Training the black dog
As a child, I lacked the confidence to invite people who I objectively knew were my friends around to my house, for fear that they wouldn’t want to spend time with me. I was equally sure that I wouldn’t get picked for sporting teams, becoming timid in try-outs or getting stuck in my head about a single mistake made. And forget even thinking about having the confidence to ask out any girl during high school…
In looking back, I can now see that I had several of these low-level kind of behaviours as a child: an incredible ability to catastrophise, low levels of self-confidence, a tendency to isolate myself.
As a child and a teenager, I didn’t have the vocabulary or the emotional awareness to see these traits or behaviours for what they were: the symptoms of depression and anxiety. In retrospect, I can now see that these twin ‘black dogs’ have been with me throughout most, if not all, of my living memory. They were such a regular part of who I thought I was that I never really realised that they almost certainly sat outside what could be considered ‘normal’ or healthy mental states.
Everyone gets sad and everyone gets stressed and anxious. These are normal and perfectly healthy reactions to many life events, losses or challenges. These emotions can serve a purpose and are not a mental illness. But in my day-to-day life, often my emotional state is maladapted, with depression and anxiety as default settings, rather than responses to events. It is quite common for me, with no apparent trigger, to feel depressed and empty, a sensation I’ve come to describe as being like a “heavy nothing”. Simultaneously, I can also be feeling stressed and anxious for significant periods of time without any clear justification.
As everyone does at some point, I have also experienced profound trauma and loss in my life. The sudden and traumatic death of my mum during my final year of school, a single-parent who had sacrificed much of her own adult life to support my brother and I, changed my life in an instant. It created shockwaves that have continued to ripple through my life, more than a decade later. Trauma during adolescence is a well-documented predictor of later depression (in combination with a plethora of genetic and other factors), so it is tempting to infer this as the starting point for my mental health challenges.
But my tendencies predate this event substantially. Looking back on the trauma of bearing witness to my mum’s death and the intense grief that followed, I can see a stark difference between that sadness and the empty feeling that can follow me from day to day.
The hedonic treadmill is a concept that is used to help explain why human beings haven’t managed to increase our collective happiness or mental health alongside improvements in physical health. It also helps explain the tendency for individuals to never rate their happiness above or below a baseline for very long, even after major life events. The idea is that much like physical traits, which occur along a continuum for humans, mental traits also have a range of ‘set points’ that people are working from. Life events, good or bad, cause you to fluctuate up and down from this set point but you eventually return to roughly where you were before. Constantly moving, but not really going anywhere, just like a treadmill. Whether your situation is objectively better or worse is less important than we would like to think.
While it is by no means a certainty that this is set in stone, much of your baseline happiness level is set by your genetic and biological milieu. Unfortunately for me, I am one of the many people for whom this set-point is low. My hedonic treadmill, with all the ups and downs of life, is starting from a lower setting than most.
The first time I can remember being actively aware of this low starting point, of my depressive tendencies and being able to label them as such, wasn’t until my early twenties. In the aftermath of a break-up and newly moved to the inner eastern suburbs of Melbourne, I came home one day and just sat vacantly on the ground, in the tiny back yard of the equally small, two-bedroom townhouse I was sharing with my cousin. Rain started falling and I didn’t move or react. Just sat. As the rain got heavier, I laid down on that tiny patch of grass and just stared up into the downpour. I don’t recall how long I stayed there, but I can still remember what I felt. Nothing.
That feeling, that emptiness, is the biggest thing that someone who is fortunate enough to not be among the one in seven Australians who will experience depression will almost always misunderstand. Depression is not just a prolonged sadness. It is not the feeling that accompanies bad news or a rough day. Nor is it the natural responses to grief and loss. Depression is a “heavy emptiness”, a visceral, painful cloud that envelops you in a feeling that everything that you do or could possibly do is without purpose, meaning or value. More terrifyingly, it can also tell you that everything that you are, down to your innate being, is also meaningless and worthless. At its worst, it is oppressive, inescapable and overwhelming.
In his devastating TED talk, Andrew Solomon eloquently explains what it is to be depressed by defining its antonym:
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment
Vitality. This is what we all desire from our lives. It perfectly encapsulates the aims that we all have for ourselves and our loved ones: we want lives filled with purpose, focus, meaningful experiences and moments of joy. It is these things that depression robs from you. It takes all of your ability to find purpose in your work or passions in ways that you did before. You lose the ability to focus on the things that matter, all of your time and mental energy taken up with fighting your own maladaptive internal narrative. Finding joy in life is often quite literally impossible when you find yourself at the bottom of a swing downwards. You can feel like you’ve lost everything and that there is nothing you can do about it.
