One

Defining Depression

Depression is a condition that can be hard to pin down. Scientists have tried to define it with technical language and poets have taken a stab at it as well. Depression can be explained emotionally, spiritually, and biochemically; no matter what words are used to describe it, depression is something you know best by experiencing it.

Here’s how major depressive disorder is explained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (The DSM, as it’s called in shorthand, is a stupendously large book that lays out current thinking about how to describe all manner of mental conditions in medical terms.)

The individual must be experiencing five or more symptoms during the same two-week period and at least one of the symptoms should be either 1) depressed mood or 2) loss of interest or pleasure.

Not everyone finds this definition particularly helpful. It includes a lot of wiggle room that might lead to misdiagnosis of someone suffering from a different condition, for example. It’s also exhausting to read through and understand if you’re already experiencing a “slowing down of thought.” The list of symptoms included therein “could have more than one cause, and the cause might not respond to the usual treatment recommendations,” according to psychiatrist Bick Wanck.5

Common English isn’t exactly helpful in describing depression, either, because depression is a slippery concept. “I think it’s a poverty of the English language that we use the same word to describe how a five-year-old feels when his baseball game gets canceled because it’s raining and the way someone feels who’s about to jump off a bridge because life has become unlivable and untenable,” said writer Andrew Solomon in a 2014 interview.6 “It gets used to describe such a range of experience, it’s sometimes difficult for people who are dealing with acute clinical depression to convey how different their circumstance is from the circumstance of someone who’s simply sad.” That makes depression slippery, because it’s hard to confidently pin down what we mean by the word. Clinical and scientific definitions are precise in part because they are narrow; that’s the way of words. Depression resists that level of rigor, and thus it takes pages and pages to explain what’s even meant by the word.

Nevertheless, trying to narrow down that clinical diagnosis is not going to be productive because depression does manifest in a lot of different ways, and many of them are similar to what one might endure on a bad day. Social worker Barbara Rachel laid out when a person might need some help to deal with things, saying that symptoms are “depressed mood every day with marked decrease in enjoyment in activities that used to be enjoyable; change in eating with either weight loss or gain; insomnia or oversleeping every day; appearing slowed down or agitated to observers; a sense of tremendous fatigue; feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt; difficulty concentrating or deciding things; and most seriously, recurring thoughts of death, plans to commit suicide or actual failed attempts.” Rachel further explained that taken together, these symptoms might become hard for a person to handle alone. “All these symptoms cause serious impairment in functioning, such as at a job or taking care of the home or self. All of these symptoms may occur in reaction to a severe loss of some kind and would be considered a normal reaction, but if they are prolonged or are deeply troubling, this is a sign of a problem.”

Siobhan Johnson, a writer and witch practicing in England, “was presenting with low mood, brain fog, social isolation, lack of drive, poor hygiene, insomnia and irritability, suicidal ideation, bingeing, and withdrawal from life. It appeared to others as a range of things including worms, of all things.” There is not, as of this writing, a way to satisfy the human desire to define depression’s causes and symptoms in concrete terms. It’s incredibly frustrating to have one’s symptoms defy a diagnosis because a diagnosis gives hope for a treatment. I can’t speak to what sort of working definition professionals were using when Johnson was first seeking treatment, but that account suggests that a condition that is hard to define can also be hard to diagnose.

One might be resistant to the idea of being in depression too. “Unless you are an experienced diviner and can actually ask, don’t try to decide if what the client has is depression, or what sort of depression it is,” warned shaman Raven Kaldera. “Just go with what they’re saying. You can ask, ‘Do you think you’re feeling depressed? Any idea why?’ Depression is a touchy subject and it’s hard to get around one’s opinions on the subject. If you are an experienced diviner, have something in your divination system that indicates clinical depression, perhaps in a particular context. I have mentally marked out an appropriate card in one of my tarot decks, and asked the gods and spirits to let that be an indicator of clinical (and likely chemical) depression, and to push me intuitively toward using that deck for the client if that’s a message they need to hear. When it occasionally comes up for a client, I know this is a big flag and I’m supposed to pay attention.”

What depression is not is ordinary sadness, something that can typically be shaken off, or your fault. Depression is quite often a lifelong companion, with at least half of the people who live through one period of depression experiencing a second, and an even greater portion of those who are depressed twice experiencing it yet again. There are two pieces of good news in that last sentence: the first is that half of people who experience depression never will again, and the second is that depression does not kill most people anyway. Living a fulfilling life is possible even if depression comes to visit more than once, and the skills to manage it have been learned by many people.

