Warning

What if we all grew up with the understanding that feeling low is natural, and that it is the same as a bruise being the body’s way of healing itself after a fall? Imagine if we could accept that the mind slows down as its own healing response to an emotional knock?

Is it possible that we have just made a huge mistake in using the same word to describe what could be an evolutionary response, as we use for an utterly life destroying mental breakdown?

Instead we just seem to buy into being told that we are getting more depressed all the time. It is the biggest crisis facing global health, the headlines yell at us­. Statistics back up the statements. Each year ‘as many people in the world now die from suicide as from homicide and warfare combined’, to quote Professors Richard Layard and David Clark, in their co-authored book Thrive: The Power of Evidence-Based Psychological Therapies. And here’s the tricky question—how do you take on something this huge when the stigma around it is such that most people will not seek treatment until it is dangerously late into their mental suffering, so late that they see death as being the only alternative to the pain?

Please read the following with care.

The scale across depression and anxiety is huge. To compare what is sometimes referred to as mild or bearable depression with a major depressive disorder is almost the same as putting a dose of ‘flu on par with a brain tumour. One can make you feel quite crappy for a while, but the other can kill you. Similarly the difference between a lower level of depression and the brutality of a total breakdown is as extreme. As with ‘flu and a tumour, the former can make life difficult for a while, while the latter can result in self-inflicted death.

So, to the warning or the title—there could be a profound misunderstanding of a very important aspect of depression. There is the possibility that what is hard but bearable might be mental evolution, as in an internally enforced state of mental rest combined with a very personalised form of emotional resilience training.

Here we are, at the top of the food chain. It has taken millions of years to get here and, as we have clambered up, one of our greatest protectors has been the ‘fight or flight’ response, triggering a hyper-alert state that enables us to fight the predators that we think we can beat, and to flee from those that we cannot. It was vital for the survival of the species out on the savannah, hunting wild boar, or when up against a pack of wolves, but most of us are now living in pretty comfortable societies. Different varieties of wild or lupine bores may still be out there, but most don’t actually threaten to kill us, at least in the flesh.

So, we do not need to fight or flee on a regular basis, but this primal response is still very much in place, and almost unchanged across the millennia. It gets topped up all the time, pushed to even more heightened states by great slugs of caffeine, refined sugars, sensory over-stimulation of every variety, right across the gamut, from artificial light through to hard-core pornography. The emotional system gets over-loaded and it spins out into anxiety, fragmented thinking, loss of concentration, messed up sleep, neuroses, obsessive behaviour patterns, violence, paranoia.

On the back of that charming list comes a depressed state, and I use depressed in a different sense, as in a lowering and slowing of both physical and mental systems. They begin to shut down. At first it crops up as not wanting to see people, not wanting to think, or to have to make any decisions. It is not long before it becomes not actually wanting to do anything at all. Sleep seems the safest place to hide.

And we have decided to, or we have been told to, perceive these things as being both debilitating and destructive? We have labelled them as symptoms marking a descent into despair, a place that is most commonly responded too with a prescription for anti-depressants or anxiolytics, as in the ‘mother’s little helper’ roll call, from slow-dose sleeping pills to Xanax.

What about changing our point of view? How about relabeling these very human responses as evolutionary answers to extreme levels of over-stimulation? It is possible that the label is just wrong, and that it is demonising what could just be our natural processes of deep mental rest, withdrawal, and healing?

I am not just throwing a controversial view on mental health out there because I am an ether masochist who gets off on ‘I wish you were dead’ cyber hate mail. Nor am I trying to dilute the utterly debilitating and dehumanising impact of all kinds of severe depression. But let me give you an example. Those I work with in Kashmir have been exposed to almost perpetual violence for more than twenty-five years—an era of bloodshed that is on-going. The levels spike, creating a matching peak in the collective ‘fight or flight’ response. When the violence cools off a bit large numbers of people experience, at first, a period of distressing restlessness. This is followed by what presents clinically as an epidemic of depression and anxiety. Our psychotherapy team help those that we treat to understand that this is a cycle, a very natural one, and to value their mind’s response to the spikes with a time of recovery, a time when everything feels dulled down for a while, maybe numb or, to loosely translate the word that we use, the mind takes rest. As people grasp this, their point of view changes and so does their sense of despair. They understand that their minds have had a bruising, and that they just need to go very quiet for a while in order to heal. As their point of view shifts, it seems to trigger recovery.

If you had been told, since you were a child, by your parents, at school, on television, on-line, that this dulling down of the senses was just a natural response, the normal off-set to over-doing it, do you think you would feel differently? Do you think that you might have another kind of understanding about your mind’s response to a period of particular stress, over-excitement, or over-stimulation?

Is it too late to rethink our view on bearable levels of depression? Can we find a way to see them as states of recuperation rather than despair?

I think we can.