Talking about depression 2

I think the biggest problem in trying to talk about depression is the lack of  shared references. For sure, we can each tell our stories about the circumstances of our depression. Mine were: end of PGR funding/relationship/folk-punk band/living in remote Fife cottage; start of awful housing arrangement/teaching 18-24 hours a week at an HE College. But that says nothing, really. Lots of people cope with far worse.

Trying to express how I felt is just so hard. OK, we can all play party games about whether or not we see the same colours, but when we try to talk about our internal states all we seem to have is cliches. And colour words: black, blue, grey...

However, I found a naive computational analogy which seems to work with other computational melancholics. It's like there's an background process in the brain to do with worry/anxiety/self doubt which probably everyone has, but which somehow gets maximum priority scheduling in conditions of unmanageable stress. And because it gets in the way of other processes to do with really important stuff, the failure to suspend it adds to the worry/anxiety/self doubt which then become self-reinforcing, maintaining the process's high priority. After each of my parents died, I realised that my grief operated in almost the same manner, but with grief it mutes, they say at a rate of one month for every year you knew the person.

Then I read Daniel Dennet's "Consciousness Explained". No, of course it isn't. But he describes a evolutionary  mind-less brain which fires off loads of random problem solving agents and the one's that are fit get to reproduce. So maybe depression is when melancholy agents get to reproduce at the expense of those we'd regard as actually fit? Note the use of a mind-full "we" AKA "I" which is doing the regarding...

Talking about depression

I'm Greg and I'm melancholic. All right, depressive. I was first diagnosed in 1978,
in circumstances that I'll maybe relate another time, and was prescribed tri-cyclic antidepressants for about 18 months. I've had attacks on and off ever since, but with markedly decreased frequency and reduced duration.

At the time, I didn't tell anyone. I wasn't ashamed. Rather, I didn't want fuss and I didn't want sympathy. I didn't want people to treat me differently though I'm sure they'd have been uniformly kind and understanding. I just wanted the black moods
 to stop and I wanted to feel normal, what ever that was.

I found that three things helped me apart from the green and black pills. First of all, standing in front of a class, trying to explain stuff I knew backwards and didn't
entirely understand why others found hard, forced me to de-centre. Secondly,
exercise, especially long walks, untensed my body and calmed the looping brain.
 And third, pursuing non-work projects with other people again took me out of
myself. In particular, I helped write and record a radio play called "Biggles and the
Day Glo Fokker", with a cast of tens, using bodjo reel to reel and cassette equipment, and BBC sound effect LPs. No it was never broadcast...

Very few of my friends and almost none of my colleagues now know I'm depressive. I'm still not ashamed. I just don't think it's relevant.

However, as  a student mentor and a UCU member supporter, and in the past as an academic manager, I find myself trying to help lots of people who are in crisis, where  reactive or endogenous depression was often at the  root or a complicating factor. So the first thing I tell them is about my own experience,  and that almost always eases their trusting me and my being able to point them at appropriate help.