In my conversations with people who were depressed, we frequently talked of death, of the losses they had suffered and the fears they had about their own death. Talking about death meant talking about religious beliefs. I realized how important all this was, and I knew how psychiatrists and psychologists ignore the whole question of belief. So I wrote my next book. The Construction of Life and Death,6 where I described how the people who coped with their lives held beliefs which gave them courage and optimism, while those who did not cope held beliefs which made them frightened and pessimistic. For instance, among those people who believed in God, those who coped believed in a loving and benevolent God, while those who did not cope believed in a God who noticed them only to punish them and who did not forgive.
By then I had come to see that the beliefs which cut us off from ourselves, from others, and from our past and future can be summarized in six basic beliefs. If you have never been depressed and want to try it out, you will find the recipe for depression in my book, Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison.7
Depression is not a state of passive misery. It is an experience of tremendous fear. Just what this fear is and how we try to deal with it was the subject of my next book, Beyond Fear.8 How we can use our understanding of this fear to develop ourselves and become the person that we want to be was the theme of my following book, The Successful Self.9
Because I have been talking to depressed people now for over twenty years and have kept in touch with many of them, I have been able to follow how these people changed themselves and their lives. In the second edition of my first book, now called Choosing Not Losing,10 I added postscripts to the chapters about my depressed clients, describing how, ten years later, they were living their lives. In this present book I have brought together what I have discovered about how people can take charge of their lives and so change.
With all that I have written about depression in my earlier books, I do not feel that I have said everything that could be said or ought to be said about depression, because depression is not a problem which strikes just a few unlucky people. Depression is a problem from which no one is exempt.
It is impossible to estimate in any way accurately just how many people are depressed. It has been estimated that in the USA some four per cent of the population is depressed at any one time, and for around the world, an estimate of a hundred million has been given, but these are likely, for a number of reasons, to be underestimates.
Many people, when they consult a doctor, feel that they should speak only of physical complaints. It is very easy for the doctor to give just physical treatments and overlook the unspoken misery of depression. Julia West, an American psychologist working in Saudi Arabia, found that her women clients would describe their aches and pains, tiredness and illness, but not their personal misery of depression. This may have been because they experienced their depression only in physical terms, or it may have been because, in their discussions with Julia, they were always accompanied by their menfolk.11 There are many of us who feel that our relatives, even when they are present only in spirit, prevent us from speaking freely about our misery.
Many depressed people do not seek any kind of medical help. It may be that they do not wish to reveal their misery to a doctor, or it may be that they do not realize that their dull, grey, lonely, cramped, trapped way of living can be called depression.
Amongst those people who lead apparently happy and successful lives, there are many who would say, ‘I’m not depressed’, but who know that depression, like a great black bird, hovers above them, ready to settle with a heavy, smothering weight upon their shoulders should they act, or speak, or even think without due care. Such people often ask me, ‘Doesn’t being with a depressed person make you depressed?’, and they look disbelieving when I answer, ‘No’. They are convinced that depressed people are dangerous because their depression can magically and malignly call forth the depression lurking in themselves. Rather than confront their own depression, they spurn all contact with depressed people, or strive to isolate and confine them. If you are depressed you might have had experience of such people, perhaps even your own doctor, treating you as if you had the plague.
This fear of depression can prevent us from realizing that no matter how fortunate and far-sighted we may be, not one of us can be certain that the circumstances of our life will not change and all that supports our way of life vanish. Neither by hard work nor by goodness can we control every aspect of our life and ward off all tragedies. It may be that at some time all the people we love and need abandon us or reject us, or that the projects which gave our life meaning and purpose crumble or fail. When such disasters befall us, we feel great fear, and if we do not understand the nature of this fear we can defend ourselves against it by turning against ourselves, despairing, and locking ourselves in the prison of depression. On the other hand, if we do understand this fear and ourselves, we can, when disaster strikes, become appropriately unhappy but not depressed, courageous and not defeated.
Generally in the following chapters I use the pronoun ‘we’ when referring to something we all do, and, when I want to speak of the things which depressed people do, I use the pronoun ‘you’. There is a difference between the way we think, feel and act when we are laying down the foundations of the prison of depression or living in the prison, and the way we think, feel and act when depression plays no part in our lives. However, I could have used ‘we’ throughout, for we are all capable of doing all that I describe if we are not wise.
By ‘wise’ I mean knowing what we fear most, and why; knowing what we need most, and why; and knowing how to defend ourselves in ways inexpensive of time and strength, and how to get and hold what we need in ways that enrich our life and our relationships.
Thus this book is for all of us.
The book is divided into five sections.
Section One, The Meaning of Depression, describes how we create the world of meaning (that is, our beliefs, attitudes, conclusions, opinions, expectations, wishes and fears) in which each of us lives. We live in meaning like a fish lives in water. Creating meaning is what each of us does all the time, but while we are very good at doing this, we often have difficulty in understanding just how we do it. As the ancient Chinese philosophers said, ‘The fish is the last to discover the water’. Yet an understanding of how we create meaning is essential to an understanding of ourselves.
The world of meaning we each create is like a landscape in which we live. The landscape has limits, so in a sense we all build ourselves a prison, a prison made up of ‘This is where and how I live, this is the kind of person I am, these are my obligations, duties, attachments and responsibilities, these are the rules I must follow’. However, some of us create landscapes which are vast and open, full of interesting and exciting possibilities, while others build landscapes which are cramped, monotonous and confined. The most cramped and confined of these is the prison of depression. In Section One I show just how we create such a prison.
Section Two, Why Is It So Hard to Change?, is concerned with why we so often do not want to leave our cramped prison, or re-structure it into something open and various. Depression is such a horrible experience that at first it seems that no one would want to remain in it, yet if you are depressed you know that being depressed does have advantages. As a university student said to me recently, ‘My depression is like an old sweater. It’s comfortable, so I keep it on. I think it’s risky to change it for something new.’
The fear of change keeps many of us from changing; so