I can’t tell you ‘what’ to vote, but here’s a thought on ‘how’ to vote – consider voting ‘below the line’ on this years Senate paper. That’s the great big one with dozens of candidates. Big parties don’t want you to do this, but it’s healthy for democracy to take control of your preferences. Here’s a quick overview of what the Senate does compared to the House of Representatives.
When you vote above the line on the Senate ticket, you are choosing to follow party preference deals, made for political expediency rather than compatibility of policy – in 2004, Stephen Fielding of Family First received a degree of primary votes, but only made it over the line on strong preferences he gained from people who would disagree with him, but voted above the line for the ALP and Democrats. Did the Democrats not know how incompatible FF’s policies were with theirs? I assume so, but it seemed to them like a good idea to try and ride the coattails of the fledgling party. As a consequence of that though, we have Stephen Fielding as one of a very small number of people with a balance of power vote in the Senate, able to bend Liberal and Labor governments to his minority viewpoints, viewpoints not held by those who carelessly preferenced him by voting above the line. If you think I’m overstating it, ask why the mandatory internet filter is still on the table, in spite of opposition from technical groups, civil liberties groups, law enforcement, the international community, and the population in general. Ruling parties will bend over backwards to appease him, and in return he’ll support whatever they ask him to. This isn’t an attack on Steve Fielding directly (although he deserves it) but an observation on the way preference deals don’t always reflect policy, and how by voting over the line you are allowing these deals to take precedence over the polices you would choose to vote for.
By voting below the line, you have the chance to put the two major parties below a number of independents you agree with, and doing so contribute a variety of independents and minority parties into the democratic process. Remember back when Liberal held a dual majority (2005-2007) legislation presented in the lower house was effectively automatically passed by the upper. What was more likely voter rebellion against Labor ineptitude at the time was used by Howard as a mandate to pass whatever the hell he pleased. Hello WorkChoices. Hello unconstitutional electoral changes. Hello Sedition Laws and an attack on freedom of speech.
Major party members will always vote down party lines in the senate, so when we have only one or two minors holding a deciding vote, the majors will pander to them. Imagine a parliament where to pass anything you need both the Greens and FF to agree to back you. Not everything FF is bad, and not everything Green is good, so all that will be passed is what they agree on. Imagine if even that wasn’t enough, to pass legislation you need your party, and Greens or FF, and several other independents who are ranged along the political spectrum. You might be more likely to see legislation passed that is in the will of a wide range of people, rather than pet projects of individuals or parties, pushed through in return for supporting another person’s pet project.
Now the senate paper can be intimidating, so it’s possibly worthwhile taking the time to do a little research before turning up on Saturday. This site: https://www.belowtheline.org.au/ will help you to construct your own How To Vote card for the senate in your state. You can start with the party you like and redo their preferences more to your satisfaction, print that and take it with you. It will also tell you in advance who your candidates are – there are a lot of very minor parties whose names don’t tell you much, or are misleading, so you can spend some time looking into what each party/independent stands for, and drag and drop them up and down as you read. We just spent an hour doing this, which may seem like a long time. If you think about the time you spent this week watching TV, playing Playstation or wandering aimlessly from room to room wondering what to do with yourself, and don’t think understanding your voting choices is at least as important, then let me know and I’ll send you my Below the Line printout and you can just copy that!
We’ve been watching a new show on SBS called Letters and Numbers. Based on a French show that has run since the sixties, it’s a high nerd factor game show, with two players playing word and maths games against the clock. It’s basically a game of Boggle alternating with a maths IQ puzzle, best way to get the idea is to watch an episode on the SBS website.
The nerd factor increases with the hosts. If you are Gen X and have half a brain, when you were at school you would probably have looked forward to watching Richard Morecroft on Behind the News. BTN still runs today, albeit without the venerable Mr Morecroft, but still with an engaging journalistic style that takes kids a little deeper into the issues of the day, as part of the kid-focussed news service on ABC3. Richard Morecroft is the main host of the show.
