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Depression is a flaw in love

Life is full of sorrow. No matter what we do

By twddnPublished 2 years ago 24 min read
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Depression is a flaw in love. As creatures of love, we are bound to despair of loss, and depression is the mechanism for this despair. When depression sets in, it diminishes a person's sense of self, eventually eroding our ability to give or receive emotion. Our inner loneliness also manifests itself, destroying not only our bonds to others, but our ability to be alone in peace. While love does not prevent depression, it cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Drugs and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, which is why they work. In good spirits, one loves oneself, one loves others, one loves work, one loves God: all of these passions provide a vital sense of purpose, which is the opposite of depression. But love often betrays us, and we betray love. In depression, the meaninglessness of every career, every emotion and life itself becomes self-evident. In this loveless state, the only thing that remains is that nothing matters.

Life is full of sorrow. No matter what we do, we're all going to die. We, each of us, are trapped alone in a body that is autonomous; Time goes by, and nothing comes back. Pain is the first experience of helplessness in this world, and it never leaves us. We get angry at being forced out of the comfort of our womb, and when that anger fades, it follows. Even those who believe that everything in the next life will be different cannot escape suffering here; Jesus Christ himself was the son of sorrow. However, we live in a time when more and more moderators make it easier than ever to decide what to feel and what not to feel. For the avoidant, there are fewer and fewer unavoidable unpleasant things in life. But for all the pharmaceutical enthusiasm for conquering disease, as long as we remain self-conscious creatures, depression cannot be eliminated, at best it can be contained, which is what all current treatments for depression aim to achieve.

The highly politicized rhetoric has blurred the distinction between depression itself -- how you feel -- and its consequences -- what you do in response. This is partly a social and medical phenomenon, but it is also the result of language changing with emotion. Depression is probably best described as an emotional pain that is imposed on us against our will and then breaks free from its external restraints. Depression isn't just a lot of pain, but a lot of pain can pile up into depression. Depression, if appropriate to the situation, is grief; If grief is more than it should be, it is depression, a tumbleweed that grows in thin air and spreads even away from the nourishing soil. Only metaphors and allegories can describe the difference: Saint Anthony of the hermit desert was asked how he could tell the difference between a meek angel and a disguised devil, and he said, "You leave with different feelings." When an angel leaves you, you will feel more powerful for his presence. And when the devil leaves you, you feel nothing but fear. Grief is the angel of humility. When it is gone, you feel your mind clear and strong, and you feel your depth. Depression is a demon, and when it leaves you, you just get scared.

Depression is roughly divided into "small" mild depression (or dysthymia disorder) and "big" major depression. Mild depression occurs gradually, sometimes permanently, eating away at a person like rust eating away at steel. It is too great grief caused by too small a cause, the pain that takes over and crowds out all other emotions. This kind of depression resides in the body, takes over the eyelids and muscles, distracts your eyes, bends your spine, hurts your heart and lungs, and puts unnecessary strain on involuntary muscles. In the same way that physical pain can develop into a long-term chronic illness, mild depression is painful not because it's hard to bear at the moment, but because it's hard to bear when you look back on the past and look forward to the future. Mild depression does not see any possibility of relief in its present tense because it seems to be taken for granted.

Virginia Woolf described this state of affairs with eerie clarity: "Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. Outside the window, he saw three Greeks in kilts; The crew; The inferior class of people, or lazy or busy, or loafing or hurrying, or in groups, mime. He was depressed, not because they were indifferent to him, but because of a deeper conviction that it was not just that he happened to be lonely, but that all of us were." This is from Jacob's Room. Woolf also described in the same book: "A strange sadness rose within her, as if time and eternity were revealed through her dress and bodice, and she watched people tragically go to ruin. But God knows Julia is no fool." It is this acute awareness of impermanence and limitation that constitutes mild depression. Mild depression has long been tolerated, and is increasingly being treated as doctors begin to grapple with its variety.

