce and calming. 

My thoughts on all this are twofold.  Firstly, to live life authentically, that is, true to whatever you have personally decided is important for you, is going to be utterly uphill – because it involves going against the grain of our society which is all (outwardly) about working, acquiring, competing, celebrity and money.  I think those of us that have become depressed, sad, whatever: I don’t think all these things are working for us anymore anyway.  I know I wish they did; I have many times wished to be stupid and quiescent and living a quieter life!!  But they aren’t, so trying to think clearly, when we can, is I reckon, a good start, and trying some of the tools for trying to become closer to the person you wish yourself to be are surely better than just giving up on life?  Surely worth a go?  It can’t be a bad thing to try and be that change you want to see in the world, as Gandhi said, just starting with yourself, surely?  (And remember, for those of you out there allergic to the idea of self-help – this is a sodding philosophy book!)

Secondly, to return to the issue of ‘Depression’ as a label and whether it’s helpful or not.  I asked Eric Maisel some quite raw and open questions on how to cope with my feelings of isolation and overwhelmedness some days as a mother alone at home with a demanding toddler.  I confess, I was expecting answers along the lines of, ‘on days where you feel xx levels of anxiety and sadness, possibly you could try [insert various strategies here, that are in the book].’  ‘And on days where you feel worse, possibly these ones might be of help’.  ‘And on the worst days, maybe to get right back to basics, possibly remembering just this or this might help’.  What he actually said, was that he had had a fantastic time raising his two children at home as a house-husband, and didn’t ‘understand the question’.  His answers were well-meaning and said in a spirit of kindness, but they underlined something that has occurred to me more and more when I think about ‘depression’.

It’s about EMPATHY.  Though Eric Maisel had been in a similar (not the same, note, as he is him and I am me!) situation to me – rearing children at home, mostly alone; because he himself had navigated this challenge very successfully (he produced both personal meaning and a body of work in that time-frame), he was for some reason unable to mentally step into my shoes, and inhabit my experience of this same challenge as different from his own.  This despite many examples of him stating in the book that people view situations very differently, and that circumstances can appear great on the outside and yet still you feel sad.  He did not see that I felt very lost sometimes, and suggested I view my ideas about ‘proper parenting’ and ‘proper house-management’ differently, to allow more time for creation (my writing).  The suggestions were valid and practical, but not talking to the spirit of desperation I had attempted to convey, for when I am very sad and anxious.  I know I am not the only woman who finds child-rearing at home very hard sometimes, exhausting and weirdly unsatisfying, despite having chosen this role freely.  I felt very cast down.  I admire the man’s work; I find his books very helpful.  And yet, on communicating with him, I found him unable to meet me where I was inside, and engage with me there, however briefly. 

This is just a shade, a reminder of the way that people who get sad feel when they try and explain this to other people.  I think it’s likely that the reason the population of Western society were so eager to have the word ‘depression’ replace the word ‘unhappiness’ in our vocabularies, was the lack of empathy and compassion they experienced from others.  We wouldn’t have needed a medical definition of sadness, made respectable with the word ‘depression’, if we were ALL more empathic to one another and didn’t discount each others sorrows and difficulties as unimportant or un-understandable.  Empathy is incredibly important.  The reason depression is a helpful label sometimes, for some people, is because it provides them a validation of their feelings and their existence as they are experiencing it in a way other people in their lives have not.  It gives them a starting point to dealing with their sorrow.  I am here, oh – where do I go from here, how?

And that, along with the proviso that as long as you can think clearly enough that day to try and read, this book may be of great help to you, is that.  It doesn't matter that my personal communication with Eric Maisel did not feel as successful for me as I would have hoped, in the end.  I’ll give him the last proper word – this is what I would have said to me perhaps, as a start, were I him…but it's there already in his book, so I have it anyway:

It makes no sense to suppose that a creature with consciousness could always feel happy.  It is absurd and telling that as a society we think unhappiness is an embarrassing, inappropriate emotion. (p.49)

Maybe we feel trapped by a life that sounds all right in the expressing but that feels dark, stressful, and ordinary in the living. (p.51)

Some endeavours, such as service [here think motherhood, me!], are indeed regularly experienced as meaningful…But they are not intrinsically meaningful.  They are only meaningful when they are experienced as meaningful. (p.70)