Depression is “something I’ll always deal with,” says Courtney Weber, a witch practicing in the northwestern United States. “The negative thoughts in my head, the actions from that, such as picking on the dog, just comes out of nowhere. I get visions of things I did and it’s proof I’m a bad person. No, it’s not true; the disease is telling me something not true. I would not fault a child for doing bad things; I’d ask what’s wrong in the kid’s life,” and to evaluate one’s own life more harshly is to use a double standard.

Trauma can get passed from one generation to the next, too. Weber’s great-grandmother ended up being a single mother full of “terror and sorrow,” Weber has learned, and impressed upon Weber's grandmother the importance of not living life and rearing a family alone. “She put fear into her daughter: you must be married, do not take this journey alone. At that time, this meant meeting standards of beauty, and led to an obsession with thinness and a strange relationship with food that has been taught down the line.” It’s not about whether people in your family tree suffered from the condition so much as whether people in your family tree experienced the sort of trauma that might contribute to suffering from depression. Even if Weber’s great-grandmother weathered her pain without experiencing depression, the lessons she learned and handed down had lasting effects for years to come. Add in other lessons from other ancestors and the convergence can produce conditions conducive for depression to be born.

“When I was around thirty, I came to terms that some things won’t change,” says Joshua Tenpenny, a pagan living in the northeastern United States. “I work around the things that don’t work,” such as developing the mental discipline to navigate through life when desire and motivation are absent. It isn’t chronic for everyone who experiences it, but many people do have recurring symptoms, and in the most profound cases it can be disabling. It does not mean that there is no hope. It does not mean that life is devoid of happiness, or meaning. Even if it’s chronic, depression can be managed and overcome. Being aware of tendencies to withdraw from the world and having a game plan that other people can help you enact if that comes to pass is important. It’s dangerous to go it alone.

Does depression have a purpose? “I think it’s a glitch,” said Tenpenny. “Stuff in the modern world may make it worse. I don’t think it has a meaning, but one can learn from any experience, including that of suffering. It gives compassion for others, and understanding, but that’s pretty easy to learn. The idea of a greater purpose is not meaningful for me.”

Searching for the cause of depression feels important for many people, but it’s often a fruitless quest. Some of us feel like it’s easy to control something if we can place it in context, but the search for a cause in some ways is a search for blame. During depression, any hunt for blame tends to lead to either a) I am a terrible person who deserves all the suffering I endure, or b) all others are terrible people who treat me unfairly, or perhaps a combination of the two. Runaway, ruminative thinking and negative self-talk has a way of turning this quest into an albatross. It’s normal to have curiosity about what led to this experience, but telling someone that their lung cancer was caused by smoking a pack a day for forty years isn’t going to cure the condition, is it?

Depression does not automatically mean that one is contemplating suicide or has an unhealthy relationship with one or more drugs, but those risks are very real, especially in people who do not have other tools for dealing with depression. Those of us who have had more than one bout of close contact with depression usually become better at identifying the signs: dwelling on negative memories, unexpected emotional outbursts, changes in our ability to think clearly or engage in even the simplest of tasks. There is evidence that older people are happier people,7 which suggests to me that eventually I’ll reach the point of putting a stop to it even before it begins again. Not the life anyone chooses to lead, but as author and psychotherapist Kirk White told me during one of my darkest periods, “The secret to life is living. The rest is just details.”

Weber, Tenpenny, and I all have this as a chronic condition, and one of the common threads is that it often manifests in early adolescence. Situational depression can also bring one’s life to a full stop, but for some people it can completely go away through some combination of time and treatment. Complicating matters still more is the fact that someone with chronic depression can also experience situational depression. There is much muddying of communication when it comes to these topics, and sometimes it makes people feel like they are experts when they are not. Perhaps depression’s original home was the tower of Babel.

The ambiguity of language has led to a number of methods to try to be more precise when referring to depression. That might mean discussing more narrowly-defined conditions such as seasonal affective disorder and persistent depressive disorder (formerly called dysthmia), comparing chronic and situational depression, contrasting the chemical from the clinical depression, or separating passing emotions from an ongoing condition by using terms like “being depressed” and “in depression.” Is it clear which of those last two phrases refers to someone who is very sad, and which points to an individual who is moving through a murky morass of emotional sludge for a period of years? No, it is not, and no matter how precisely I choose to define terms in this book there will be others who use them slightly differently, rendering my efforts moot. The use of terms varied even among those I interviewed for this book, and any attempt to shoehorn them into my arbitrary definitions would not improve clarity. The reason there is not an intuitive distinction between the concepts is because it does not serve depression to be easily described.

