Depression Squared: Faulty Wiring
It is so confusing to be depressed. The outside looks the same — perhaps a little fatter or thinner, a certain slant away from direct contact in the eyes — but nothing that even a lover or a good friend would notice. Yet inside, the brain seethes as it engages with the world, fizzling and crackling at every join, as the steam of internal negativity hits broad indifference outside and oozes to join it.
Any major illness can cause a sufferer to see the world differently. It is hard not to, if you know that, unjustly, this may be your last spring. Or if you can sense your understanding of the world seeping away. But Depression is different, because the perspective on the world shifts so fundamentally on its axis that it becomes impossible to look at the world as it is, but that shift is often unperceived by others.
Treatment breakthroughs for Depression in recent decades have focused on identifying and labelling the faulty thinking that goes with it, breaking it down into component parts, tying it back to childhood models, finding affirmations and suchlike to oppose each segment with a parallel positive. They make for intelligent reading. But these organizational systems also often seem intuitive, even naive. It is a statement of the obvious to suggest that those who are depressed do not think right.
Incorrect thinking can mean all kinds of things. Its characteristic pattern is a spiral, which twists and turns from reality through degrees of seeming logic until the world becomes a harsh and cruel dystopia.
It may be a case of focusing only on the negative in any situation, of seeing danger where there should be none, of seeking perfection to the exclusion of all else, of seeing the self as fundamentally evil and undeserving. There are so many variations. They share a tendency to place the self at the centre of the picture and to see darkness around it.
They also expose a gap, which can be seismic, between perception and reality. A depressed person does not pretend or look for contradiction — they cannot see the gap, however blindingly obvious it is to everyone else. At its most extreme this is what we call psychosis. Even at its lesser extremes it is a dangerous distortion.
Reading through the textbooks, replacing one view with another seems straightforward. But the beliefs that power someone who is depressed are seated so deep that their roots intertwine with personality’s core, and double standards rule. I can accept at a general level it is unhelpful to go through life demanding a perfect score in everything, quantitative and qualitative. I can apply the counter-statement that it is not necessary to get 100 all of the time, that everyone makes mistakes. But believing it so that it actually acts to counter the pressing weight of need and expectation I place on myself is a whole different challenge.
Then there is sadness. People become sad, legitimately, from what life hands to them. That sadness may last for some time and may benefit from therapy of some sort as a way to get through it.
The sadness of Depression is a crushing weight that grows from the inside out — like a tumour that is caused and nurtured by core beliefs which seek to bring their owner down. It continues to grow through the days and the nights, and surgery risks slicing a knife through being itself. It becomes all that the sufferer sees of themselves. This is not the sadness of tears and whispered fears. It is more like the groans of some more primordial hell, the clinking of chains in the darkest chapters of history, the whiteout of the heart of a snowstorm, which goes on and on and on.
To those outside it all seems so logical — or illogical. They remember past events differently. They hear conversations and off-hand comments differently. They see the world differently with different people in it. They look at the face of someone with Depression and do not see a monster. Sometimes they do not even see a sufferer.
All treatments for Depression — from ECT to Talking Therapy — aim to make a set of new, correct connections in the brain, like rewiring an electrical system to carry the charge it must cope with. The experts involved may succeed by drawing on the tried and tested operating systems offered in so many manuals and models. But it is important to recognise too that every single person they encounter presents a differently tangled challenge of damaging beliefs and faulty thinking. Above all, even the most experienced practitioners require patience and imagination to understand the case presenting itself in front of them. It is not enough to have studied theories: They need to be able to apply principles like Radical Acceptance to tackle their own limitations.
I am still too close to be able objectively to quantify how many degrees off reality my own thinking has veered. I read the texts and study the works the experts call on, and I see myself in all my wrongness inside them.
Look at me once and you will see perfect adjustment, a smooth surface off which life rolls like water. But look harder and there is a head just breaking the waves, trying to untangle things as I go, impossible yet to see how the mass of wires will resolve itself, whether and how the circuits will fire up again.