You can’t make all the meaning you want.  You can’t provide yourself with a continual experience of meaningfulness.  Authenticity is not like a ladder you climb…where one day you see all the authenticity you need.  Authenticity is about trying, day in and day out, in the small gestures and in the big decisions you make, to live out the vision you have for yourself and to earn the experience, if only on that day and for that day, of having lived authentically.  There is no journey from unhappiness to authenticity, as if unhappiness were something that could be left behind in the dust.  You live authentically, and sometimes you are unhappy. (p.211)

Nothing could be more natural.  What sort of creature do we think we are?  A kind of wishful thinking has washed over the developed world that life has become simple and settled.  […]  This is a false view of life.  Life is a project. (p.209)

You will have plenty of reality with which to reckon.  This reckoning is heroism.  It is how you earn your feeling of authenticity. (p.140)

I do recommend this book, I do. I think a bit of Existentialism can be very good for the brain, if you aren't too flat on the floor to concentrate for it. If you experience depression as a sort endless trapping in a nasty self conscious present moment (as I often do), these ideas could help to nudge you toward a more advantageous self consciousness.

For other stops on Eric Maisel's Blog Tour for this book, see here. 

Eric Maisel, Rethinking Depression, California: New World Library (2012)

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And these posts can be in honour of my dad, a difficult but brilliant and sometimes very kind man, who I loved very much, and whose echoes in my mind keep me engaged with life, to this day.

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[1] Notice I say the truth as you see it.  I do not think there is any such thing as objective 100% true Truth, all of the time, for anything much.  I think truth moves, I’ve said so before.  You can make a decision at any time, based on the best information you had, the truth as you then saw it.  Later you can find out that there were many other variables you were unaware of.  These may have caused you to make a bad error.  Truth changed.  Information comes, or not.  You only do the best you can at any given time.  (Maisel makes this point with some very good examples, on p.72.)

Let's Talk About the Dark, Part 2: Eric Maisel, R.D. Laing, Ben Goldacre and Adam Curtis

Warning!  This post is ridiculously long!  Be prepared to sit for a bit…

Last post I wrote you a mini history of why I think I get sad, and what it feels like for me.  This is so you know that I’m not speaking of these things with no damn idea what I’m talking about.  On the other hand, what I told you of is simply and only, my personal experience.  No two people’s experiences of anything will ever be exactly the same.  Before I begin to tell you about the first part (actually, it’s only the first 3 chapters and the introduction) of Eric Maisel’s useful new book, Rethinking Depression[1], I want to make one thing crystal clear to anyone reading.  It’s this:

Everybody’s feelings are different, though similar.  One person may struggle with a feeling s/he calls depression their whole lives and say little about it to anyone; another may seek help by talking or medicine, and often.  Some people feel chronic sadness or depression is a deeply private thing; others feel the stigma of it should be fought and we should talk about it openly, a lot.  Some people are greatly benefited by drugs prescribed them for their feelings and their management; some people have had awful reactions to these medicines; some people will not touch them out of principle.  Same goes for talking therapies, or any kind of help.

Never think, for one second, reading this (or anything I write, I’ve told you this before), that anyone’s own experiences of this life are invalid.  Personally, I have been sad on and off my whole life, and several times very badly.  Personally, I have tried 6 different types of anti-depressants and had awful side effects from each one, and zero help from them.  So I won’t be trying anymore, I shouldn’t think, and I will worry for you if you do or are, in case you have the same problems I did with the meds.  Personally, I have tried several therapists and 2 psychiatrists.  All the therapists I tried had hobby horses of their own disciplines, and all were a disaster for me.  One psychiatrist was worse than useless, and one was a lovely man, who tried me on cognitive behavioural therapy – which didn’t do much for me; I don’t think it’s the saviour of our minds other people think it is.  I don’t like or trust most doctors, due to my own mental health experiences with them, and to watching them ill-treat Troubadour when we were married, and he had been seriously ill.  But these are My Experiences Alone.  I will be talking out of them, of course.  I will reference them.  But I do not mean to invalidate anyone else’s.  If you take meds and it works for you – good.  If you have a great counsellor or therapist etc, and it works for you: good.  Good for you.  We are not all the same; we are similar.  Got it? 

Evangelism is never going to work for me.  Sharing information and experiences and trying different tactics at different times for different things, IS.  What works for me may not for you.  And vice versa.