An estimated 264 million people experience depression, according to a 2018 study.8 More than a quarter of a billion people yet it eludes a clear definition to help pin it down in common language. During my interviews, depression was compared to fog, water, a black cloud, darkness, silence, cold, and heaviness; those who have experienced it feel isolated, slowed, silenced, smothered, invisible, and exposed. Some have directly compared it to death—imagining that death must feel something like depression—or surmised that death could not be worse, or that living through depression and living through a journey to the underworld might be similarly difficult.

The therapist with whom I had the longest relationship described depression as “anger turned inward.” It’s simplistic, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

“Depression for me is a sort of inner death, or numbing out, or being in a place where I just can’t feel anything good any more,” said British Druid Nimue Brown. “It can take any of these forms and can move about between them. It goes with a loss of energy, a lack of motivation and inspiration, an inability to hope or believe in anything good. It messes with my concentration as well. This is awkward for me because I’m invested in the idea of myself as a creative, capable sort of person, so there’s a loss of self when this comes round.”

“Depression feels to me like a numbness, like a great horrible weight that saps all of your energy,” said Johnson. “You can’t think straight, and you distract yourself almost out of instinct. It’s easy for self-hating thoughts to run on a loop, but what really stands out in my experience of depression is that numbness, and the self-sabotaging behaviour isn’t really a punishment when you get down to it; it’s just something to make you feel again. Good feelings like joy and pride seem too hard, but tiredness from staying up too late, the buzz from food or video games or music or alcohol, physical pain, mental strife—that’s easier to get hold of. You’ll make up any kind of rules to give yourself an excuse for punishment, because it reminds you you’re alive.”

Author and conjure-man Orion Foxwood describes depression’s symptoms as a “state of emotional deflation … a leaky tire that can’t ever be patched enough,” with no motivation to do anything about it or most anything else. This tends to be coupled with a sense that “everyone wants us away from them,” even as people try to help, which itself can trigger guilt and shame for being such a bother. It’s an unkind cycle: those who wish to help often don’t know how to, or presume all it will take is a little support for someone as they “pull themselves out of it,” but people with depression may need much more. Foxwood has personally experienced serious depression, triggered by high levels of pain during a crippling bone malady that required a replacement of both hips to address, which itself left him with large debts.

Sarah W. likened depression to shaman sickness, a trauma that marks the spirit worker. The term “shaman”—which is often identified with spirit work generally—comes from indigenous Siberian tribes, and some feel using the term is cultural appropriation. Shaman sickness is a form of illness that takes the worker to the brink of death and perhaps allows for a crossing into the underworld; upon recovering, the spirit worker should possess knowledge of illness or death that can be used to heal others. Some mythological katabases—descents into the underworld—are evocative of depression directly or indirectly. Inanna must strip herself bare to visit the underworld, which may be easy to imagine for someone who has experienced depression. Demeter’s grief and, arguably, depression when her daughter is in the land of the dead is attributed as the cause of winter. In seeing this as a chronic condition, “I come to view it as my version of a shaman sickness,” Sarah W. explained. Sarah W. does not feel like it’s been inflicted by a god or spirit “to teach me a lesson, but I can choose to see it as something I can learn from. … It’s a catalyst for a lot of development.”

When my first teacher accepted me as a student, I said that I wanted to learn to be a shaman. I did not bring this sickness upon me by asking to learn to be a shaman—a term I no longer use for myself because it is infused with that specific context—rather, I was starting to become aware of a trial I was already enduring, and I was asking for help.

Depression can be described as draining color from life, but Tenpenny adds nuance to the metaphor by distinguishing between the black depression and the grey. “Mine is grey,” he said. “Nothing is interesting, don’t want to do anything.” One might say that depression is associated with an imposed stillness, and the inertia of that stillness is profound.

Tenpenny can enjoy an activity if he engages in it, but “the desire, the wanting is gone. I have no wants; they’re all dead.” Even though he’ll enjoy the activity, when depressed he finds motivation is a “big struggle,” and the more difficult the task, the mightier that struggle. Even getting out of bed can be challenging.

That brings to mind another of the ways Sarah W. described the experience of depression, calling it by the ancient term acedia, “a spiritual staleness, emptiness, boredom, the ‘noonday demon,’” which is “not quite the same as the clinical” understanding of depression. “It could be called fallow times, or the dark night of the soul.”

