Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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      There is a good reason why psychiatrists, both then and now, do not enquire too carefully into what their patients think and feel. The reason is that people ruin theories. Psychiatrists and psychologists go to a great deal of trouble to create their theories about why people behave as they do and they want all people to fit these theories. We can make up all kinds of theories about people simply by making a few observations of what a few people do, and our theory can seem very good, but as soon as we make a few more observations, or, worse, ask people what they think, we find that our theory is ruined. People are so diverse they just don’t fit into theories.

      Every time I run a workshop where I talk about my theories about why we behave as we do, people in the workshop are sure to say, ‘I’m not like that’, and ‘I don’t see it that way’. So I can understand why psychiatrists prefer not to put themselves into situations where their patients can challenge their theories.

      It is not just that people are so individual that they don’t fit theories, it is also that each of us is so complex that no single label can ever describe us accurately. We are complex because we can always think, feel and believe two opposite things at one and the same time. Recently, one of my clients, a man in his thirties who had told me frequently and at some length how he was so timid and shy, how bad he was at his job, how he had got his qualifications only by the sheerest of chance, said to me, ‘I’m really very arrogant. I always believe I could do the job much better than the people I work for’. And so he is, both humble and arrogant.

      I have found, as you must have too, that no matter how well you know a person, there is always something more to be discovered about that person. No one ever tells his life history completely; no one ever reveals all of his thoughts, feelings and desires; no one behaves in exactly the same way with each person he meets. No category can ever encapsulate an entire person, no theory can ever explain completely why any one of us behaves as we do.

      Thus, to maintain their theories, psychiatrists have always had to avoid talking to their patients. This is why in psychiatric hospitals patients and staff are kept so separate. It is not simply, as so many patients have been led to believe, that patients are inferior creatures who could contaminate the sane and superior doctors and nurses.

      However, by not talking to their patients psychiatrists have failed to learn from them just what the experience of depression actually is.

      What the patients in Sheffield told me, and what depressed people have gone on telling me, is that being depressed is very different from being unhappy. When we are unhappy we still feel a connection to the rest of the world, but when we are depressed we are cut off, enclosed in a strange isolation. People describe this experience in vivid images: ‘I’m in a dark tunnel, and beyond the tunnel is another tunnel’, ‘I’m at the bottom of a black pit and no one can reach me’, ‘I’m stumbling lost in grey, swirling mist’, ‘I’m trapped beneath a dome of glass and the people outside appear like shadows’.

      As the people in Sheffield and later in Lincolnshire were telling me this, they were also describing how their experiences had led them to draw conclusions which served to cut them off from other people, conclusions like, ‘I am bad and unacceptable’, ‘I must not forgive’, ‘I must not trust other people’. I described this research in my first book, The Experience of Depression.⁵

      In my conversations with people who were depressed, we frequently talked of death, of the losses they had suffered and the fears they had about their own death. Talking about death meant talking about religious beliefs. I realized how important all this was, and I knew how psychiatrists and psychologists ignore the whole question of belief. So I wrote my next book. The Construction of Life and Death,⁶ where I described how the people who coped with their lives held beliefs which gave them courage and optimism, while those who did not cope held beliefs which made them frightened and pessimistic. For instance, among those people who believed in God, those who coped believed in a loving and benevolent God, while those who did not cope believed in a God who noticed them only to punish them and who did not forgive.

      By then I had come to see that the beliefs which cut us off from ourselves, from others, and from our past and future can be summarized in six basic beliefs. If you have never been depressed and want to try it out, you will find the recipe for depression in my book, Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison.⁷

      Depression is not a state of passive misery. It is an experience of tremendous fear. Just what this fear is and how we try to deal with it was the subject of my next book, Beyond Fear.⁸ How we can use our understanding of this fear to develop ourselves and become the person that we want to be was the theme of my following book, The Successful Self.⁹

      Because I have been talking to depressed people now for over twenty years and have kept in touch with many of them, I have been able to follow how these people changed themselves and their lives. In the second edition of my first book, now called Choosing Not Losing,¹⁰ I added postscripts to the chapters about my depressed clients, describing how, ten years later, they were living their lives. In this present book I have brought together what I have discovered about how people can take charge of their lives and so change.

      With all that I have written about depression in my earlier books, I do not feel that I have said everything that could be said or ought to be said about depression, because depression is not a problem which strikes just a few unlucky people. Depression is a problem from which no one is exempt.

      It is impossible to estimate in any way accurately just how many people are depressed. It has been estimated that in the USA some four per cent of the population is depressed at any one time, and for around the world, an estimate of a hundred million has been given, but these are likely, for a number of reasons, to be underestimates.

      Many people, when they consult a doctor, feel that they should speak only of physical complaints. It is very easy for the doctor to give just physical treatments and overlook the unspoken misery of depression. Julia West, an American psychologist working in Saudi Arabia, found that her women clients would describe their aches and pains, tiredness and illness, but not their personal misery of depression. This may have been because they experienced their depression only in physical terms, or it may have been because, in their discussions with Julia, they were always accompanied by their menfolk.¹¹ There are many of us who feel that our relatives, even when they are present only in spirit, prevent us from speaking freely about our misery.

      Many depressed people do not seek any kind of medical help. It may be that they do not wish to reveal their misery to a doctor, or it may be that they do not realize that their dull, grey, lonely, cramped, trapped way of living can be called depression.

      Amongst those people who lead apparently happy and successful lives, there are many who would say, ‘I’m not depressed’, but who know that depression, like a great black bird, hovers above them, ready to settle with a heavy, smothering weight upon their shoulders should they act, or speak, or even think without due care. Such people often ask me, ‘Doesn’t being with a depressed person make you depressed?’, and they look disbelieving when I answer, ‘No’. They are convinced that depressed people are dangerous because their depression can magically and malignly call forth the depression lurking in themselves. Rather than confront their own depression, they spurn all contact with depressed people, or strive to isolate and confine them. If you are depressed you might have had experience of such people, perhaps even your own doctor, treating you as if you had the plague.

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