Major depression is a breakdown. If you think of the soul as a block of iron, it will be weathered by grief, rusted by mild depression, and the whole structure of this iron of the soul will collapse in a severe depression. There are two models of depression: measured and categorical. The metric model suggests that depression is on a continuum of sadness and represents an extreme form of an emotional experience that is universally felt and known. The category model describes depression as a specific illness, distinct from other emotions, just as a stomach virus is distinct from indigestion caused by excess stomach acid. Both views are correct. Whether you experience a gradual accumulation of emotions or a sudden trigger, when you become depressed, you enter a completely different realm. It takes a while for a rusted iron skeleton to collapse, but the rust is grinding, thinning and hollowing it out all the time. The final collapse, however abrupt, is the result of years of decay. Still, this is a dramatic change, a clear anomaly. Rust is a long process from the first drop of rain to the time when rust engulfs the whole beam. Sometimes rust occurs at key points, and the collapse of the structure seems to happen all at once. But collapses are more often local: one collapses, another collapses, and the entire structure is thrown out of balance.

It was never pleasant to experience decay, to find yourself exposed to rain almost every day, to know that you were getting weaker and weaker, that more and more of yourself would blow away at the first strong wind, leaving less and less for yourself. Some people store up more emotional rust than others. Depression starts out as insipid, shrouding your days with a dull gray mist and dulling your daily activities, until the day comes when you need to put so much effort into them that the clear patterns of those activities blur and you're left with exhaustion, boredom, and self-absorption -- but you can survive it all. It may not be fun, but you can get through it. No one can be sure of the exact points at which the collapse signals major depression, but once you're in that situation, you rarely get it wrong.

Major depression is birth and death: something new, something completely gone. Life and death happen gradually, though official documents try to impose natural laws by creating categories such as "legal death" and "time of birth." Nature is unpredictable, but there must come a time when a never-born baby is born and the old who once lived die. It is true, however, that at some stage the baby's head is here, but not its body; Until the umbilical cord is cut, the child is physically connected to the mother. There are also periods when an elderly person last closes his eyes hours before he dies, and there is a gap between when he stops breathing and when he is declared "brain dead." Depression exists in time. The patient may say that he has been suffering from major depression for months, but this is still imposing a certain unit of measurement on an immeasurable object. All a person can be sure of is whether he is aware of major depression and experiencing it at any given moment.

The birth and death that make up depression always happen at the same time. Not long ago I returned to the wood where I had played as a boy. There stood an old oak tree, now a hundred years old, in the shade of which my brother and I had often played. In the past 20 years, a giant climbing vine has wrapped itself around the old standing oak tree, almost suffocating it. It's hard to say where the line between trees and vines ends. The vine had long since covered the old oak's branches, and from a distance its leaves looked like oak leaves; Only close inspection reveals that there are few living branches left, while a few young shoots struggle to show their heads like a row of thumbs on a giant trunk, the leaves still carrying on with their photosynthesis in a mechanically ignorant biological fashion.

I had just come out of a major depression. I could hardly think of other people's problems when I was there. So at that moment, I felt what happened to the old oak tree. When depression grew in me, it was like a vine conquering an old oak tree -- it wrapped itself around me whole, sucking the life out of me, ugly but more alive than I was. It had a life of its own, and bit by bit it was suffocating me, squeezing out my life. During the worst phase of my major depression, I knew that some emotions were not my own, but depression's, like the leaves on the branches at the top of the oak tree, which were actually the vine. When I tried to think it over, I felt my heart shut in, with nowhere to stretch. I know the sun rises and sets as usual, but I can't get a ray of sunshine. A force far stronger than I was pushing me down: first I couldn't move my ankles, then I couldn't control my knees, then I strained my waist, then my shoulders gave in, and finally I was curled up in the fetal position, exhausted and crushed by depression that didn't even need to possess me. Its tendrils threatened to crush my mind, my courage, my appetite, crush my bones, and expose my body. And so he devoured me until there was nothing left to feed him.

I was too weak to stop breathing. I just felt like I was never going to root out the vines of depression, and all I thought was, in that case, let me die. But it drained my energy, left me powerless to kill myself, but it didn't take my life. My rotten trunk, which once supported the thing, is now strong enough to keep it from falling to the ground; It destroys and becomes another force to support what it destroys. I was curled up in the far corner of the bed, torn and crushed by something visible only to me. I prayed for deliverance to a God I had never fully believed in. I was willing to die in the most painful way, but I was so unconscious that I could not even think of killing myself. Every second of life is torture. I can't even cry because this thing sucks all my fluids out of me. My lips are dry and chapped, too. I used to think that when one is in the worst pain, tears fall down, but the worst pain is the dry pain that comes in after the tears have dried up, blocking up all the space that you used to measure the world, or that the world used to measure you. This is what major depression looks like.