On the other hand, Wiccan author Ivo Dominguez, Jr. contrasts the monochrome of depression with the vibrant colors of practicing magic. Dominguez likens depression to the crossed conditions that are a focus of hoodoo and root work, but also sees it as a curse. “Your own powers of manifestation, turned against yourself, bringing into being the worst outcomes,” something of a spiritual hijacking. There are similarities between depression and crossed conditions, Dominguez explained, or “at least a strong overlap between the two. There is a spiritual component in that regard, to some degree there is externalizing of inward gloom.” Similarly, White says that in the context of Chinese medicine, depression might be seen as an “inability to manifest.”

“I look at depression as malady, ally, and aftershock,” Foxwood said. Malady is the condition of depression itself, together with its panoply of symptoms. It can be an ally, he said, “if we can surf its tides, go deep without losing ourselves, swim in those waters without being lost; [when we] get clarity we become an oracle for the deep place, the underworld, for healing.” Depression is also aftershock particularly for those who are sensitive to subtle beings and energies, because “gods and their people have been wounded horrifically,” and some people “cannot ignore that and engage in even the components of Paganism. The ancestors still cry out for redemption.”

Yet another way to conceive of depression was explained to me by Minnesota-based Norse cultural educator Kari Tauring: that depression exists because the parts of the soul become disconnected, one from another. In Norwegian, hug is a concept Tauring likens to “heart-mind-soul” in English, and huglaus refers to being depressed. “It’s the mind, heart, and spirit loosened, not in alignment, that is what creates depression,” she said. It’s as if depression exists in the space between the soul-parts, perhaps because there should be no space there. It occurs more often in times of physical darkness, but also times of “blighted thought.” The three components of hug “can’t find each other,” leading to “no spark” or ability to rekindle one. Moreover, “someone else’s gumption is not what it takes” to set it alight again.

Tenpenny is not always in tune with emotional responses during periods of depression. That does not mean emotions are absent, as I once believed; rather, when emotions are expressed they can catch a person by surprise. While emotions can be triggered by thoughts, they come from the body and are closely connected to the instincts which are built into our genetic code. Try this experiment: grit your teeth, clench your fists, and breathe quickly and shallowly. You’ve created an emotional response, without involving the brain. A lack of awareness of emotions is a symptom of the disconnection that Tauring describes, and there’s nothing quite like being caught off-guard by anger, or love, or fear, to make one feel disconnected from everyone around them too.

Anger was Weber’s constant companion as a young adult, and as with Tenpenny, it wasn’t always clear why. “I was always angry, but I didn’t know the source,” Weber said. This transitioned into abusive relationships. “Someone being nice was uncomfortable; there must be something wrong with them.” Weber came to prefer romantic partners “who mocked my degree, or the fact that I hadn’t read The Sound and the Fury,” she said. She recalls one of these partners once observing, “You’re not very pretty, but I like you anyway.” As a Christmas present one year, she received a handwritten copy of Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’s Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun,” which is anything but complimentary. Weber’s self-esteem was low enough to make it easy to accept such treatment as par for the course.

In Chinese medicine, the question asked is often “Where is the energy not flowing?” White associates depression with the element of wood in the Chinese system, which controls fire, the flow of chi. With depression, that flow is interrupted and builds pressure inwardly. This covers symptoms like brain fog and low motivation, while the related buildup of pressure speaks to symptoms such as self-harm and outbursts of anger.

The question Foxwood raises is “Why is it always bad to feel sad?” It can be reflective of times shared with a departed loved one, for example, an opportunity to give that person respect expressed through grief and mourning and memory. “Not all deep places are places where we drown,” he said, but demonizing of the underworld can make it harder to accept that truth in the deepest parts of self. “We’ve lost reverence for deep emotions,” he laments. “I’m not sure all pains should heal, and that all depressed states are to be avoided. In fact, most should be given time to be.” He describes it as being “summoned by your soul. It wants us quiet and uncontaminated, and it has something it wants to say.” Depression can be “the magnetic, cool call of the soul,” while its frequent companion anxiety might in fact be “the electric hot call of the spirit” that “people don’t know how to recognize. They are forms that are debilitating, but would not be if we weren’t taught to resist the low places.” That resistance causes harm that might be avoided by leaning into it, in his view. Anger has its place, and neither honoring that place nor expressing that feeling is ever good for one’s health. “I want to re-sacralize rage,” he said, “because volcanoes can build new land.”