For this reason, I have a slight problem with the tone and assumption of the first bit of Eric Maisel’s book.  He writes very conversationally, as he always does, very persuasively – he is a great writer, a great polemicist, and I have admired some 20 so far of his 35 or so book output on creativity, living creative lives, and staving off sadness and meaning loss in our lives by organising our thoughts and philosophic leanings more cleanly and clearly. 

Eric Maisel sets out a thesis in the first part of the book that really, there is no such thing as ‘depression’ as we know it now.  What there is – and he goes to great lengths to not underplay it[2] – is a deep and persistent, chronic human sadness, that we can all feel.  It can come at any time, for a reason we can see, or for no apparent reason at all.  Furthermore, it has been hijacked by the pharmacological industry, for their profit.  He says that we have ‘unwanted’ emotions sometimes, that we have been taught to label as ‘abnormal’.  He says: ‘Unwanted does not equal abnormal’ (p.9). 

He argues the chicken and egg scenario of biological brain differences in those feeling chronically sad: are their brains showing differences in chemical actions and areas working more or less BECAUSE they became sad and it changed the working of their brains?  Or because their brains were like that anyway, because they have a proper biological disorder and this MADE them sad?[3] 

He argues the medical industry would like us to believe the latter, when he thinks the former is more likely.  The same goes for the effects of various anti-depressants.  Do they work because chemicals have an effect (you drink; you’ll get drunk), which means you may think you must have had depression because this pill FIXED it?[4]  Or is it simply that your feelings were altered by chemicals, your symptoms masked – while the causes of your malady were left completely unaddressed, and therefore, likely to make a quick return once the pills are stopped?  He is angry at the way the medical industry as a whole seems relatively uninterested in finding the causes for this modern epidemic of depression (an idea we’ll return to), and trying instead to validate their own authority arbiting status by merely inventing labels for maladies, syndromes, disorders, and then offering us drugs for them (all of Chapter 1).  Drugs that he says may or may not do anything for you (pp.31-35). 

He worries that we are as a culture laying down for all this, adopting the language given to us by the medical and pharmacological industry (I regularly refer to my late father as both ‘OCD’ and ‘obviously clinically depressed, just never diagnosed’, for example).  The fact that it can be mightily comforting to have a name for the thing that ails us, is not lost on him. 

The fundamental linguistic game played by the mental health industry, is to characterize anything that remotely needs remediating or changing a disorder.  That hundreds of millions of people agree to play this game only proves the power of naming. (p.39)

But he suggests that by buying into the labels of medicine, wholesale, and taking all their drugs and their expensive talking therapies, we are giving up what personal responsibility and control we could have for trying to feel better ourselves.  He argues that by remembering that this modern thing we call ‘depression’ is in fact a 20^th century label and construction; by remembering that throughout history, people were seen as ‘melancholic’ of temperament (a philosophical word rather than a purely medical label)[5], some more so than others, and that we can find ways of living our lives differently and training our minds and thought processes better, so that life is less easily able to lose its meaning and sink into a pit of greyness – we would be better off.

He isn’t by any means, a lone voice in the wilderness saying that our Western society is too quick to yell mental illness, and ‘pathologize the experiences of everyday life’ (p.9).  He backs up his points with several scientific studies (all supporting his points, of course), and quite a few good books, some of which I have read[6].  I need to make clear that a lot of this story takes place in America, and is about the American pharmacological industry for a large part, which functions a bit differently to ours.  Though the idea of comforting labels is all over both our societies.

I had greatly furrowed brow while reading all this.  I agree that our society is very quick to jump on bandwagons; and that we all seem to love a Label, for ourselves or others – as Bill Maher recently said, I need to label you, as if I don’t, I don’t know whether to ignore all your opinions immediately or not (I paraphrase, as we have annoyingly deleted that download of his Real Time – if anyone can give me the correct quote, please do, its within the last month).  Its scary to consistently be feeling things that go against society’s grain of needing us to be team oriented, happy happy happy all the time, and mostly extrovert in behaviour.  It’s scary to feel unable to talk about this for fear of being criticised as wimpy/ malingering/ unable to look after your children/ unable to hold down your job, or the nicest one of all: ‘mental’, ‘crazy’.  So its no surprise that some of us have chugged down our diagnoses of depression with a relief or gusto that may seem odd to others.  If it’s got a Proper Medical Name, then its REAL…and because more people are speaking out about it, its starting to lose its stigma – because so many of us seem to have it, or have had it, or will have it at some point.  There then lays out before us an array of ‘help’: support groups, drugs, psychiatrists.  This can be very comforting.  And it can work, for some people. (I'll come back to this in the 3rd and last post of this series.)