He is joined by two expert assistants. David Astle writes for the Age/SMH, including writing the cryptic crossword. He is obviously the word expert, ensconced behind his encyclopedic Macquarie dictionary, David Astle was once described by Geoffrey Rush as “the Sergeant Pepper of cryptic crosswords”. The other host is Lily Serna, who at first appears to be just the attractive barrel girl, until she unleashes her big texta and big brain on the maths games. As Monique correctly deduced in spite of my attempted denial, when she effortlessly demolished both contestants with a smile and not a hair out of place, I may have gone a little slack-jawed. Cute, confident and formidably intelligent, but since I already have a woman like that we won’t dwell on her any longer!
Letters and Numbers has only just started on SBS, we happened to come across it channel flicking and decided to start watching, figuring it was worth a few viewings to decide whether to add it to our weekly routine. Halfway through the second episode we watched (the fifth episode overall) came a sure sign that this is a show for me:
There are things to appreciate about advancing cinematic technology. For example, Wizard of Oz points out two particular things. One, by switching from monochrome in Kansas to colour in Oz, they showed us colour is cool. There’s some arty stuff you can do with black and white, but in general you want colour. The other thing you can learn from Wizard of Oz is that widescreen films look way better. Wizard of Oz was filmed in 4:3, which is what your old CRT TV did, i.e. more or less square. Big wide movies draw you in more, Wizard of Oz is great but you notice the difference when you go back and watch these older ‘square’ movies.
There’s an upper limit to where technology improves the whole cinematic experience though. Unless you are actually focussing on the production and technology, most of it is lost – f’rinstance, bits in the Matrix where shells are falling all around, hundreds of individual *ting* noises scattered throughout auditory space sound crazy awesome if you are listening for them. If you are immersed in the movie, it’s just as good with two speakers at the front of the room. You might lose a bit of your immersion if you switch from stereo to mono, or maybe not. Either way, a crap movie with great surround sound production isn’t going to engage you. Likewise with HD – In the same way that getting Foxtel just means you now have even more channels with nothing good on, a crap movie will just be a better looking crap movie in HD. Conversely, a great movie can still be just as enjoyable on your old tube TV, if the plot, script, characters, action, music etc are good enough and the quality isn’t so bad as to be distracting. So you might have replaced a perfectly good old TV with a big new HD model, for pretty much nothing.
Bummer.
Sure, the visuals are great in Toy Story 3 and the stunning CG vistas in Lord of the Rings are so detailed, but you only think you care about that. You might be counting pixels in the foreground of your mind while watching Transformers 2 on Blu-Ray on your HD plasma, but that should just tell you that the movie isn’t all that good and counting pixels is the highlight. There’s beautiful art to be made with better technology for sure – Avatar may have been a recycled story with two dimensional characters, but the way it used three dimensional cinematography were genuinely brilliant. However if the movie is good enough for you to suspend disbelief for 118 minutes, it will do it regardless of the cutting edge tech. I’ve always said the same about music – a good song is still a good song even if it’s through ten buck headphones on your old tape-style walkman.
Now this is pretty much an opinion piece, but I can back it up with a little science here. Research from Rice University’s Department of Psychology has shown that people’s perception of video quality is actually biased by their enjoyment of the content.
[Researchers] showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to DVD quality. Participants viewed the two-minute clips and then were asked about the video quality of the clips and desirability of the movie content.“At first we were really surprised by the data. We were seeing that low- quality movies were being rated higher in quality than some of the high-quality videos. But after we started analyzing the data, we determined what was driving this was the actual desirability of the content.”
Did you get that? It means a good movie can turn your SD TV into a HD TV!