“I pretty much managed up until fourteen or fifteen, where the brain fog really presented itself,” recalls Johnson. “I had glasses made to try to keep me focused in lessons; I do have dodgy eyes, but that wasn’t the cause. My grades started a slow decline—I was top of the class to the point of boredom anyway, so it wasn’t really caught until too late—and then I was told off for not studying. I got Cs and Bs, but not the As I was predicted. This is the period that my hygiene and social life pretty much vanished as well. The bullying got worse, and I was minorly molested almost every school day by a fellow student. Again, my memory is really foggy, but I do remember my mother not being able to make an appointment with anyone at school regarding it, so one day she and I literally just stood in the foyer until someone talked to us. Nothing came of it, and that whole episode was bungled several more times.” For Johnson, depression resulted in behaviors that marked a difference, like poor hygiene and poor grades. This in turn led to bullying, similar to how some animals will drive off a member of their group when a perceived flaw is deemed dangerous to the whole.

For Brown, “All of this has roots in stuff that has happened to me, along with pain and exhaustion as reliable triggers. I tend to have a fair idea of what’s going on, which means I can at least tell other people about that, and it takes the pressure off them a bit. Part of what causes this is low self-esteem—I’m easily knocked down and have a hard time picking myself up, and in part it’s because I don’t reliably feel that I deserve nice things, or happiness. I’ve spent significant chunks of my life persuaded that my basic human needs were just selfish wants, while the things I wanted were so off the scale as to make me a terrible human. Times when crying because I was hurt would be responded to like I’d just launched a massive attack on someone [and] this kind of thing leaves marks. If I’m feeling fragile, I still find it hard to tell if the things I imagine I need are things it might be acceptable to need. This means I am not always well equipped to look after myself. Knowing about it helps, but I’m still not reliably able to sort it out.”

One reason depression can be more challenging to deal with in some western cultures is because of what Tauring calls “one of the most dangerous things our western culture has produced,” the observation by philosopher Rene Descartes of “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). “It was the moment when we pulled ourselves completely apart,” Tauring believes, by concluding that the mind is “the sum total of who we are,” leaving no room for other aspects of self. The Nordic concept includes thought and memory as parts of the soul, she explains, and both “are connected at the heart’s root,” which she contrasts with the modern western perspective that prioritizes treating symptoms of the body, and tends to frame symptoms of the mind and spirit as evidence of weakness or moral failing: “Those [who are] struggling [are] seen as weak and damaged, and not in control of their humanity.”

Another modern shift in thinking Tauring thinks contributes to depression is how time is conceived. Norse “ancestors were past-looking, and believed we are creating the past as we go. Old Norse didn’t even have a future tense, with the nouns not representing past, present, and future but rather is, is becoming, and lastly debt/necessity/should. “We think of the future in terms of debt to the past, or what precedence tells us is appropriate action.” Much anxiety and depression might be alleviated by people getting unstuck from planning for the future without using the past as a guide for what might be.

My understanding of depression is drawn on my own experience, as well as the experiences of those who were kind enough to agree to be interviewed about it. The experience of pain, loss, and the pairing of sadness and grief can be useful in understanding depression, because those emotions can be as painful and intense. What separates grief from depression is the ending and the beginning. No matter the intensity of grief, it has an end. There will come a time when the death of even the closest loved one will not sear the soul with constant agony. The idea of an ending feels much less certain with depression, and I think that has more to do with the beginning. We know the origin of grief, but for depression it’s less certain. Sometimes it’s possible to identify a moment that feels like the beginning of depression, but there were always many other moments before it, moments that built up stress and taxed the emotional reserves. We all have different levels of resilience, and they change over time as do other factors that contribute to health and well-being. Once we reach and exceed whatever our personal stress threshold might be, depression might settle in.

It was when I lost a college friend to suicide that I learned how grief and depression can differ. We had been out of contact for many years, reunited thanks to the surging interest in social networks that happened in the latter half of the aughts. We liked, commented, and sent each other messages from time to time, but plans to reunite in person were never made. When I got news that my friend had committed suicide, I was gripped with a powerful sense of grief and loss. I blamed myself for not trying harder to connect, wondering if I could have said the one kind word needed to prevent this from happening. Having been through depression and having taken the path of suicide a good long way, I felt that perhaps I ought to be an expert, with the power to detect these troubles in others and to eliminate them. It turns out that the experience of depression has left me with no such gifts. Thoughts of our relationship consumed me for days, and my ability to perform household tasks or paid work was significantly curtailed as I mourned. Then, gradually, the paralyzing weight of sadness lifted as I processed those emotions.

