How do we deal with Depression?

Question. I am always depressed. What should I do?

Serge. Depression is a terribly debilitating condition and let me offer you all my sympathy. It makes us feel bad about ourselves; it  makes us dislike ourselves  and live in a world where the glass is always half empty. It  also often compells us to hide away from life and is one of the reasons why some people drink a lot, or take drugs - just to deaden the pain. That said, there are many different kinds of depression and  I don't know what yours fits into. 

Basically,  I see depression  as falling into five main categories.

1. The first category  is what we call   a 'clinical depression' , which is the result of some faulty wiring somewhere in our brain (usually due to something having gone wrong in our early childhood).  This can verge from our experiencing a continual low grade despair, to feeling especially 'sad' when  the sunlight goes, to having a serious depressive illness such as bipolar disorder.

2. The second kind is the result of painful things happening to us in our lives, such as a big financial loss, being made redundant or losing a loved one. 

3. The third kind  is how we feel if we never bother to do anything remotely meaningful in our lives, that is, if we just live on benefits  and never try to find work and  live like the Royle family, gawping at the television all day, or seeing how much more we can  dishonestly wheedle  out of the system. 

4. The fourth kind is  how we feel if we live a totally topsy turvy  and destructive and violent kind of life, where we treat others disdainfully, overeat, never do exercise, earn our living drug dealing or selling arms! 

5. The last kind of depression is a natural part of what happens to us at certain phases of  our spiritual journey and is not pathological, but is the result of a more spiritual part of ourselves beginning to awaken. If we go into a 'Dark Night of the Soul' crisis, for example, we  may enter a very despairing and bereft place inside ourselves, and come face to face with our many shortcomings  and  get to see all those  negative parts of ourselves which, up until now,  we have not wanted to see ( and have probably projected out onto others) in order that we can now work on them.  I have written a long article about this called 'The spiritual path as  a tough and beautiful journey.

Sometimes, these different depressions collude together and the reason why we spend all day doing nothing is because we are too  clinically depressed to do anything. Sometimes, loafing around all day  or living a violent kind of life, conspires to upset the brain chemistry, and  this makes us clinically depressed. Sometimes a serious life tragedy becomes an integral part of how we begin opening up spiritually.

I suggest that you try and assess yourself  and see what category  or categories you feel your depression falls into. If it is the first, then go to your doctor and ask him to refer you to a psychiatrist. I say this because all too often GPs, who are not experts, as psychiatrists are, in the many different types of depressive disorders we can suffer from, just prescribe Prosac. And that may not be what is required. Here, make sure your psychiatrist is a human being kind of psychiatrist and not the type who pathologies everyone and everything and hands out  dangerous drugs to all and sundry  as if they were smarties.

 A good  psychiatrist will assess the seriousness of your condition and may  not  even put you on medication. He may suggest you do Cognitive Behaviour therapy or may even send you to someone like me. If you suffer from bi polar disorder,  however, then you have to be on medication. Many very eminent people who have had this disorder, have lived good  and productive lives, as a result.

If it is the second kind  of depression that is due to loss, you may just have to tough it out. If you feel  really suicidal, you might go to your GP and get a small amount of 'chemical help' just to tide you over for a month or so.   But try not to. And if you do,  don't see it as anything more than a very temporary crutch. What is  also important here, is that you surround yourself with  good friends, do things that comfort you, and  even try and help others, i.e.,  this gets you out of being overly morbid and just ruminating on your loss. Eventually, you will have to come to terms with it and accept it, and when that happens, the depression will go. As regards the third kind, well try and get off your backside and do something, as the act of doing will reconnect you to the outer world ( and a lot of  our despair and depression is because we feel alienated and disconnected.) If it is hard to do this, try and get some help.

There are all sorts of social services available.  If it is the fourth kind of depression, well just stop for a moment  and look at the kind of life you lead and know that if you treat others like pigs,  that this is how you are going to feel! And if it is the last kind of depression, caused by spiritual emergence,  you need to remember that in order to get up into the spiritual light, you first have to go into your darkness, and that an integral part of our developing a genuine spirituality, is becoming conscious of our dark side or  what Jung called our Shadow. 

Remember: before Dante went up into Heaven, he first had to go down into Hell. Here, we might have to hang out in a pretty dark and dank  tunnel and  be prepared to wait until such a time as we will have sufficiently 'burned through' our negativity and thus should not try to distract ourselves and  do things to make ourselves feel better prematurely ! When the time is right, we will once more surface up into the light.

The key thing about all depressions is to get some kind of help.  Also, we need to stand outside  ourselves and say ' This is not who I am; this is only my depression talking!' So go to a counselor. Find a psychotherapist you trust. Go on a spiritual pilgrimage.   Do a lot of exercise. It produces more endorphins in the brain.

Perhaps, change things  about the way you live. A lot of our despair,  which can lead to depression, can  also  be caused by our living the life we think we should life, or that  perhaps  our parents or society  have said ' we ought to live', as opposed to how we  really want to live.  If we can  manage to live more  the way we really want to, then we should  try to do so. Many of the depressed clients that have come to see me for psychotherapy, became  increasingly 'un-depressed' after they stopped doing  a lot of the kinds of things that  they found 'pressed down' on them! I hope this is of some help.