Up to a point anyway
This is great news for you, as you don’t need to upgrade your TV, just stop watching stuff you aren’t really enjoying. Likewise, it’s good news for deliverers of online content, TV station catch-up services, as they now know they can save some bandwidth by compressing shows a bit more, nobody will notice. Of course it’s also bad news for the movie industry – if this news gets out, we’ll have no reason to throw out all our VHS and DVDs and replace them with Blu-Ray – projected income from forced obsolescence will fail, and studios will be forced to, I don’t know, start making good, original movies again or something.
Liberal Party election advertising has no policy information, and relies on making Julia Gillard look stupid and untrustworthy.
Labor Party election advertising has no policy information, and relies on making Tony Abbot look stupid and untrustworthy.
The Neuromesh Party believes that they don’t need any help in these areas. Our advertising is full of policy, and relies on making Jase look awesome.
Vote for Neuromesh. Our advertisements don’t criticise other parties. Except this time.
I had my blogging abilities impugned three times in weekend. Mark complimented the Rethinking Depression series by saying it was better researched than the crap I’m usually spouting. That’s OK, I know when I’m spouting crap, and he was smiling when he said it so I didn’t have to kill him. If I was writing a blog on a particular subject and trying to monetise it somehow, I’d spend more time on research etc, but since this is just for my own amusement and creative outlet, you’re just going to have to guess which ones I’ve researched properly.
Second was Monique complaining about poor (or in my case non-existent) proofreading. Fragmented sentences and mixing up your and you’re, which is OK for drafts but not for publishing. These are valid complaints. I could make excuses about how I don’t get that much blogging time and if I drafted three times and waited for a proofreader I’d post even less often than I do, but really that’s just embarrassing.
Third one just proved Mark right. Kitty DeCapitate from the Victorian Roller Derby League commented on the Wheels of Pain article to point out that where I had thought from my three minutes of research that there wasn’t much going on in Melbourne roller derby, that the VRDL is quite strong, trains constantly, meets often, and is the winner of the inaugural National Tournament. She also pointed out that bouts sell out in about an hour so if you ever want to go see them you really gotta pay attention!
So clearly, I’ll have to lift my game a little bit. I really enjoyed researching and writing the depression series, although the posts were very long to read as I’d learned so much and wanted to tell you all about it. I’ll be checking facts a bit more and putting things through a second draft, but it’s still a hobby blog so if you expect it to be perfect, your dreaming!
This is the last in a four part series. You can read the whole series here. In this article, we investigate: If depression is not just the result of a broken brain, if you start from the assumption that your wiring is fine and it’s just a matter of your thinking being off track, what can you do about it?
When people talk about psychological characteristics like perfectionism, it’s easy to see them as negatives. The perfectionist can be crippled by their inability to put everything in order, many people with very cluttered and disorganised houses are actually perfectionists who gave up. Perfectionism can also lead to anxiety and depression, when the constant battle to create order becomes overwhelming. You might wonder, what’s the good of perfectionism? But next time you drive across a bridge, or go up to the tenth floor of a building, you can probably thank an engineer who is a perfectionist that you survived the experience. If we medicate all these supposed flaws away, there’s a lot we could lose. So too with the ‘ruminative’ factor associated with depression. But for those of us with that ‘deep thought’ tendency, how can we get the most from that side of ourselves – create art, study literature, understand history, design products, solve problems, write computer programs, perform theoretical physics – without getting trapped in a depressive spiral?
Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who started challenging the ‘disease model’ of psychology way back in the late 1960′s. Rather than psychology’s ‘normal’ aim of making miserable people less miserable, broken people less broken, he helped to pioneer the idea of positive psychology – finding what makes positive and strong people able to stay that way, what thought habits and activities characterise authentic happiness, and teaching them to all people as an ‘immunisation’ against depression. This isn’t the magical ‘power of positive thinking’ guff, the affirmation nonsense of saying “every day I’m getting better and better” being enough to make it true, but a scientific approach to finding what characterises a complete, whole and happy life. This is a ten minute video but it covers it well.
