Surviving America's Depression Epidemic
Surviving America's Depression Epidemic
How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy
by Bruce Levine
Excerpt
During her annual physical examination, a nurse friend of mine mentioned that she had been depressed. Her hurried physician tried his best to say something empathic: “So, who’s not depressed? If you work in health care, you’re depressed.”
Americans live in the age of industrialized medicine, and everyone-inside and outside of health care-is now in the same boat. Doctors are financially pressured to be speedy mechanics, and patients often receive assembly-line treatment, which can be a painful reminder of their assembly-line lives. While most Americans manage to go to work and pay their bills, more than a few struggle just to get out of bed, and growing numbers feel fragile, hollow, hopeless, and defeated.
In 1998, Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, spoke to the National Press Club about an American depression epidemic: “[W]e discovered two astonishing things about the rate of depression across the century. The first was there is now between ten and twenty times as much of it as there was fifty years ago. And the second is that it has become a young person’s problem. When I first started working in depression thirty years ago . . . the average age of which the first onset of depression occurred was 29.5. Essentially middle-aged housewives’ disorder. Now the average age is between fourteen and fifteen.”
Despite the unparalleled material wealth of the United States, we Americans-especially our young-are increasingly unhappy. What is happening in our society and culture? How is it that the more we have come to rely on mental health professionals, the higher the rates of depression? And are we in need of a different approach to overcoming despair?
During the course of our lives, it is the unusual person who does not have at least one period of deep despair. The majority of depressed people do not choose professional treatment but many do, and my intent is not to create discontent among patients satisfied with their mental health treatments. This book is for people who believe that any approach to depression that does not confront societal and cultural sources for despair becomes part of the problem rather than a sustainable solution. Standard mental health treatments routinely ignore the depressing effects of an extreme consumer culture, and for people who feel alienated from such a culture, it is my experience that conventional treatments can actually increase their sense of alienation and contribute to their despair. This book is also about providing hope and a practical path for people who have lost faith in psychiatric orthodoxy, often because it has failed them or their loved ones.
I am in my third decade of working with people who have not been helped by standard psychiatric treatments. I have found that while the majority of such “treatment resisters” do not identify with any political party, most share these political views: they are deeply pained by a society that focuses on increasing consumption rather than celebrating life; they believe that powerful corporations rather than individuals and communities dictate public policy; they suspect that many of those authorities and institutions-including those in mental health-that inform Americans have been corrupted and hijacked by corporations whose singular goal is increased profit; and they consider it common sense that an alternative approach that threatens the societal status quo will be ignored or derided by those who financially profit from the status quo.
Much of what I will spell out is increasingly neglected in the education of mental health professionals. Today I would give most professional training programs failing grades in the following areas necessary for revitalization:
• Regaining morale. The demoralized need people skilled at the craft of transforming immobilization to energy, and they need to learn the craft of self-energizing.
• Understanding depression. Depression is a “strategy” for shutting down pain, a strategy that can result in the depressing of one’s being and a vicious cycle of more pain and repeated depression.
• Healing the source of depression. The unhealed need helpers skilled at the craft of healing emotional wounds, and they need to learn the craft of self-healing.
• Distinguishing self-acceptance from self-absorption. While the self-absorption associated with extreme consumerist society is one source of depression, self-acceptance provides the security necessary for connecting with the whole of life, which is an antidote to depression.
• Teaching the essentials of relationships. Beyond simplistic communication skills, depressed people often need a deeper wisdom about friendship, intimacy, family, and community.
• Reforming society. Whether people are successful or not in shaping a less depressing world, they are often rewarded with community and vitality when they go beyond their private sphere.
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