Why a condition? As you can tell from what I’ve written, I’m not inclined to view depression as a disease or as a disorder. I feel that to do so at best oversimplifies and at worst misconstrues. I’ve emphasized the plurality of experiences, their heterogeneity, the fact that what I feel and what I go through can in no way be the same as what you feel and go through. Yet the very fact that I have begun this blog, and have used words like “us” and “we” clearly indicates that I feel that we have something shared, something in common. And here is where depression as a word comes in and proves quite helpful. One way to view it is that depression as a word ‘flips over’ our experience. We think and feel many things – WAY too many things – and all too often it feels like a few words or a million words would never be sufficient to describe our experience. But one word – depression – somehow becomes able to capture that infinite multitude of sensations, the pain, the weakness, the suffering, and contain it beneath its umbrella. This is because we do indeed share something. As a result I can then say to you, “I’m depressed,” and with that convey to you a universe of hurt, loss, and my sense of destitution. Without the word I would speak too much and say too little, or would remain in the agony of silence. But with the word – depression – I can communicate to you my condition, a condition much like yours but never the same; relying on something shared, I can turn all of the scrambled and dispersed thoughts on top of my brain ‘upside-down’ and place them underneath a word, and then send the package to you. However, this is always done at a loss. For the convenience of the word, I always sacrifice something. Part of that is the uniqueness of my experience. Yet without the word, I could not communicate.
Another way to think of depression as a word is as a sign on a door, like a club. We may all aggregate inside that room. The sign on the door suggests that, inside, the contents of the room have something shared, something similar. And the sign on the door, whatever word or words may be inscribed, will likely tell us what brings us together. If the sign said ‘cafeteria’ or ‘restroom,’ the observer outside would obtain a pretty good idea of what’s going on inside. And when the sign says ‘depression,’ we have an idea of what is shared among the participants. If there were no sign, the outside observer would face the mystery of asking what unsaid force exerted such an influence so that a bunch of individuals would collect themselves in one room.(A similar example can be found in movies. To use an example suggested by Alfred Hitchcock, imagine first the camera shows a close up actors’ faces. They are staring at something, without expression. Then they smile. What is it that draws their collective attention, and then causes them to smile? The director could then switch to a point-of-view shot, where we the audience see what the actors see – a cute baby, or a sexy blonde. We don’t know until the final word, or in this case the image, brings it all together.)
So to sum up these two introductory posts, we know each individual is different. Depression is a condition: we are born of unique circumstances, and have our own unique experience over places and over time. Yet certain bits, important bits, of the ‘architecture’ are similar, or might we say ‘homologous.’ This allows us to share, to relate. On other levels our experiences are unique and unrepeatable, and with that we have the ability to teach and learn from one another about the experience of depression, and what can be gotten from it in terms of understanding what it means to live human life in the contemporary world.
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