I said depression is life and death. Life is the vine; death is man's own decay, the breaking of the branch that sustains this tragedy. The first thing to lose is happiness. You can't get pleasure out of anything. This is the most well-known symptom of major depression. Soon, other emotions will be forgotten as well: sadness, as you know it, that got you into this situation; A sense of humor; The belief in love, the ability to love. Your mind is filtered until you feel stupid. If you don't have much hair, it will be thinner. If your skin was always bad, it's worse now. You can even smell the sourness on your body. You lose the ability to trust anyone, the ability to be moved, the ability to grieve. In the end, you are simply absent from your own life.

It may be that something present usurps the absentee's rightful place, or that the absence of something dim and dark makes something else manifest. In either case, you've lost a part of yourself and fallen into the grip of something foreign. Therapy often answers only half the question: either what is present or what is missing. But you need to hack away at the heavy vines as well as recapture your roots and photosynthesis. You can feel it happening. You can feel the drug poisoning the parasitic vine, making it wither a little bit. You can feel the weight disappear, feel the branches gradually regain their original arc. You can't even think about what's missing until you remove the vines. But even if you remove the vines, you may be left with only sparse leaves and shallow roots, and none of the drugs available will help you rebuild yourself. Freed from the burden of the vine, the sparse leaves on the dead branches can begin to receive the most basic nutrients. But this is not a good state, nor is it a robust state. The process of rebuilding yourself during and after depression requires love, insight, work, and most importantly, time.

The diagnosis of depression is as complex as the disorder itself. Patients always ask doctors, "Am I depressed?" As if a blood test would tell you for sure. The only way to know if you're depressed is to listen to yourself, observe yourself, feel your feelings and think about them. If you feel bad most of the time for no reason, you are depressed. If you feel bad most of the time, and you know why, you're depressed, too, although changing those causes may be a better path out of your depression than ignoring your circumstances and fighting it directly. If depression keeps disabling you, it's major depression. If it's a mild disturbance, it's not serious. The Psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), inappropriately defines depression as meeting at least five of a list of nine symptoms. The problem with this definition is that it's completely arbitrary. There is no particular reason why five symptoms should qualify as depression; Four were more or less depressed, and five were not as severe as six. Even having just one symptom can be very uncomfortable. Having all symptoms but very mild is probably less of a problem than having two symptoms but very serious. After a long diagnosis, most people look for the cause, but knowing the cause is not directly related to treating the disease.

Diseases of the mind are also real diseases that have serious effects on the body. People who visit a doctor's office complaining of stomach cramps are often told: "Why, you have nothing wrong with you but depression!" But if it's severe enough to cause stomach cramps, that's really a big deal for you and you need treatment. If you complain of breathing problems, no one is going to say, "Why, you have nothing but emphysema!" Psychosomatic illness is as real to the afflicted as stomach cramps from food poisoning. Psychosomatic disorders occur in the unconscious part of the brain, causing the brain to send inappropriate messages to the stomach. The exact diagnosis -- whether it's your stomach, appendix, or brain -- can make a difference in how you're treated, and that's no small matter. The brain is a very important organ, and if it is dysfunctional, it must be dealt with appropriately.

Chemistry is often used to bridge the gap between body and mind. When a doctor tells a patient that his depression is "a chemical reaction," the patient is often relieved because of the belief in a whole self that spans time, the imaginary dividing line between totally intentional grief and totally random grief. Whether their stressed-out dissatisfaction stems from dislike of their job, fear of aging, failed relationships or hatred of family, the term "chemistry" seems to lessen people's sense of responsibility for it. "Chemistry" was appended with the freedom to be cheerfully free of guilt. If your brain is prone to depression, you don't have to blame yourself for it -- blame biological evolution, but remember that blame itself can be understood as a chemical process, as can happiness. Chemistry and biology are not something outside of a person's "true" self, and depression cannot be separated from the people it affects. Therapy is not about easing the confusion of your own identity and returning you to some degree of normalcy, but about realigning your multiple identities and changing you as a person in a small way.