I’ve had a number of responses from friends to these posts, including two people with similar stories – they are aware they have a tendency to dwell on things, and both have a parent who is constantly depressed and negative. Having that parent as a reminder of what can go wrong meant that both of them learned early on to catch themselves before it got too bad, one with the occasional bit of counselling, so they’ve kind of performed behavioural therapy on themselves. Likewise, discussing this with a staff member at work (an art teacher – creative, ruminative) she mentioned that her father had taught them a lot of these optimistic thinking skills when they were young, deliberately to help them avoid these pitfalls. Where some of us succumb to what Seligman calls ‘learned helplessness’, others learn they can take charge of their thinking in a situation, and these are the skills I believe you need to conquer depression.
Cognitive behavioural therapy is an approach to counselling/psychotherapy based on making you aware of the way you think, and teaching you to make changes in that thinking. CBT came from a rejection of Freud’s belief that analysing past experiences could help patients get better, the classic TV psychology on the couch. Instead, it works on the way your thoughts and beliefs inform your feelings, so rather than spending years dwelling and rehashing things that went wrong in the past, you analyse how you think about what is happening now, what you believe about situations, people and yourself. By thinking about the way that you think (cognition) and changing the way we respond and act in situations (behaviour), CBT seeks to create a positive way of moving forward, rather than dwelling on a past that can’t be changed or fixed.
With anxiety and depression there are a lot of underlying assumptions and habitual thoughts happening, CBT can help to challenge the beliefs that flow on to anger, anxiety and depression. You learn to analyse the thoughts you are having, the beliefs you currently have that these thoughts are based on, and the reasons you are reacting the way you do. Rather than feeling helpless in a situation, you can learn to manage the anxiety and hopeless feelings, and without that clouding your mind you can learn to tell what you can change, and what you have to accept and look at differently. I’m lucky enough to work only four days a week, this decision was made in response to Mon and I analysing some of the things that didn’t work for me and looking at ways to change them.
A couple of books that you might find helpful are The Optimistic Child by Martin Seligman, and Change Your Thinking by Sarah Edelman. Optimistic Child is aimed at parents, it is some dry, academic reading, but it also has examples and exercises to help build children’s resilience. It’s still good reading for adults who suffer depression, but is more aimed at the idea of ‘immunising’ children against depression. Change your thinking is easier to read, and aimed at the current sufferer of anger, anxiety and depression. Again, there are lots of examples and exercises to help you build your own strategy.
You don’t have to do it on your own from books either. Psychologists are expensive – the Australian Psychological Society recommends a fee of $212 for a one hour consultation, although many psychologists will charge less. However, if you have a referral from your doctor, you can get a rebate from Medicare with a GP Mental Health Care Plan, which covers you for 6 visits and a possible 6 more if needed. With CBT the idea is that this is enough to teach you skills which you can then practice on your own, as opposed to a lifetime of weekly psych visits like on TV. I was lucky enough to find a psychologist that would bulk bill, so it cost me nothing.
Also, exercise. You sleep better, you are healthier, and it’s a free dose of endorphins to the brain, which encourages positive thinking without disrupting the good side of your deep thinking brain. Also gets you away from moping on the couch, so if you find it hard to get motivated try and find a team sport or group activity with friends so you have a regularly scheduled exercise to get to. The achievements you make in getting fitter, faster, thinner, buffer or whatever, can also help you to feel better about your whole self.
It probably seems like I’m quite against medication for treating anxiety and depression, but this is not entirely the case. What I’m against is medication being the first and/or only tool, and being the lifelong treatment. It takes considerable effort and motivation to change the way you think and act and live, and for many people their depression is far too deep by the time it is recognised, and pulling yourself far enough out of the mud to even start this is impossible. In my own case I have been medicated for some years while I’ve been learning and going through the rest of this process, and it’s only in the last few months that we’ve been talking about the possibility of me coming off them. When formulating a mental health care plan, a GP should be assessing the need for medication in the whole plan, and you should certainly feel comfortable asking your doctor whether it’s feasible to start the process without medication, but it’s not a failure if you need to take something for some time before you have enough stability to face other steps. Coming off them later is then a conversation to have with your doctor as well as those people around you who will have to put up with you if it doesn’t go well.
