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| Old tree, taking a time-out, filling its soul Odiorne State Park: 3/29/14 CC Jean Stimmell |
He convincingly
documents how our mood system is a complex, multi-faceted, biological part of
us, mostly beyond our conscious awareness, and it has significant evolutionary
survival value.
Unfortunately,
as modern humans, we have lost sight of positive attributes of depression
because of the cultural constructs we have created through language. Using our
ability to spew forth words, we have constructed stories depicting depression as
an arch villain, a dreaded pathology that is unequivocally bad.
The
trouble is, as Rottenberg notes, “the stories we tell ourselves about our moods often end up
being just that. Stories.”
“One of the amazing
things about the mood system is how much of it operates outside of conscious
awareness. Moods, like most adaptations, developed in species that had neither
language nor culture. Yet words are the first things that come to mind when
most people think about moods. We are “mad,” we are “sad,” we are “glad.” So
infatuated are we with language that both laypeople and scientists find it
tempting to equate the language we use to describe mood with mood itself.
This is a big
mistake. We need to shed this languagecentric view of mood, even if it
threatens our pride to accept that we share a fundamental element of our mental
toolkit with rabbits and roadrunners.”[3]
Rottenberg cites studies showing how subjects with depressed mood are
more deliberate, skeptical, and careful in how they process information from
their environment than subjects with elevated mood, concluding:
“Just as animals
with no capacity for anxiety were gobbled up by predators long ago, without the
capacity for sadness, we and other animals would probably commit rash acts and
repeat costly mistakes.”[4]
So what is the bottom line.?
The bottom line that resonates with me is the poetic definition of
depression that Rottenberg cites by Lee
Stranger, from his essay “Fading to Gray,”
Perhaps what we call
depression isn’t really a disorder at all but, like physical pain, an alarm of
sorts, alerting us that something is undoubtedly wrong; that perhaps it is time
to stop, take a time-out, take as long as it takes, and attend to the
unaddressed business of filling our souls.[5]
xxx
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| Coco barking up the wrong tree but not depressed |
[1] I am indebted to Maria Popova
for her review of Rottenberg at:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/03/24/the-depths-rottenberg-depression/
[2] The Depths: The Evolutionary
Origins of the Depression Epidemic by Jonathan Rottenberg
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Lee
Stringer from his essay “Fading to Gray,” found in the altogether fantastic
2001 volume Unholy Ghost:
Writers on Depression:
I like this... a different way to look at depression, and as always there are facets to most everything in nature.
ReplyDeleteThe only difficulty I had was the font used... almost unreadable to me.
I'm not sure how radical an idea all this is in the mental health field, but ironically it opens up new ideas to me, and I count.
All this time I've defined myself by words, that define what I feel is depression, and all the while another huge, ancient part of me was a tree. I always felt it, but until now never knew what i was feeling. What my words were distracting me from understanding.
Thanks Bob.
ReplyDeleteYes, our more-than-human collective consciousness contains a rich store of wisdom beyond words.
And speaking of words,thanks for pointing out the illegibility of the font I was using.