As anyone who has taken a high school science class knows, humans are made of chemicals, and the study of those chemicals and their organizational makeup is biology. Everything that happens in the brain has a chemical manifestation and a cause. You close your eyes and try to think about polar bears, and that's what happens to your brain chemically. You stick to a policy that opposes the capital-gains tax deduction, and that does something to your brain chemistry, too. When you recall episodes of past experiences, you're going through a complex chemical process associated with memory. Childhood trauma and subsequent adversity also alter brain chemistry. There are thousands of chemical reactions involved in deciding to read a book, picking it up in your hand, looking at the glyphs on the paper, extracting meaning from the glyphs, and then having an intellectual and emotional response to the meaning conveyed. If, over time, you come out of the cycle of depression and start to feel better, the chemical changes that result are no less special and complex than those that result from taking an antidepressant. To the extent that the outer state determines the inner state, the inner state creates the outer state. The idea that when all other lines are blurred, the boundaries that make us ourselves will be blurred too is deeply unappealing. In the chaos of experience and chemical processes, there is no pure essential self like a vein of gold. Anything can change, and we must understand the human organism as a series of selves that can surrender or choose from one another. Yet when the language of science is used to train doctors, and increasingly for non-academic writing and conversation, it is strangely absurd.

The cumulative effect on brain chemistry is not well understood. For example, in the 1989 edition of the standard General Psychiatry Textbook, we find this useful formula: The depression score was equal to levels of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenyl glycol, a compound found in all people's urine that is not significantly affected by depression, minus levels of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid, plus levels of norepinephrine, Subtract the sum of norepinephrine and norepinephrine divided by the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid, and then add some unspecified conversion variable. In the book's expression:

Depression type score =C1(MHPG)-C2(VMA)+C3(NE)-C4(NMN+MN)/VMA+C0

The score would be between 1 and 0, 1 for depression and 0 for bipolar disorder. If you get results out of range, you're doing it wrong. How much does this formula tell us? How can these formulas be applied to something so emotionally erratic? It's hard to determine to what extent certain experiences contribute to depression; It's hard to explain the chemistry of how someone responds to their environment with depression; It can also be difficult to find out exactly what causes a person's depression at all.

Although the popular media and the medical industry portray depression as a single-cause disease like diabetes, this is not the case. Depression is strikingly different from diabetes. Diabetics don't produce enough insulin, so treating diabetes involves increasing the amount of insulin in the blood and keeping it steady. But depression is not the result of a decrease in anything we can measure. Boosting serotonin levels in the brain can trigger a process that ultimately helps many depressed people feel better, but not because their serotonin levels are abnormally low. Furthermore, serotonin doesn't work right away. You could pour three or four liters of serotonin into a depressed person's brain and it would not immediately make him feel even a little better, although in the long run, a sustained increase in serotonin levels would lead to a reduction in depressive symptoms. "I'm depressed, but it's just chemistry" is the same as "I killed people, but it's just chemistry" or "I'm smart, but it's just chemistry". If you think in these terms, everything about a person is "just chemistry." Maggie Robbins, who suffers from bipolar disorder, said, "You can say it's 'just chemistry.' I can say there's no 'just' chemistry." When the sun shines, it's just chemistry; The hard rock, the salty water, the nostalgia of a spring afternoon breeze, the longing and imagination that lay dormant in the long white snow of winter, it's all chemistry. "This serotonin thing is part of the mythology of modern neuroscience," says David McDowell of Columbia University. It's a series of compelling stories.

Inner reality and outer reality exist in a continuum. What happens, how you understand it, and how you react to it are often interrelated, but one cannot predict the other. If reality itself is often only relative, and the ego is in a state of constant flow, then the change in mood from slight to extreme is a glide of a string of notes. Disease, then, is emotion in an extreme state, and it is reasonable to describe emotion as a mild illness. If all of us at all time happy cheer (but not delusional mania), could be made more and more happy life on the earth, but the idea was a chilling (but of course, if we actually feel happy at all time, we might all to do with chilling behind).

