Depression, contrary to our frenetic culture of ‘getting and spending’, is principally about being. In this sense, it is the shadow side of a civilization polarised towards doing. We hurry through life without taking time to draw breath or refuel. Consequently, we are hungry, thirsty and spiritually impoverished.
An overemphasis on activity and doing sets itself up for a descent, often cataclysmic, into a deficit of being. Within the context of our frenetic lifestyle where even our holidays – demoted from ‘holy days’ – are dynamic and packed with activity, the only way we can experience being is through illness, dis-ease and loss.
Amidst our culture of doing, I have come to realise that depression is about being… about enduring, about suffering meaning. A lot of illness, regardless of what organ or bodily system it affects, can be reoccurring and cyclical. There are remissions, which may last months, even years, followed by subsequent debilitating periods of dis-ease which may become more progressive as time goes by. Again, our culture of fixing and curing illness undermines the potential of these periods of being, so that we long for health in order to feel normal. And by this I am not advocating that illness, dis-ease and sickness should be revered and not treated, but valued while it is in residence in our lives.
Depression, the shadow side of our doing culture, because of its relative invisibility, carries the most shame and least understanding and empathy as a dis-ease. Because all of us, if we are honest, have been depressed at some point in our life, often our outlook can be judgmental, rather than empathic. If we feel we should ‘snap out of it’ then we expect others to do the same. We might even, covertly, look upon those who fail to do so as weak and inadequate. This outlook, although seemingly personal in nature, is shaped by the culture of shame that has been built around depression.