Does suffering have any purpose to it?

Question: Can you please  comment on what you see as being  the purpose of Suffering and how you feel  we can best deal with it?

Serge.  Thank you for asking me this question as I think it is a very important one, as  certainly suffering, in one form or another, visits all of us from time to time. Indeed, it  spares none of us, and, as Jack Kornfeld pointed out in his  book 'After the Ecstasy, the Laundry',  it even  hits those among us who are  enlightened! And often it comes and whacks us right  out of the blue.  We develop a serious illness; we suffer a severe loss. Something very painful happens to us.  And the thing about suffering, especially if it is very acute, is that it takes us very deep.  It concentrates our attention like nothing else. We  get to see things  about ourselves or about the world that perhaps ordinarily  we would never be able to see . 

Perhaps, we recognise that we need to care more about the Not-Have's of this world; perhaps, we are challenged to be kinder or braver or less self-indulgent!   Perhaps we need to look at death in the face or understand more about the spiritual significance of loss.  I also think that suffering is   in our lives   to 'test' us, to see if we are up to dealing with  it ! Indeed, if our suffering is very acute,  we simply have to learn to deal with it , if we are to survive. I think our big challenge is to see  if we can use our grief to help us evolve and move forward as opposed to  feeling resentful that  the world isn't   dealing us  the cards that we would like! 

The one thing which all of us have in common,  of course, is that we don't like to suffer! Indeed, as the Buddha pointed out,  most of us try to devote our lives to having pleasure and avoiding pain! However,  we need to realise that suffering really  is a fact of life and  that   were it not for its existence, we couldn't  really know joy. Also, the more we try to avoid it, the more it will come after us! Jung understood suffering and told us that whenever he felt deeply touched  either by  great joy or by  great pain, that he knew that both had come from God. It helps  us if we can  realise this as well, as it  can get us out of the thinking that  we need to put our lives on hold  until we 'get  through' our suffering,  to realising that it is an integral part of our life  and therefore needs comprehending and living with.

I always think that one of the  main things that  my suffering (when it chooses to visit me) asks of me is that  I have more heart, that I  be more conscious,  more human, that I open my eyes much more, that I learn to see  many things that  I have  always seen,  only in a new and deeper way. Indeed,  often we will find when we suffer,  that we cannot  any more 'get away' with our old fuzzy and unconscious habits that we could get away with when our lives were going the way we wanted! 

What suffering asks of us, then,  is that we rise to it, that we choose  to show  conscious strength, that we make sure that we find a clear centre inside ourselves  which can help us  be more objective and thus realise  that our suffering is not who we are.  If we get too identified with it and  go too far down the road of 'poor-me-ism' or feeling a Victim,  then we risk , quite literally,  getting ' taken over' by this archetype
( for suffering is an archetype). And if this happens, then we lose the capacity to deal with it. Our suffering has us instead of us having our suffering and when this occurs, it ceases being transformational.

I think  that at this particular time in our evolutionary history, that a great many of us are  going through quite a lot of suffering. Indeed, I think that Species Man or 'us as a human collective' is being  powerfully tested and that what is currently happening on our planet is that we are  going through what I will call a Species Dark Night of the Soul crisis.

Essentially what this means is

a) that many of us are having to face  very, very painful aspects of ourselves  that perhaps, up until now, we have avoided looking at, and
b) that many of our old supports and conforts are currently being removed from us.

Here I am reminded of that lovely little remark by Thomas a Kempis. 'Grace is given to us to train us and is removed to test us'. For essentially what suffering is, is  an absense of grace.   Our old comforts and supports are removed. We are left  naked, having to confront our own darkness. OK, so how do we  deal with this?

Firstly,  I suggest that we accept  our suffering and  we don't try to deny or fight it but instead recognise  that it  really is one of the ways that God uses to try to help us grow, and  so, hard as this may seem,  we  need to give thanks for this opportunity.  Thus, we  must try to open our hearts as wide as possible to our suffering , mindful that  they really are our  own little 'inner alchemical furnices' and, if we allow them,  are capable  of transmuting all our 'base metal' into gold! 

Just as logs fed into a fire will make it burn more brightly, so, if we feel up to it,  if we feed our  suffering  into our hearts,  it will  also help   open them  more. It is also useful to  recognise that what we are confronting is a karma of some kind or other - either one that is particularly connected to us, or conversely,  it might be that our souls will have chosen to work through some aspect of species karma   - and so we are 'taking on' some extra heavy suffering! 

If so,  again we accept this and if our pain is very great,  we may feel moved to want to pray and ask for help from a higher source. It is surprising how well we can pray and how effective our prayers can be when we are really up against it! Also, it is good to  not be proud and  therefore to ask our close friends for their help and support.  There is an old song by the Mamas and the Papas which has a line that goes 'The darkest hour is just before dawn.' 

We need to remember this.  The joy and the light are near. They are approaching us. Basically, if  we can  endure our suffering and not cave in to it, we will emerge purified and strengthened and the  new spiritual light  that will  soon be with us, will allow us to move forward in our lives in a whole new  and powerful way.