Recovering from depression is a journey, and can be long and painful for the sufferer as well as friends and family. However I believe it’s important to value the whole person by looking at the problems and issues as real and life based, and not the results of a mere fault in brain chemistry, and addressing the problems directly. Certain personality traits and characteristics can make people more prone to depression, but by learning to understand and control the way are thoughts shape our feelings we can also learn to get the most out of those traits, and eventually live our lives whole and unencumbered by mental illness.
Tony Abbot was accosted at Knox Shopping centre by a man in red speedos yesterday.
It was cold yesterday too.
According to the Age:
Mr French is believed to work at the ALP’s Victorian headquarters, in a group of election campaign organisers whose salaries come from a ”pool” created from the taxpayer-funded electorate office allowance of state Labor MPs.
So there’s a big wank about it, suggesting that the stunt is a waste of tax payer money. Labor are claiming the guy is on leave and did it off his own bat. Whatever, most of what goes on in an election could be considered a waste of money, at least this is funny.
The Libs are taking the hijinks much more seriously – where Labor were happy to have a bit of a laugh at Tony Abbot’s expense, the Liberal party has resorted to despatching demon babies to try and eliminate the Labor leadership.
Look at those malevolent eyes
You may have noticed Disney like to take great things and make them a bit smarmy. Tell this to your kids : (spoiler, obviously) the Little Mermaid doesn’t really get the prince, every step on her human legs is agony and he still marries someone else, and the mermaid turns into foam rather than kill the prince as commanded by the witch. The Hunchback sure as heck doesn’t get Esmerelda, she gets hanged, he throws the baddie off the cathedral and then curls up with Esmerelda in her grave and starves to death. Fox and the Hound, Jungle Book, etc etc strong stories sold out for happy endings.
So then to Pixar. Many years ago, George Lucas bought a small animation studio filled with cutting edge creative and technical people, and then proceeded to ignore them and make the prequels instead. He sold Pixar to Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, who thought Pixar would make a nice ornament on his mantlepiece, and told them to go and have fun and he’d come back and see what they were up to later. He forgot about them, and they made Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, etc I’m sure you’ve heard of them. It was apparently a great place to work, stimulating creativity in every way and creating movies that showed the fruits of the free thinking environment. I looked at Pixar Offices some years ago on Neuromesh.
They looked like this back then, really.
So zoom ahead to a few years ago, Steve Jobs found Pixar down the back of the couch but couldn’t remember what it was as his attention span had been shortened by constant connection to the internet through his iPhone. So he sold one of the most creative and still successful animation studios in the modern world, a group of people who value quality and originality so much that they produce wonderful and popular things, to Disney, who haven’t seen an original idea in about 55 years and will flog a horse until the whip tangles in its desiccated ribcage. This is about the equivalent of him selling Apple to Microsoft. Cars and Wall-E followed, as they were already in production.
Following that, the ethos at Pixar went from ‘we don’t do sequels’ (Toy Story 2 being the exception, as Disney had the rights to the sequel due to a contractual issue, and Pixar said ‘well for the love of all that is good, if it is going to happen at least let us do it right instead of doing what you did with Aladdin 2…and 3….) to the upcoming Pixar Lineup: the current Toy Story 3, Monsters Inc 2, Cars 2….An original movie called Newt has since been cancelled, leaving one called Brave (or the Bear and the Bow depending where you read it) the only original story currently in the Pixar pipeline.