But I do agree that it goes too far.  It’s very tempting to say things like, if you grieve too long after a death, you have gone from mourning to depression.  How long is too long?  It’s obviously different for us all.  You can’t bring it all down to numbers, and lists of symptoms.  That’s over-generalizing, and creates its own problems. 

This was dealt with in depth by the UK documentary film maker, Adam Curtis, in the first episode of his short series The Trap: What Happened to our Dreams of Freedom? broadcast here in 2007.  (If you want to go see that bit, it’s on YouTube here, and it starts about 36 minutes in, with R.D.Laing looking very thoughtful and pinched, listen from there – I warn you, its dense, lots to take in.)  The section I am mentioning is part of a wider critique of political control in Western and specifically UK society, so I am quote mining, in a way; it’s a small part of what he was saying, but an important part. 

Eric Maisel’s book focuses the early sections on how depression is not a real thing at all, but a construct, made by doctors, and an incredible find for the psycho-pharmaceutical industry.  He doesn’t give any background as to why this may have happened, or how.  This is where Adam Curtis comes in, and the section of his documentary I just mentioned.  So before you jump up and down and yell: ‘But I AM sick!’ do have a think about how the label of depression arose, and what it does in our society.  The background information is, in fact, vital to thinking about it all.

What Adam Curtis proposed was this (for those of you who have no time to watch a 10 min clip, or don’t want to) - any phrases in speech-marks indicate direct quotes from Curtis's narration; indented paragraphs are longer quotes:  

Celebrity Scots psychiatrist RD Laing goes to America, mid 1960s.  He is against the medical elite, as always propounding mental illness as a purely biological thing, taking no account of intellectual and social factors.  He viewed psychiatry as a ‘fake science’ used for political control of people. Labels of madness or sanity have no actual reality, they are just convenient labels to lock up people ‘who want to break free’ politically – who differ from the norms.  One of the many young US psychiatrists who came to Laing to learn was called Rosenhan, and he devised a truly breathtaking experiment to see if psychiatrists could tell the difference between madness and sanity.  You need to watch the documentary clip for this bit alone, or read this link that describes the experiment: it’s truly shocking.  Basically, they really couldn’t.  Healthy people were judged sick, sick people judged healthy.  It emphasised the immense dangers of psychiatric labelling.  It was an important experiment and sent shockwaves through the American psychiatric establishment at the time (1973).  (Maisel sites some similar though less dramatic experiments, pp.27-30.)

The psychiatric establishment fought back though, with a new system of diagnosis that relied on the scientific, clear and clean beacon of numbers.  ‘All human judgement removed’.  The new system was based on ‘measurable surface behaviour of human beings’.  Curtis has Paul McHugh, then psychiatrist in chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital explain quite clearly that psychiatry has no clue what causes any of the conditions – ADD, ADHD, OCD, BPD, PPSD, GAD etc, but could just tell you ‘what they look like’ based on surface behaviour that could be observed and recorded.  Characteristics of all these Disorders, including depression, were listed very specifically, and questionnaires devised asking people if they thought they had these characteristics (NB: human judgement straight back in there, doh!).  The choices were ‘yes’ or ‘no’, so that anyone could conduct an interview with a symptom checklist, and the results could be fed into a computer, that would then diagnose a person as having this or that disorder, or none.  If they were normal or abnormal. Curtis has Dr Robert Spitzer, creator of the new diagnostic system in 1979, confirm this was how it was supposed to work: ‘no clinical judgement required’.

This is the bit we will start to be familiar with, over here in the UK.  In the late 70’s, to test the checklists, interviewers were sent all over the USA to question randomly selected people with them.  The point is made that till then, psychiatrists had only seen people who felt they needed help, who felt ill.  'No one had asked regular people how they felt'.  Do you need me to tell you that the results were apparently terrifying?  That more than 50% of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder, 17% of them had a depressive incident at some point.  This is where the idea of a ‘hidden epidemic’ of depression comes from, in our society.  More surveys were done, more random people: very similar results were returned.

