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Most abuse is a form of cowardice, and some cowardice is a reasonable symptom of depression.
me: I felt as though I were disappearing, and somewhere deep in the most primitive part of my brain, I felt that violence was the only way I could keep my self and mind in the world.
another part of me does not rue what happened, because I sincerely believe that I would have gone irretrievably crazy if I had not done it—
Breaking things in anger is atleast acceptable to a certain extent but breaking the jaws of your friend and telling that if you hadn't fone it you would have gone crazy is something deeply problematic. Also, associating yourself with wife batterers and telling that they also have full justification for their behaviour is even more problematic!
I do not accept the behaviour of wife batterers and I certainly do not endorse what they do. Engaging in violent acts is not a good way to treat depression. It is, however, effective. To deny the inbred curative power of violence would be a terrible mistake.
Again I cannot accept this justification. It seems to be mere window dressing.
Because children do not tend to consider their own future as adults do, and because they do not organize their memories lucidly, they are seldom preoccupied with the meaninglessness of life. Without the development of abstract feeling, children do not feel the hopelessness and despair characteristic of
adult depression. But they can suffer persistent negativity.
“You get these women, and I’m related to several of them, who come in saying, oh, my back hurts and my belly aches and my legs feel strange and so on. What I still want to know and can’t find out is whether they just say this to avoid admitting to their psychological problems, or whether they are experiencing depression this way, without feeling the usual symptoms.
In her beautifully poignant book Willow Weep for Me, Meri Danquah describes the trouble: “Clinical depression simply did not exist within the realm of my possibilities, or, for that matter, in the realm of possibilities for any of the black women in my world. The illusion of strength has been and continues to be of major significance to me as a black woman. The one myth that I have had to endure my entire life is that of my supposed birthright to strength. Black women are supposed to be strong—caretakers, nurturers, healers of other people—any of the twelve dozen variations on Mammy. Emotional
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It’s always a shock, the discrepancy between my self-perception and how I am perceived in the world, between my internal vision of myself and the external circumstances of my life.
“Seek professional help if you need it, but in the meantime, cheer up.”
Among the groups most likely to suffer depression, gay people rank shockingly high.
A few scientists have argued for a genetic link between homosexuality and depression (a proposal that I find not only disturbing but also untenable).
Atleast I am happy that you agree that this hypothesis is ridiculous.
the most obvious explanation for the high rates of gay depression is homophobia.
You are right about the reason for depression among gays as homophobia. But why did I detect a tendency to defend wife beaters and violence in men towards women while speaking about the reason for women being depressed? Isn't the role of women in this man's world a major reason for depression in women?
In two remarkable papers, “Internalized Homophobia and the Negative Therapeutic Reaction” and “Internal Homophobia and Gender-Valued Self-Esteem in the Psychoanalysis of Gay Patients”, Richard C. Friedman and Jennifer Downey write movingly of the origins and mechanisms of internalized homophobia.
Is it surprising that when I began to feel suicidal, I chose to court HIV?
The road from knowledge to freedom is, however, a long and arduous one and I battle my way down it every day.
I think it is likely that I entered into sexual relationships with women in good part so that I might further prove my own masculinity.
Perhaps, I think, at the very least, that I would have had years of happiness that are now forever lost.
I am again unhappy that you primarily chose to concentrate on men for discussing about the problems faced by gay people with barely minimal mention about women in this. I understand that you are a man but you have managed to do a complete research on several aspects of depression and I am all the more disappinted for ignoring women in this equation!
“The richer, softer and more delectable nature becomes,” the essayist A. Alvarez has written, “the deeper that internal winter seems, and the wider and more intolerable the abyss which separates the inner world from the outer.”
Depressiveness, with concomitant hysteria and paranoia, is the price paid for the intense communality of Inuit lives.
quality of loneliness is infinitely plastic.
pain. Context, race, gender, tradition, nation—all conspire to determine what is to be said and what is to be left unsaid—and to some extent they thereby determine what is to be alleviated, what exacerbated, what endured, what forsworn. The depression—its urgency, its symptoms, and the ways out of it—is all determined by forces quite outside of our individual biochemistry, by who we are, where we were born, what we believe, and how we live.