Speaking of the Pixar pipeline, I’ve managed to get exclusive pictures of staff at work in the new Pixar Offices, recently renovated to Disney Standard:
Pixar employees grinding for dollars
This is part three in a series of four posts looking at new understandings of depression and the role of thought and personality. You can read the whole series here. In this article, we look at how a deep thinking person can be prone to depression, but that deep thinking has a lot of useful aspects as well. Also, being depressed can be your minds way of saying there’s something wrong in your life. There is a lot to lose by trying to quick fix things.
There’s a general consensus that depression means there’s something wrong with you. You’re born with a flaw in your brain that is just waiting to be set off. By hormonal changes or a DNA timeline or something, some genetic defect is triggered, a chemical switch is thrown, and a natural propensity to depression is manifested. It’s a mental illness that must be cured. Take away the symptoms and you are all better. It could be temporary, but you may well have to stay on antidepressants for the rest of your life to correct what is wrong with your brain.
So what if this isn’t true? What if depression is a symptom of something else, not an illness in itself, like a fever, or vomiting, or sneezing, that are part of your mechanism for fighting off germs? What if the natural propensity to depression is just a side effect of a positive genetic trait? These are questions being asked by evolutionary psychologists, who want to know how a trait that can take away your will to look after yourself, to reproduce, and even to live, could possibly remain so prevalent in the human race. They want to find the advantage that allows it to continue to exist in the species.
Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews , from the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University respectively, are challenging the ‘flaw in the brain chemistry’ idea. Starting from the assumption that ‘the mind is a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs’, they wanted to see if the habits of depression had a purpose, some advantage that was being ignored or even obstructed in current methods of treating depression.
Depression is characterised by a thought process called rumination – what cows do when they regurgitate and rechew their food several times. Thoughts, concerns, issues and anxieties leap back into the mind repeatedly, stealing our attention and dragging us away from positive thoughts and enjoyment of the present. It becomes a positive feedback loop – the things that are depressing keep coming to mind, which then makes us more depressed. Being more depressed makes us more inclined the focus on the thing. This builds habits and thought patterns in thinking about these things. So even when we can distract ourselves and start being positive, the well worn neural pathways draw us back, and we think about them again, and get depressed about them again. When other things go wrong or become stressful, they are added to the list, and we become completely overwhelmed by the weight of all the things we keep ruminating on. Add to that the idea that if you are depressed, you are broken and wrong and need fixing, and you can add an icing of guilt to your big black layer cake of gloom.
It’s a gross oversimplification that doesn’t come close to actually describing the experience, but I didn’t want to, you know, depress you or anything. Being in that loop affects certain brain functions – particularly memory and executive function. This is why people with moderate to severe cases of depression just can’t seem to get their act together. Clearly it’s not a good thing to spend your whole life like this.
So what’s the good of it? Well, people in a melancholy mindframe are more able to make good decisions in complex situations, judge the accuracy of rumours, and a variety of other useful stuff. The sacrifice in certain brain functions means brain processing power can be allocated to other tasks. While people in a depressed state show suppressed functioning in some areas, they also display high activity in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex – VLPFC (Sir, will this be on the test?) which is linked among other things to maintaining attention. Psychologists have shown that inducing a slightly depressed state (eg watching a sad movie) can improve performance in complex analytical tasks, and also that engagement in these tasks affects brain function in the same way – looking at an MRI, people concentrating hard on something look like depressed people.
In my own experience, and that of a friend who responded to one of these articles, the loss of the ruminative mind state due to medication meant a loss in many areas – we’ll talk about the underlying issues in a minute, but you also lose the ability to create art, solve complex problems and do things that involve a lot of concentration. Artistic creation involves two separate mental states – in my case of songwriting, the creative insight that comes from a relaxed and drifting mind, eg a melody line or poetic concept, chorus lyrics or so on, that come in a flash of insight such as while standing at the toilet, in the shower or while eating a sandwich and staring out the window. That’s the core of your work, that you then roll around in your mind for a while to develop the idea into a whole song, which is where the ruminative thinking comes in. And then there’s the hard work, the construction of the song, the completion and revision of the lyrics, the reconstruction of the song, more revision. Rehearsing the parts. And this is before you’ve started recording, when there’s more absorbed work building drum tracks, recording guitar and vocal parts over and over until they are right, developing layered guitar and vocal parts to build texture and dynamic. You can tell from the rough unfinished state of the songs on The Death of Me, that I’ve thrown the ideas down but just can’t stay focussed enough to do the hard work parts.
