Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ you that, when they skip around you pretending you’ve got it wrong, that’s rock-bottom time.¹²

      Somehow, if we can face ‘the bare-boned, skeletal truth’ we can find the courage to go on with our lives. We can find that courage because, as the ordinary people that we are, we are brave. We know that life is full of uncertainty, not just the uncertainty we all face in terms of nuclear war, or of the destruction of the ecological balance of the planet, or of huge national debts, or of terrorism, or of Aids, but the uncertainties we each face in our own way: ‘Will the firm I work for go bust?’ ‘Will my child get to school safely?’ ‘Is the lump in my groin cancer?’ ‘How will I manage if my husband dies?’ We each have to live with our own uncertainties.

      We are brave in the way we keep on going. We get up and go to work, no matter that our work is dull and unrewarding or demanding and stressful. We go on cleaning, cooking and looking after our children, knowing that many of the things we would like for ourselves and our children are not going to come our way. We go on trying to make our children brave by telling them that they are wonderful and that the future is opening up before them full of promise. We try not to tell them that their future might be tough and miserable, even though we fear it may be so. We go on loving one another, even though we know that out of that love will come the terrible pain of separation and loss.

      Sometimes we lose our nerve. Sometimes our courage falters, and then we feel great fear. This happens when we lose confidence in ourselves and we find that there is an unacceptable discrepancy between what we thought our life would be and what it actually is.

      Such a discovery is made by just about all of us at some point in our lives. When it does, we feel an immense fear which threatens to overwhelm and annihilate us. One way of dealing with this fear is by locking ourselves in the prison of depression. In there we can shut out other disturbances and give ourselves time to think things through and so come to terms with the discrepancy between what our life is and what we want it to be.

      For some of us, coming to terms with the discrepancy and building another life is not too difficult, and so our period of depression is brief. However, for others of us the task is much more difficult. So much more has been staked and lost, so much time and effort has been wasted, and so few alternatives for the future are on offer. Most of all, if you have grown up believing that you are bad and unacceptable and that you have to work hard to be good, then in the prison of depression you can doubt that you have the right to change your life and to claim something for yourself. Thus your sojourn in the prison of depression goes on, until you can discover in yourself that sense of intrinsic acceptance and worth with which you were born.

      This is not an easy thing to do because you have been told so many confusing things, not just by psychiatrists, but in the past by your parents and teachers, and in the present by people who want you to be the sort of person they want you to be.

      Many people, not just psychiatrists, want to believe that depression is a physical illness.

      If you are depressed and believe that it is a physical illness you may be holding this belief because it allows you to be irresponsible – no matter what you do, you can say, ‘I cannot help what I do, I am ill’. Or perhaps you believe depression is a physical illness because you are trapped in an impossible situation and being depressed is the only form of escape that you can find. Or perhaps you have been brought up to believe that you must never question what anyone in a position of authority says, and so if psychiatrists, backed by the whole medical profession, say that depression is a physical illness, you believe them without question.

      Many people want to believe that depression is a physical illness because that allows them to ignore the suffering of other people and the complexities of life. It requires very little mental effort to think, ‘Depression is a physical illness’. Whereas to understand how we think, feel and act, how we affect and are affected by the people around us, how we respond to and are affected by the customs and beliefs attached to our gender, dass, race, religion and nationality, and how we respond to and are affected by the propaganda that we are subjected to and the political, economic and ecological changes in the world we live in requires considerable mental effort and a tolerance of uncertainty. To say, ‘Depression is a physical illness’ requires one sentence. To describe the multitude of matters which are relevant to our experience of depression requires many sentences, indeed, a large book.

      The aim of this book is to help you sort out this confusion and to be a signpost for your journey out of the prison of depression. Depression is not an illness. It is an experience out of which we can gain greater understanding of ourselves and other people.

      My friend Pat Wakeling, a psychiatrist who, having found that the treatment his colleagues gave him for his depression did not work, had to find his own way out of the prison, wrote:

      Depression is not – as I have eventually and painfully learned – something to sweep under the carpet: to deny, to forget. It is an experience that brings great misery and causes a great waste of time, but it can be, if one is fortunate, a source of personal wisdom and worth more than a hundred philosophies.¹³

      This book is a distillation of my work not just on depression but on all the suffering which we can encounter. In it you will hear the voices of some of the people who have talked to me over the last twenty years, people living in the United States, Britain and Australia. To them I give my gratitude and love.

I The Meaning of Depression

       1 An Ordinary Story

      ‘My family insisted I see a psychiatrist. So I went along expecting to have to tell him all about my life, but all he said was, “We don’t need to go into all that. You’re obviously depressed”, and he prescribed me some pills. That wasn’t what I wanted at all.’

      Pat looked tired and much older than her forty-five years. She had read my book. Beyond Fear, and had written to me to say that she would like to talk to me because in that book I had described what she was going through – experiences of terrible fear and a sense of despairing and painful isolation.

      So now she sat on my sofa and diffidently and simply told me her story.

      She was a doctor’s daughter and had wanted to be a doctor too. But her father had said that medicine was not a profession for a woman. So she trained as a nurse and met Simon, a medical student, and fell in love. They planned to marry, but Simon was killed in a car accident.

      Later she married one of her patients, a Korean veteran who had acquired the habit of drinking to maintain his courage, a habit which he did not relinquish after the war. For ten years Pat tried to maintain her marriage for the sake of her son, but eventually had to admit failure. She was offered the chance to train as a teacher and, even though this, like all the jobs she had done previously, in no way stretched her ability, she was glad to have a secure job which allowed her plenty of time for her son. Soon, though, there were other demands on her time. Her parents were now old and infirm, and her sisters had compelling reasons why they could not look after them. So Pat nursed her father and then her mother through long, painful, and finally fatal illnesses.

      When Pat was a child she had enjoyed drawing and painting, but her parents and teachers discouraged her. Her parents had belittled her efforts, and her teachers told her she could not study both art and science. Though she had put aside this interest, she was delighted when her son showed artistic talent, even though he went to Paris to study. СКАЧАТЬ