What I didn’t realise for a very long time is that this isn’t true. You aren’t powerless and you do have options. You can work to manage these feelings, up to a point anyway. This work is incredibly hard and never ending and for a long period of time many people, myself included, simply follow what seems like an easier path: denial. A refusal to admit that what you experience is not within the normal range of mental ‘health’. This is often paired with the process of regular self-medication, which for me usually takes the form of a glass or two too many beers or red wines. This is not healthy or helpful in the long term (or the short term, depending on just how many is “too many”).
If you are prepared to acknowledge your challenges, you can change your lifestyle. You can (and should) try to eat better, develop a sleep routine, exercise more and get into nature. For me, running is a management technique that helps keep me functioning and feeling ok, yet the evidence to support its efficacy for improving the symptoms of depression in general is mixed. Unfortunately, you could be eating as well as you can and running 10 km two or three times a week and still not be able to manage. Like many, I know this from my own experience.
In late 2016, everything I was doing was supposed to “fix” my symptoms: regularly seeing a psychologist, using mindfulness techniques, eating well and exercising almost everyday. And yet I could not cope. I was losing control of my own mind. At a leadership development program for work, I had what could only be described as a meltdown. Unable to cope on my own anymore, and at the pushing of a close friend, I went onto medication.
Many people divide themselves staunchly into being pro- or anti-antidepressants. I believe that such absolutism is incredibly unhelpful . If I hadn’t made the decision to move onto medication, I would have continued to spiral. I am not a blanket advocate for medication for mental health challenges. But when nothing else is working, what option do you have? For me, anti-depressants stopped me from bottoming out when I was swinging violently downwards. They allowed the management techniques I had in place to start working again, by preventing the more extreme elements of my cycles of depression. The trade-off was that they also removed the top end, numbing the good times to a certain extent as well. For me, this was a compromise I was prepared to accept, while my doctor also warned me that I might “get fat” in his own inimitable manner.
Medication should never been seen as a silver bullet. It is pretty clear that they don’t work for everyone all the time and I don’t think that they should be used if not paired with proper therapy from a professional. The skills I learned through cognitive behavioural therapy completely changed my interaction with my symptoms. For the first time I had a tool to counter the problematic narratives in my mind. Exploring the ideas of positive psychology, including the work of Martin Seligman (a fellow depressive), further built up my toolkit. Working in education, a career that provides me with an urgent and tangible moral purpose, as well as trying to practice gratitude, reduce time on social media and create routines to increase my “resilience score” are all steps that help, at least most of the time.
Most of the time seems to be the best that I can manage, because the truth is, nothing cures depression or anxiety. On most days, I am doing alright. After more than 18 months, I transitioned off the anti-depressants, changing doctor along the way after he asked me the same questions about my side effects and time on the drugs twice in five minutes, with no apparent recall. Not exactly reassuring from the man prescribing you literal mind-altering drugs.
Although I am no longer on anti-depressants, I still need to manage my mental health every day. No matter how well I have developed my skills in working through my symptoms over the last few years, I have big and at times long depressive and anxious periods. Sometimes I feel like I am winning these battles. At other times I am definitely losing. These periods, these spirals, are not any easier than they were. At times I simply aim to keep going, getting by following my routines as best I can, hoping that they help me get out of the feelings that are dominating my mind. The difference is that I now have a language to describe what I am feeling and I have strategies that work to counteract those feelings. I can find lucid moments where I know that the things I do can help me manage, even if they don’t work every time. There are many contradictions in my experience, my mindset and in my writing here and yet I feel like that somehow makes sense. Depression and anxiety are simultaneously distinct and somewhat contradictory, yet also intricately linked phenomena. Trying to deal with them is equally complicated and at times non-sensical.
I am somewhat resigned to the fact that I will always be managing my mental health, perpetually riding that hedonic treadmill up and down. While that could be seen as somewhat bleak or pessimistic, I choose to look at it from a different vantage point. The journey that I have been on to regain control of my health has lead me to a far greater understanding of who I am. Despite my starting point, despite my challenges, I know that I do have the power to take actions that help myself. I am more aware of what is good for me and what is not than I have ever been. This knowledge is a powerful tool and it allows me to be deliberate and thoughtful when I make decisions in all facets of my life.
Perpetual happiness is an absurd and unrealistic goal for me, as it is in reality for anyone, and the black dogs may always be lurking not far behind me. That won’t stop me from working to craft a life that gives me fulfilment and connection, to fight the “heavy nothing” and try to return to myself some of my stolen vitality.
