We’ve got more power than we think when it comes to handling depression.
—
“Coming of age” is the term usually reserved for our awakening to sexual feelings and urges, the loss of our virginity. Mine was neither. Instead, my coming of age was being confronted by the realities of my life then, realities many have said through the years were “awful,” “unfair.” At the time, there was no option to judge the morality of my life’s realities, the only option being to simply “deal with it.”
|
I felt no need to exert the emotional and physical energy to disprove what I already knew – I was not good at anything, and I was not good for anyone.
|
My coming of age crashed down on me after a certain summer that I understood years later was the last one of my childhood. By the following summer, still a child in terms of age, an undefined something had happened with and to me since the previous summer. Still pubescent, my activities and thoughts were not the kind that preoccupied other kids my age. Instead of landing a girlfriend, playing school sports and worrying about what suit or tux to wear to the high school dance or prom, I was afraid to even try anything kids my age were doing – afraid because I knew I was not good enough, not popular enough, not good-looking enough, certain that anything good in my life was doomed to inevitable failure or would be taken from me – or simply disappear.
I felt no need to exert the emotional and physical energy to disprove what I already knew – I was not good at anything, and I was not good for anyone.
◊♦◊
So was the planting of the seeds that would grow into a lifetime of periodic bouts of clinical depression, that in the opinion of the psychiatrist to whom a medical doctor referred me when I showed up at the latter’s office looking “like death’ and a “pressure cooker ready to explode,” as he described me.
Years earlier, when I was in elementary school, my father started calling me a “goddamn queer” when he was drunk. He eventually got around to calling me the name when he wasn’t drinking. I had no clue then what “queer” was then but knew it wasn’t something nice if my father qualified it with “goddamn,” that a queer was something to hate.
|
A year later, at age 14, I was on my own after being tossed into the streets by my father after he came home drunk.
|
When I learned what queer meant, I wondered why my dad called me the name because I was just 8 years old – I hadn’t done anything sexual with anyone, myself included. Dad later substituted queer for faggot. I did not know what faggot was either, but I was too ashamed to ask either of my parents or a friend what one was because I was scared to come off as stupid or ignorant.
◊♦◊
I was first diagnosed with clinical depression some six years after what I think was the last summer of my childhood when I was 13 years old. A year later, at age 14, I was on my own after being tossed into the streets by my father after he came home drunk. If my father’s decision that I was a “goddamn faggot” didn’t convince me that he simply wanted me gone, his driving a knife into my lower leg did the trick.
From that night on, I never went home in any sense. I was not part of any traditional family gatherings like Thanksgiving or Christmas. I had been thrown out of the house in which I grew up, and I understood that I would never again have a home.
|
As a young adult and after a couple of years of a steady regimen of the popular antidepressants of the day, I stumbled on the “high” of taking my medication with whiskey.
|
Some years after reaching adulthood and off the streets, after noticing a precipitous weight and an ever-present fatigue, I broke down and sought out a doctor. After he ran a battery of tests, the doctor told me it was “time to see a psychiatrist.” Seeing a psychiatrist then carried a shameful stigma, but I went ahead with the appointment because I had nothing more to be ashamed of in my life. After all, I’d been thrown out of my own home, rejected by the parents who raised me and had the memories of some shameful things I learned to do to survive on the streets. The courage to do some of those things came from liquor, introduced to me at age 14 by a man who would pay me for sex with something to eat and a bed to sleep in one cold winter night.
◊♦◊
As a young adult and after a couple of years of a steady regimen of the popular antidepressants of the day, I stumbled on the “high” of taking my medication with whiskey. All too soon, I plunged into that dark and nebulous twilight zone of alcoholism. After almost a decade of alcoholic drinking – at my worst, I was drinking the equivalent of a fifth of whiskey a day – I attempted suicide because dying was the only way I knew how to stop drinking. I failed but survived with the knowledge that I had to stop drinking. I also understood that recovery had to be more than not drinking, that I had to “fix” whatever was clearly broken inside me.
|
It has been more than a decade since my last significant episode and, and for me, getting through depression has required an iron will not to empower it by succumbing to it.
|
Psychotherapy then turned from being just talk to actually applying its tools to my everyday life. As my treatment drew to a close, the psychiatrist suggested I would likely experience episodes of depression the rest of my life but that I could deal with it without medication. He reinforced the fact that an alcoholic relapse would deepen the depression because, after all, alcohol and other mood-altering substances are themselves depressants.
The psychiatrist’s prediction that I probably would have periodic rounds with depression the rest of my life has proven accurate. It has been more than a decade since my last significant episode and, and for me, getting through depression has required an iron will not to empower it by succumbing to it. That requires physically forcing myself out of bed on mornings when I think I absolutely cannot face the day ahead, to vacuum a carpet that was cleaned two days earlier or get on hands and knees to scrub a floor that was mopped the week before.
◊♦◊
|
The desperation of getting out of the depth of depression can be overpowering if the “fix” of a bottle or other high becomes tempting.
|
Most important for me, however, is to shift the self-focused nature of depression, that is, to get myself away from myself by being of service to someone or something else in need of whatever help I can provide. Almost as important are lessons of my past – our pasts should not be forgotten as being “done” and can speak to us in terms of how we have survived so far. The strategies we applied to get through yesterday might still work today.
The challenge of overcoming depression is complicated if the sufferer has a dual diagnosis of alcoholism or addiction, of course. The desperation of getting out of the depth of depression can be overpowering if the “fix” of a bottle or other high becomes tempting. But remembering the personal cost of giving into the temptation to drink or shoot up, even “just once,” is deterrence enough for some of us.
The state of our physical health cannot be taken for granted as well. We absolutely must make sure we eat, even if we have to force ourselves, and a one- or two-mile walk can bolster the physical strength needed to face more demanding tasks.
None of these suggested remedies are intended to be insensitive to those people who endure more frequent and deeper degrees of depression, nor are they intended as a prescription to all sufferers. As unique as all of us are individually, so are the natures and extent of depression we encounter. If medical treatment is warranted, it should and must be sought out.
◊♦◊
|
I hold firmly to the conviction we have the choice and strength not to empower depression, and that it does not define or control us.
|
My personal experience of nearly three decades since I was first diagnosed lends some credibility, I hope, to some editorial observations about depression in general, some perhaps bold and others arguable. First, I do not subscribe to the perception that depression is a mental illness but instead is a medical condition of insufficient enzyme levels, thus the importance of medical treatment when needed. Partly for that reason – depression as a medical condition – I do not believe that depression is a reflection of the character and strength of the person who deals with it
That men also can be depressed remains a taboo topic of discussion to some extent. Just as depression is not an indicator of man’s character and strength, it also is not and should never be a commentary on his masculinity or manhood. Noting that depression is treated partly with medications, men cannot be expected to be “manly” or “masculine” enough to be immune to the physical contributors to depression.
A final observation based solely on personal experience: regardless of the extent and nature of an individual’s depression, I hold firmly to the conviction we have the choice and strength not to empower depression, and that it does not define or control us. Beyond that, the challenge to us as individuals is to find our own paths out of the darkness and into the light.
Would you like to help us shatter stereotypes about men?
Receive stories from The Good Men Project, delivered to your inbox daily or weekly.
—
Photo: Getty Images
Thank you so much for this article. I grew up in a difficult situation (similar to your own) and now have chronic depression. Mine has not been helped by treatment, (I’ve been in intensive treatment for years), but it is good to know others have found success and that it is possible – even if only intermittently. My hope is that someday I will find the right combination of medications, therapies, etc. that will bring me some relief. Until then, I find solace in the possibility.