Many many people found ‘the checklists were a liberation: their private suffering was finally being recognised’.  But here come the unforeseen consequences:

Millions of people began to use the checklists to monitor and diagnose themselves; to identify what was aberrant or abnormal in their behaviour and feelings.  By definition this also set up a powerful model for them, of what were the normal behaviour and feelings to which they should aspire.  Psychiatrists began to find more and more people coming to them, demanding to made normal.

Paul McHugh makes the point that previously people did not wish to seem ‘psychiatrically injured’ but that now they had a new ideal of NORMAL they wanted to be made to fit the model.  Curtis concludes this section with saying:

The disorders and checklists were becoming a powerful and objective guide to what were the correct and appropriate feelings in an age of individualism and emotion.  This was a very different system of order: no longer were people told how to behave by an elite.  Instead, they now used the checklists to monitor their feelings and police their own behaviour.  They were reassured that these new categories were scientific and could be checked by the power of numbers.

Now, you may think it weird I have devoted so much time to Adam Curtis in a review of a book by someone else, but I ask you – if an author declares depression doesn’t actually exist, is a construct, and serves other ends for those who created that label, not really much for us…would you have liked a bit of background to such an immense claim?  I had already seen this documentary, read a fair bit of Laing and knew about the anti-psychiatry movement (of which Laing did not like to think he was associated, by the way), so I could see where Eric Maisel was coming from.  The other point of course is that RD Laing is very important for modern existentialists – he saw mental illness as part of lived experience, cultural and societal, not just a biological phenomenon and that it must be treated as an intellectual, societal, cultural phenomenon; and Eric Maisel is an existentialist, so tends to take the same view.

I think the problem I had with the first part of this book was that whilst this modern thing, ‘depression’ is almost certainly a creation of the mental health industry and its adjuncts, and that restating how we feel when we feel awful as simply part of lived experience, and then trying to live differently and more mindfully, with a set of good existential tools on how to do so…will not work for everyone.  Maisel makes it clear that existentialism is a tough philosophy, hard and rigorous (bit like I find Zen Buddhism – too hard for me by far)…BUT.

Let me put it like this.  I read Sally Brampton’s Shoot the Damn Dog (2009) a while back.  (As a result of it I became quite vocal for a while about ‘my depression’ in an attempt to remove stigma, at least from around myself.)  Its one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read.  That woman had a hell going on inside her for a long time.  I did think, reading it, that all the meds she had given to her did not seem to be helping at all, and she freely says they gave her awful awful side effects.  Eventually she came out of it all, years later (also unimpressed with cognitive behavioural therapy, as I am).  I also note that Marion Keyes, beloved chick lit Irish author is only just now feeling better from a depression that she described on her website in absolutely heartrending flat clear terms.  Both these women, and these are but 2 examples, were on the floor with whatever ailed them.  And their lives were fine before sudden felling by depression, or whatever we want to call it.  Marian Keyes had had some depressions like mine before, but nothing like what befell her the last 2 or so years.

I don’t think either of these women could have been helped, at their worst states of mind, by existentialism, or by being told that depression doesn’t exist and they felt ‘chronic human sadness’…Semantics would not have helped them, at this point, I think.  Do you see?

Many of us feel quite shitty, quite a lot of the time.  And there are degrees of it, different for each person.  Whilst I think many of us are far too quick to embrace the idea of being mentally ill (for whatever reason), I think there are states people get into where you genuinely cannot, for sometimes a feck of a long while, think your way out of it, or do things that will make you feel more in control and thus feel better about life and yourself.  Some people really do disappear into an abyss for a while.  Whatever we want to call that, depression, a melancholic episode…it’s REAL.  People die there sometimes.

The dangers of the first part of Eric Maisel’s otherwise very useful book is to blithely state that depression is just a word.  A bad word in service of the psycho-pharmacological industry.  It may well be, as I have tried to show you with a bit of background. 

But it is very dangerous indeed to lump all the ways people feel when they feel sad together and if someone in the absolute pits of sadness came across this book, and tried to read from the start, when they are at that point where you aren’t capable of proper action or thought, I don’t think it would help – it would make you feel worse, because you would feel guilty and powerless to feel any better, despite seeing the logic in some of what he says. I don’t personally think meds are the answer either.  But that’s just me, ok?  I don’t know what the answer is.  I think the fact may be that its different for each person.