Years later, I am still very sad about this loss of life, but those memories do not sting or crush any longer. I will never know what drove my old friend to that decision, and I can but hope that the suffering ended. My pain has healed in a way that my friend’s did not, and I believe that this is because depression had a hard grip on my friend, and it was too much to bear. I know that grief can last much longer than it did in my story, but it is expected to soften, reduce, and in time fade away. Depression, often without beginning, feels unending. That thought itself can be a bit depressing, but rest assured there are millions of people in the world who have found ways to manage their periods of depression. That effort is sometimes frustrated by all of this ambiguous language.

We are storytellers, and depression defies that part of our nature too. It’s not easy to tell a tale that has no beginning, and no end. Stories connect with different aspects of the self than analytical information. If only the conscious mind is engaged, the ability to resist is limited. We lack myths about depression, stories that speak to this shared experience and how they can be addressed. There are certainly myths in the other sense of the word, that of “an unfounded or false notion.” 9 Here’s a story that fits more into the latter definition:

Back before the turn of the century, I attended a high-level healing ritual that gave me a surge of hope and a crash of disappointment. College had flamed out for me in the wake of being hospitalized in the middle of a semester. I didn’t quickly recover from that low point, but eventually found myself living with my parents, working a semblance of a job, and returning to school part-time. As part of my studies, I was awarded a grant to go to a particular pagan conference and write a paper about it. I had a support system of family and friends, my education had resumed, and my life was turning in a positive direction.

At this conference were a goodly number of people whom I didn’t know were important until many years later. The centerpiece seemed to be this particular healing ritual, held after all the other programming was wrapped up for the day, and included at least fifty people. The facilitator directed energy raised by the attendees to effect healing, and the impact was often quite dramatic. It was a multi-hour affair, and some had to take a break or be excused before it was all over.

Early on in the evening, a “triage” of needs was undertaken. In other words, this powerful healing was available to all. This was high-grade stuff, helping people with cancer and heart disease and profoundly debilitating conditions. I was only about two years past having been locked up for trying to kill myself, and even after I started getting treatment I had since been through a period of over a month when I would remain in bed for up to twenty hours a day. I, too, had a life-threatening, profoundly debilitating condition. That’s what I shared.

I received a smile, and then, “We’ll do that at the end, with the warm fuzzies.”

That well-regarded elder had bought into the myth that clinical depression is the same as passing sadness. If someone has had a super-sucky day that started with bad coffee and an empty gas tank and never quite improved, warm fuzzies can probably scrape that gunk off the aura. If warm fuzzies are not enough for people enduring cancer and other life-threatening conditions, they are not going to cut it with depression. Confusing it with a passing phase—or a moral failing—will do nothing to solve the problem, and could well make it worse.

When it comes to depression, we do not lack for myths in the sense of common misconceptions. There are deeper myths, too—the ones that speak of the relationship with depression through allegory or metaphor. The condition is not new, and while I do not know of any tale describing a depression demon, for example, the many underworld journeys speak of a loss that might feel familiar: there are Greek (Orpheus and Persephone), Sumerian (Inanna), and Egyptian (Osiris) tales about experiencing loss—of possessions, or memories, or something else that is precious—when crossing into the land of the dead. A Greek myth tells of how Sisyphus sought to cheat death, and as a punishment was forced to perpetually push a boulder uphill, beginning anew when it rolled back down. I can think of no better description of the sense of exhaustion and futility that settles on people during depression. Acedia and melancholia were both terms used by the ancient Greeks to describe symptoms now considered depression: it was being observed and named. It may be time to revisit old myths to bring out their lessons about depression, or discover new ones tuned to that purpose.

Another quality that separates depression from strong negative emotions is that it does not always get processed like an emotion, which would allow for healing. Instead, a voice of destructive self-talk emerges in the psyche, a voice that is extremely critical. Weber eloquently described being reminded of reasons why one is not a good person who deserves happiness or healthy relationships, undermining things that weaken depression such as wholesome foods, movement of the body, and social connection. It might be described as a feedback loop, but I instead see it as a dark cone of power being raised from these negative emotions. Michael Pollan writes about research that suggests that some mental conditions “are not the result of a lack of order in the brain but rather stem from an excess of order. When the grooves of self-reflective thinking deepen and harden, the ego becomes overbearing. This is perhaps most clearly evident in depression, when the ego turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality.” 10

Johnson goes on to say that “it was explained to me more along the lines of fear and anxiety/depression as a means to keep yourself safe. If I want friendship, but I don’t have it, clearly I’m rejecting it in some way. The isolation and withdrawing because of depression is actually a safety mechanism that’s overdoing it, to try to keep me from being rejected/hurt/abused. I think that actually a lot of mental illness is kind of an autoimmune disease of the mind—it’s the mind overreacting to an initial trauma, however big or small, and then finding more and more triggers to react to.”