Influenza is simple and straightforward: one day you don't have the virus in your body that causes the disease, the next day you get the virus and you get sick. The transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from one person to another occurs in a single, clearly defined moment. And depression? It's like trying to find clinical parameters for hunger. Hunger affects us several times a day, but it is only in its most extreme cases that it kills its victims and leads to tragedy. Some people need more food than others; Some people can function with extreme malnutrition, while others quickly become so weak that they faint on the street. Similarly, depression afflicts different people in different ways: some tend to fight and fight to the end, while others languish in its clutches. Strong will and pride can carry one person through depression, while the same amount of depression can bring down another, who is more gentle and compliant.

Depression interacts with personality. Some people face depression fearlessly (during and after a depressive episode), while others are weaker. Because the boundaries of personality are equally fluid, and the chemistry is equally confusing, some write off everything else and chalk it up to genes. This is too simplistic and flippant. "There's no such thing as a mood gene," says Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). "It's just a convenient term. What happens is a very complex interaction between genes and the environment." If everyone is more or less depressed in certain situations, then there is also some ability to fight depression in certain situations. Fighting often takes the form of finding the most effective treatment in the battle, and that includes acting while you still have the strength to ask for help, and allowing yourself to live as well as you can during periods of severe depression. There are people with horrendous symptoms who are still capable of real life achievement; Others are completely overwhelmed by the mildest symptoms.

There are some benefits to getting out of mild depression without drugs. This gives you the feeling that by exercising your own chemical will, you can correct your own chemical imbalance. Learning to cope with the seemingly inevitable physiochemistry of pain is a triumph for the brain, an exciting way to discover the pure power of the mind. Overcoming depression "on your own" also protects you from the social discomfort associated with psychotropic medications. It shows that we are happy to accept ourselves as we are and rebuild ourselves using only our own internal mechanisms, without outside help. A little recovery from the pain gives some meaning to the ordeal.

However, their own internal mechanisms are hard to rely on and often insufficient. Depression often destroys the mind's control over emotions. Sometimes the loss of a loved one takes you through the complex chemistry of grief, and the chemistry of both loss and love may lead to the chemistry of depression. The chemical process of falling in love may be started by obvious external causes, or it may begin by spontaneous causes completely unknown to the mind. But this emotional irrationality is not incorrigible if we are willing to try. It's crazy for an adolescent to rage at his devoted parents, but it's a traditional kind of crazy, and it's always been that way, so we're relatively tolerant of it without questioning it too much. Sometimes the same chemical process happens for external reasons that don't seem sufficient by ordinary standards to explain the despair: you feel sad when someone bumps into you on a crowded bus; Or you read about the world's overpopulation and think your life is intolerable. Everyone has experienced disproportionate emotional feelings over trivial things, or feelings for no reason or reason at all. Sometimes chemical processes occur without any obvious external cause. Most of us experience inexplicable despair at some point, often late at night or early in the morning before the alarm goes off. If it lasts for ten minutes, it's a strange, fleeting emotion. If it lasts for ten hours, it will be like a grinding fever; If it lasts ten years, it's a serious disease.

Happiness comes, often is fleeting; And depression, but always seems to linger. Even if you accept that your emotions will change and that whatever you feel today will be different tomorrow, you can't become happy as easily as you can become sad. Grief has always been, and still is, a more powerful feeling for me; If this is not a universal experience, it may be the root of my depression. I hated being depressed, but it was in depression that I learned all about myself and saw my soul in its entirety. When I'm happy, I feel slightly distracted by my happiness, as if it doesn't engage some part of my mind and brain that wants to be involved. Depression is hard work. Every time I lost a moment, I tried to grasp it tightly: I could see the beauty in glass objects as they slipped from my hands and hit the floor. Schopenhauer wrote: "We find pleasure no longer so pleasant, and pain more painful than we expected. We all need some measure of care, sorrow or desire at some time, just as a ship needs a ballast to keep it straight."

There is a saying in Russia: wake up not bitter, you know has died. Although there is more to life than pain, the experience of pain, especially intense pain, is one of the surest signs of life's strength. Schopenhauer added: "Imagine a people coming to a utopia where everything grows itself, where roasted turkeys hover, where there is no waiting to find someone to love, where there is no hardship to grow old together. In a place like this, some will probably die of boredom or hang themselves, others will start fights and kill each other, and they will create more misery for themselves than nature can inflict on them... The extreme opposite of suffering [is] boredom. I believe that pain needs to be transformed, not forgotten, rejected, not erased.

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