Depression may be the cause of substance abuse; depression may be the result of substance abuse; depression may alter or exaggerate substance abuse; depression may coexist with substance abuse without affecting it; depression and substance abuse may be two symptoms of a single problem.
The medical literature claims that addiction comes from problems with “(1) affects, (2) self-esteem, (3) self-other relationships, and (4) self-care.”
Part of what is most horrendous about depression, and particularly about anxiety and panic, is that it does not involve volition:
For many depressives, alcohol or cocaine or heroin is the chilli, the intolerable thing the horror of which distracts from the more intolerable depression.
Caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol are the primary legal addictive substances incorporated to varying degrees into the norms of our society and advertised to consumers.
Alcoholism has more recently been treated with Antabuse, a drug that alters alcohol metabolism and diminishes tolerance for alcohol.
Marijuana is antimotivational and in this mimics symptoms of depression. Withdrawal is unpleasant but not agonizing (as with heroin), nor potentially life-threatening (as with alcohol), nor protracted (as with cocaine), and so the drug is often described as nonaddictive.
Regular marijuana use becomes antimotivational and “has real neuro-cognitive changes which might as well be physiologically permanent if you’re high all the time,” McDowell says. Marijuana also, of course, carries all the toxicity of cigarettes, causing significant damage to the lungs.
Opiates, including opium, heroin, and prescription drugs such as Demerol, are to the mind what the fetal position is to the body.
Hallucinogens and the “club drugs” (ecstasy/MDMA, Special K/ketamine, GHB) make up another class of substances of abuse.
The benzodiazepines (or benzos)—Valium, Xanax, Klonopin—and their cousins Ambien and Sonata are perhaps the most confusing drugs of all: they are addictive and they are useful for psychiatric complaints.
Depression is a search for invalidation. And you can always find as much as you want. When you’re depressed, you keep seeking to prove that you’re unworthy.
Depression enables addiction. Resisting desires takes so much energy and will, and when you are depressed, it is too hard just to say no—to food, to alcohol, to drugs. It’s really simple. Depression weakens you. Weakness is the surest path to addiction. Why should you say no when no will lead you only to more intolerable misery?
Suicidality has been treated as a symptom of depression when it may in fact be a problem that coexists with depression. We no longer treat alcoholism as a side effect of depression: we treat it as a problem that occurs simultaneously with depression.
To travel to the other side of death on a return ticket is an attractive idea: I have often wanted to kill myself for a month.
fact, life denies suicide by obscuring, most of the time, the reality of one’s own mortality.
Is life only an absurd deferral of death?
Whensoever any affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword”; to Camus.
“It will generally be found,” Schopenhauer has declared, “that as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life.”
It is this abnormal ‘split’ between what we think and what we feel. There lies the illusion of control; there lies madness.”
I have seen in a single document both the assertion that depressed people are five hundred times as likely to commit suicide as their nondepressed counterparts and the statistic that depressed patients have a suicide rate twenty-five times the societal norm.
the National Institute of Mental Health grandly if unscientifically averred for a long time that “almost all people who kill themselves have a diagnosable mental or substance abuse disorder”; they recently downgraded the “almost all” to “90 percent.” This notion helps people who have made unsuccessful suicide attempts, and those left grieved by the suicide of someone to whom they were close, to expel some of the guilt that might otherwise fetter them.
Contrary to popular myth, those who talk about suicide are the most likely to kill themselves.
As we confront chronic stresses for which we are ill equipped, we rely on and overuse neurotransmitters. The rush of neurotransmitters we induce in sudden stress cannot be kept up during more sustained stress. For this reason, people who experience chronic stress tend to sap their transmitters.
Actual suicide attempts are usually brought on by external stresses, which frequently include use of alcohol, acute medical illness, and negative life events.
What all of this means in functional terms is that people with low levels of essential neurotransmitters in key areas are at a high risk for suicide.
Suicide is often the manifestation of the depressive end of a manic-depressive mood spectrum, and this is the reason usually given for the high rate of suicide among people who are highly successful.
At the same time, having entertained the idea of suicide, I had broken down certain barriers that had stood between me and self-obliteration.