The authors of The New Mind-Body Science of Depression posit that depression is indeed connected to immune response. Whether that’s proven scientifically or not, it’s a useful model for thinking about depression, because it represents a shift away from blaming the victim. There is no easy way for the conscious mind to control immune response. If I rub up against some poison ivy, the urushiol on the plant’s leaves is going to elicit a reaction from my immune system that will result in a rash. I cannot personally prevent that rash by deciding that I will not get a rash. That said, the conscious mind still has a role: for poison ivy, it begins by memorizing what it looks like and not touching it. I can, and should, name triggers for the condition and avoid these if possible.

Johnson laid out an hypothesis for how stress and trauma can lead to depression: “I don’t think someone honestly wakes up depressed, but I also don’t think that there needs to be a particularly upsetting event that stands out either. I think some people are more susceptible to depression than others, just like human bodies typically don’t like inhaling dust particles but some people are more susceptible to that particular overactive immune response. Looking at this idea that part of the mind has an immune system of some kind, it’s easy to see how the slide into ‘mental illness’—in particular depression, anxiety, phobias, and addiction. That immune system works by trying to remove anything from the mind that is of discomfort, but it has to work fast because the rest of the mind is doing its normal store-analyse-retrieve, day-to-day business. If someone is horrible to you, the mind first rejects the incident and the person by becoming angry, then it seeks approval from others (‘you don’t think I’m lazy, do you?’), and then perhaps it may seek distraction/numbness, through food/TV/alcohol/etc. The problems come about when either the mind cannot express anger at all (by prior conditioning) or the person behaves in a way that is, for want of a better word, ‘inappropriate,’ and escalates the situation, or they’re ‘needy’ and seek approval from any or every source they can, or they have no one to seek approval from, or they have been burned by approval-seeking in the past, and so skip straight to phase three and binge whatever numbness-inducing substance they can. Because all three of those give some kind of reward for the brain (righteouness, approval/comfort, or dopamine/numbness through substance) the brain begins to lock in those paths and encourages that behavior, whilst also labeling the initial experience as upsetting and one to avoid, so the brain ends up both craving and rejecting the same experience, only the craving is subconscious (and therefore more powerful) and only the rejection is conscious (but not always; sometimes both are subconscious).”

There is research that suggests that this explanation—that depression may be a reaction to a perceived threat—has some merit, and may actually be a defense mechanism even if it doesn’t feel like it’s doing a body good. It’s a subroutine of the body’s programming, reacting according to how it’s designed and not controlled by the conscious mind, just like the reaction to poison ivy, which is a form of inflammation, one of the basic immune responses in the body. Inflammation can be triggered by injury, infection, or trauma (physical or mental), among other factors. With poison ivy, some people encounter the irritant and don’t even notice, while others seem to have no tolerance whatsoever and break out seriously from the slightest contact. Similarly, not everyone is affected by stress at the same intensity. There is research into the hypothesis that depression may be a response to inflammation in the body, altering behavior to maximize healing and minimize exposure to others as if one was recovering from an injury or infection.11 If that’s the case, then acts of self-sabotage could be seen in the same light as a poison ivy rash: an overreaction, yes, but one that is triggered without conscious thought.

A normal human approach to the world is the search for origins, but that’s elusive when it comes to depression. While it might be possible to name the moment when depression began, it was precipitated by a thousand cuts that weaken resistance and resolve. Tenpenny searched for a cause for his condition. “I’d always pick the least changeable circumstance as the cause of my misery, and even if it changed it didn’t help, not even temporarily.” Not having a clear idea of what causes depression to begin can—like just about anything, when experiencing depression—make the condition worse. If you can’t point to that one moment, it’s easy to feel guilt or shame, or develop a belief that this is evidence that you are a failure of a person, because that’s how depression rolls. The truth is that there were likely myriad contributing factors, and no single cause or origin story.

Carl Jung posited that humans put unwelcome aspects of themselves into their psychological “shadow,” and Johnson suggested depression might emerge from that same shadow. “Perhaps the shadow really is the higher guardian angel, only we’ve shoved it so full of pain and anger, and because we only listen to our own self-hatred it has no choice anymore but to speak to us in our own language—one of recrimination and fear. Yes, in some ways, I do think depression is external or it can certainly feel that way, but only because it’s all the parts of our soul we’ve rejected, and in doing so has become powerful enough to manifest in form.”

