Why do I feel depressed today?

This question seems natural, given my low state of mind. It seems sensible to figure out what’s gone wrong. Sadness envelops me, my body feels fatigued, my spine hurts, and a hollow ache has taken residence in my chest. These are all the sensations that typically accompany my depression. There must be an explanation for this bleak mood, right?

In fact, it’s easy to think of causes for my depression. Not only I can think of many reasons, I can think of many categories of reasons. Although I’m going to recommend minimizing the time spent trying to explain depression, just for fun let’s take a look at how easy it is to do. What follows is a partial list of the explanations my mind comes up with for my depression.

Childhood Causes

  1. As a toddler I witnessed horrible fights between my parents.
  2. This may have weakened my immunity, since I ended up hospitalized for weeks with pneumonia, which I remember as frightening, traumatic, and lonely.
  3. My dad left us when I was four.
  4. My mother became severely depressed following the divorce, and was frequently hospitalized.
  5. She killed herself when I was six.
  6. My stepmother then took over raising me, a job she didn’t want. She took out her frustration by abusing me emotionally, physically, and sexually.
  7. My sister suffered a psychotic break when I was ten, and it became my job to protect her from her delusional impulses.
  8. My father was an alcoholic and a narcissist.
  9. My father and stepmother often had ‘swinging’ parties during my early teen years. This was titillating but also humiliating and frightening.
  10. I started drinking and smoking pot at an early age, which stunted my social development and may have affected my brain circuitry.

Genetic Causes

  1. See numbers 4, 7, and 8 above.
  2. Depression seems to run in my mother’s family.
  3. Alcoholism is rampant in my father’s family, and alcoholic genes seem to also relate to mood disorders.

Biological Causes

  1. I’m sleep deprived.
  2. The days are getting shorter, and I suffer from seasonal affective issues.
  3. The cold, damp weather increases my arthritic problems, and the pain depresses me.
  4. I am still adjusting to life off antidepressants. I stopped my last psychiatric medication just eight months ago.
  5. As a result of all the above, it’s quite likely that I’m deficient in key neurotransmitters.
  6. I’ve been reducing a hormonal replacement I was forced to take due to my former psychiatric medications. My body is only slowly beginning to compensate, which may contribute to my depression.

Situational Causes

  1. My sister died five weeks ago.
  2. I have no remaining family other than an elderly aunt and some cousins I almost never see.
  3. My acupuncture business is losing money.
  4. Even twelve years after it ended, I miss the status, income, and security of my old job as a subspecialty surgeon.
  5. My back and neck hurt all the time.
  6. Although I like writing, it makes me feel guilty since it distracts me from building my acupuncture practice.
  7. My body looks older all the time, which makes me realize that time is running out.

Regrets

  1. Because of my mental instability during my younger years, I never felt ready to have children. Now I imagine how nice it would be to have some grown kids to interact with.
  2. My intellectual passion in college was ecology and natural history. I chose medicine because of pressure from important people in my life who told me it would bring greater income, prestige, and security. Now I wish my days were spent in nature studying wildlife rather than struggling to learn a new healing modality in my fifties.
  3. Naively trusting my psychiatrists, I took powerful and toxic medications for many years and damaged my body. I became obese, mentally clouded, hormonally deficient, borderline diabetic, and so on. Many of these changes are reversing now that I’m off the drugs, but I don’t have any guarantee that I’ll get back to normal. I regret taking that first capsule of Prozac.

Fears

  1. If inflation gets much worse, I’ll soon have serious financial problems, since our income is fixed.
  2. Old age is approaching, with its inevitable stresses.
  3. Since there are no young people in my life, as we get older my wife and I may have no one to help us.
  4. The country, economy, and the world all appear to be on the verge of catastrophe, and it looks like it may strike at a time in my life when I no longer have the strength and resources to cope effectively.

So what did this exercise accomplish? Do you think finding all these reasons for my depression made me feel better? If so, you must respond differently to this sort of thinking than I do. I submit that this list hurts more than it helps.

Yes, it’s probably a good idea to have insight into one’s mind and one’s life. It is a good idea to know one’s history and how it affects attitudes and feelings. But there is no reason—none at all—to dwell on any list of so-called explanations.

Because the truth is I may feel the way I do because of some random glitch in my brain. And even if some of these reasons are valid, most of them are beyond changing. So what do I gain by looking at them?

And yet, there is a strong pull to find explanations for low moods. The mind would rather feel rotten and know why than feel good for no reason at all.

Most important, if one stills thoughts while depressed, what’s left are simply strong feelings. The sensations are tolerable and sometimes (with the right attitude) even blissful. This, of course, was the thesis of a recent post. Given this powerful truth, thinking about why we’re depressed is a terrible strategy, because it prevents us from achieving Grace.

I came of age at a time when therapists encouraged clients to look for childhood, situational, and other reasons for depression. Sigmund Freud, after all, convinced the world that uncovering unconscious reasons for neurosis would produce mental health.

Well, I have news for Freud: it doesn’t work. Don’t ask why you’re depressed. Don’t dwell on explanations. Just embrace the feeling and accept it as your current mental weather pattern. Exercise, or spend time with friends, or do something pleasurable if you want. But don’t try to understand why you feel bad. Your mind will be more than eager to convince you that your depression makes perfect sense.

The depression will pass of its own accord, and trying to explain it will only delay the emergence of a sunnier state of mind.

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