The depressed state then, the downcast mood and activity in the VLPFC, these things occur for a very good reason. They allow the brain to avoid distraction, to focus on an important problem. Our attention is a limited resource, we can’t manage all the day to day administrivia, all the needs of people around us, and still focus deeply on important things at the same time, so when there’s a ‘big problem’, your brain throws the other stuff out. Whether you were the first guy who sulked in a cave for three days trying to nut out the problem of bringing down a mammoth to feed your starving family, or the system administrator who has a widespread server outage, three hundred people unable to do any work and waiting on you, there’s a lot of advantage to this thinking.
What science and psychiatry have long ignored in treating depression is that the switch into apparently useless ruminative thinking is usually triggered by life events, a response to real things. We’ve been looking at it arse about for fifty years – “this person is obsessed with these problems because his brain broke and he is depressed”. Come at the problem from the other direction, believing that the person’s brain is working fine, then you suddenly have someone who has fallen into a depressed mindset because his rumination on certain problems has failed to find an answer, or come to terms with something.
There’s even the suggestion that a period of depressed thinking after a traumatic event can be advantageous – chewing over your failed marriage, trying to find everything that went wrong, can allow a greater understanding of what went wrong, and lead to personal growth and a better ability to manage a next relationship. Hating your job can mean a deep consideration of what you really find rewarding, and can lead to you finding the career that suits you. If our depressed times are actually doing us good, the deep thinking being the ‘fever’ that helps kill the virus, then fighting the symptom without addressing the cause can prolong or worsen the underlying problem. Allowing ourselves to experience the negative mood can allow us to grow from the situation, understanding the problem and motivating us to change our lives and selves for the better.
In our house, if someone has a fever we don’t reach for the panadol, we generally let it burn as the fever isn’t the actual problem - the fever is your immune system’s response, making your body less friendly to the virus, so we let it do its thing. If you suppress the fever, it actually takes the body longer to defeat the virus. You feel like hell for a while, but it works. We do however drink plenty of water, rest up, eat healthy and take vitamins, to assist the immune system and speed the recovery. The same approach needs to happen with depression – you can medicate the depression away, but your underlying issues are still there, but if you help someone to understand the problems that keep rolling around their skull, to find solutions or perspectives that solve the problems, and the skills to manage them, the depression can go away with the problems – a 2005 study at Vanderbilt University showed that patients treated solely with antidepressants had a 76 percent chance of relapse, whereas cognitive therapy patients had a 31 percent relapse rate.
Chronic depression can happen when the process gets stuck – too many issues get stirred into the soup, and the rumination becomes circular. An issue that doesn’t seem to have a resolution will nonetheless stay in focus, or you know the answer but can’t bring yourself to take the action. Or the depressive side effect has become so strong or so habitual that you really do need to treat the symptoms before the cause, as the brain just isn’t functioning and the emotional reserves too empty to face the issues. However the fact remains that there’s overwhelming advantages to the ruminative process, both in problem solving and other skills that are useful in your life, and in addressing and resolving events and situations in our life that cause stress and emotional hurt. Learning to work with your feelings and emotions, rather than against them, is the key to beating depression and growing into a whole and functioning person.
Go to Part 4: Learning to Live, looking at how to develop strategies for living with a ruminative mind, and courses of action are available for people suffering depression.
References:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Depression-Should-Be-Embraced-Not-Medicated-102005.shtml
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/03/mood_and_cognition.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html