I too think the pharmacological industry is not an altruistic one by any damn means, and I would totally concur with (UK medical doctor) Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science, in this assessment of ‘medicalisation[7]’:

[which is] the expansion of the biomedical remit into domains where it may not be helpful or necessary…In its most aggressive form, this process has been characterised as “disease-mongering”.  It can be seen throughout the world of quack cures – and being alive to it can be like having the scales removed from your eyes – but in big pharma the story goes like this: the low-hanging fruit of medical research has all been harvested, and the industry is rapidly running out of novel molecular entities.  They registered fifty a year in the 1990s, but now its down to twenty a year, and a lot of those are just copies.  They are in trouble.

Because they cannot find new treatments for the diseases we already have, the pill companies instead invent new diseases for the treatments they already have.  Recent favourites include Social Anxiety Disorder (a new use for SSRI drugs[8]), Female Sexual Dysfunction (a new use for Viagra in women)…and so on: problems, in a real sense, but perhaps not necessarily the stuff of pills, and perhaps not best conceived of in reductionist biomedical terms.  In fact, reframing intelligence, loss of libido, shyness and tiredness as medical pill problems could be considered crass, exploitative and frankly disempowering. (p.153, my italics)

Which brings us back to Eric Maisel, who would also utterly agree with that, I’m sure.

 Despite the fact I am in two minds about dismissing the word ‘depression’ for everyone, I have actually found dismissing it for myself quite useful.  In my last major fit of being in the pit, I frantically googled about the web looking for things to help me think.  I’m a pagan by inclination, so I googled pagans and depression (wondering why my own notions were helping me so little), and found this blog article.  It’s noteworthy because of one line, for me.  It said that pagans are often quite left-leaning, politically, and lefties have a lot to be depressed about in the way our society is going.  Or this one, about free-thinking people being more often classified as mentally ill (harking back to RD Laing’s point of psychiatry as something to label and lock up those who disagree with societal norms).  That really made me think.   

Why was I so quick to embrace the idea of being depressed as thing that was happening to me, against which I was powerless (in a way)…making it seem like an alien, or chemical invader.  In fact: there’s loads going on all around me, that explain perfectly well why I am worried, anxious, and downright upset, a lot of the time.  Watch the news!  Live with someone like Stanley who watches the news a lot!  Have an upbringing like the one I described last post. You’ll then be a bit vulnerable to paranoid feelings, insecurity and phases of feeling worthless.  Trust issues.  It’s understandable, not a mystery.   Be someone who seems to think a lot, to over think, analyse a lot.  To have been alone often, so sees things from the outsider perspective, often.  To get into bad mental habits as a result of all ones experiences, is not a surprise.  And it would affect and take each of us differently, depending on what our personal experiences were.  Obviously. 

So whilst I’m not going to be one to take the label or idea of depression away from anyone who is finding it helpful in learning how to feel better, and live differently; unless I am in the real pits, I do take it away from myself.  I’m me and I get damn sad, damn often.  But I like to try and deal with it with my own brain, which is why I do like the rest of Eric Maisel’s book, the meaty bit, the solutions.  Which we’ll get to next post, the last one of the series. 

It won’t work for everyone, it won’t always work for me, and its only part of an answer.  But it is part.  I think it can help.  Some of us could do worse than try some of his ideas.

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[1] Maisel, Eric, Rethinking Depression, California: New World Library, 2012.

[2] Rethinking Depression, all of pages 49-52, give a long list of reasons why we get unhappy.

[3] RD – p.16, p.20

[4] RD – p.34, p.41.

[5] RD, p.10.

[6] The ones I have read and can recommend as interesting to the topic are: Charles Barber’s Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation (2008), Richard Bentall’s Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Any Good? (2009), Daniel Carlat’s Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry – A Doctors Revelatins about a Profession in Crisis (2010), Peter Conrad’s The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (2007), Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield’s (also featured in Adam Curtis’s documentary The Trap) The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depression Disorder (2007) and lastly, Joanna Moncrieff’s The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (2009).  There are many more he lists that look very interesting, but these are the ones I can vouch for as MOST interesting.

[7] Goldacre, Ben, Bad Science, London: Fourth Estate, 2008

[8] An antidepressant, Prozac is of the SSRI family.