Courtney Weber considers depression “part of my legacy of being a descendant of immigrants.” Weber has learned from her own family history that immigrants—even the willing ones—must take steps to cut themselves off from the pain around leaving one’s ancestral homeland. Trauma can get passed from one generation to the next. Weber’s great-grandmother ended up being a single mother full of “terror and sorrow,” she has learned, and impressed upon her daughter the importance of not doing that—living life and rearing a family—alone. “She put fear into her daughter: you must be married, do not take this journey alone. At that time, this meant meeting standards of beauty, and led to an obsession with thinness and a strange relationship with food that has been taught down the line.” When one’s ancestors are enslaved and shipped to a new life as nothing more than property, one imagines that the potential for trauma being passed down is all the greater.

This is a broader take on the ancestral role of depression than others I spoke to have taken. It’s not about whether people in your family tree suffered from the condition so much as whether people in your family tree experienced the sort of trauma that might contribute to suffering from depression. Even if Weber’s great-grandmother weathered her pain without experiencing depression, the lessons she learned and handed down had lasting effects for years to come. Add in other lessons from other ancestors, and the convergence can produce conditions conducive for depression to be born.

Anyone can become depressed, Dominguez says. “When you climb the mountain high enough, it’s painful. The pain of the knowledge of how difficult it is to fix it all. Sometimes as we are confronted with new revelations, this makes us feel it’s hopeless, a Gordian Knot of human culture. The process of learning how things work almost requires there be dark periods.”

Considering Tauring’s observation that there is no split between body and mind, seeing mental defense mechanisms as an extension of the immune system makes sense. The person is a whole person. The body, the mind, the spirit, the soul and all the parts of it that may have broken away, the many layers or aspects of self, all comprise a whole being. No condition is solely spiritual, or mental, or physical; there is no disease that only affects the mind or only affects the body. Depression doesn’t affect everyone in the same way, and some do not experience it at all—despite experiencing emotionally challenging events. Agents that cause disease include microbes and environmental stressors that chip away at the immune system until something bad happens.Every condition takes a toll on every part of the person, albeit in different proportions. The best treatment is the one that addresses the hurt on all levels.

Sarah W. seems also to understand depression as impacting the whole person, saying that depression is “not necessarily a spiritual state. There is brain chemistry and other physical stuff contributing to it. Actual bad stuff happening in life is a factor. Everything has a spiritual aspect, and can at least lead to a spiritual condition like acedia.”

JOURNAL EXERCISE

Naming the Pain

Set a timer for five minutes.

Definitions can be slippery, but pain is very real. The next time you experience a wave of pain, open your journal and pour out all the words that describe the sensation. Whatever words that rise up, send through the pen onto the page, paying no attention to whether they make logical or grammatical sense or not. Write until all those words and phrases come out.

If you have time remaining, use it to write about the experience using full sentences. The pain may have physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual components. Take note of details such as whether it moves around or remains fixed, if it seems hot or cold, whether it comes in waves or remains steady.

Add three minutes to your timer if you’re on a roll, or just stop the timer and keep writing.

This is your experience, your definition of depression. You have named your pain.

[contents]

4. Jessica Truschel, “Depression Definition and DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria,” Psy.com, accessed November 12, 2020, https://www.psycom.net/depression-definition-dsm-5-diagnostic-criteria/.

5. Bick Wanck, Mind Easing (Deerfield Beach, Florida: Health Communications, Inc., 2019), 31.

6. Solomon, “ ‘Darkness Visible’ Broke Ground.”

7. Association for Psychological Science, “Why Are Older People Happier?” Last updated January 5, 2012, https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/better-research-is-needed-to-understand-why-elders-are-happier.html.

8. Spencer L James, Degu Abate, Kalkidan Hassen Abate, Solomon M. Abay, Cristiana Abbafati, Nooshin Abbasi, Hedayat Abbastabar, et al. “Global, Regional, and National Incidence, Prevalence, and Years Lived with Disability for 354 Diseases and Injuries for 195 Countries and Territories, 1990–2017.” The Lancet: 392:1789-1858. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32279-7.

9. Merriam-Webster, “Myth,” accessed April 17, 2021, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myth.

10. Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 313.

11. Vladimir Maletic and Charles Raison, New Mind-Body Science of Depression (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), 84.