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Sometimes the complexity of life requires more than many, if not most, of us can handle. For some, the complexity of their inner life becomes overwhelming, and begins a long, slow cycle downward into what the ancients called a ”dark night of the soul.”
In today’s medical vernacular, we call it depression.
And, as too many of us know personally, and as all of us were reminded this week, depression is an ugly, albeit powerful, monster.
After weeks, months and even years of bravely fighting the monster to no avail, some begin to realize that the only way to end the battle would be to remove themselves from it by suicide.
The story of Robin Williams brings to center stage an all-out war that is being waged in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans all across the country – including in our community here. It was revealed Thursday that Williams was also battling Parkinson’s Disease. Odds are, you know someone who is battling depression, and if not depression, you know someone battling mental illness of another kind.
Despite the fact that it’s the year 2014, and despite the fact that the last 40 years have been marked with endless television campaigns to help us understand depression and other mental illnesses, it can feel to those who struggle with mental illness, or to those who care for those struggling, that we live in the Dark Ages.
In the 1975 classic, ”Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a woman who has been accused of being a witch is pulled before a crowd of angry men and women who try to prove she’s a witch through all sorts of ridiculous, even idiotic, methods of ”science.” A completely normal man says she turned him into a newt; another points to a wart on her nose, which ends up being a rag-tag piece of costumery made by the crowd. Proving her magical nature comes down to whether or not she can float, and so they put her on a scale with a duck.
To those suffering mental illness, many people around them offer solutions no better, no more helpful, than these silly remedies. Friends and family members run to easy platitudes: ”Just don’t feel that way anymore.” ”Just get out of bed, and you’ll feel better.” ”What you need now is just a bit more hard work and some fresh air.” ”Just pray about it.”
(Christians, I’m sorry to say, are the very worst at platitude-izing sorrowful, painful situations.)
Even worse, there is still a social stigma to medicating mental illnesses. When a friend of mine, my graduate school roommate, went through a significant season of depression, he had a hard time bringing himself to accept a prescription because he had been trained to think he was taking the easy way out by doing so. (Months later, it was the medication he was prescribed by trained mental health professionals that ended the cycle.)
I write this column for one simple purpose: to tell you that if you are reading this while battling significant mental illness, or perhaps what feels to you like a low-grade fever of sadness that just won’t go away, that you really would benefit were you to seek some professional help. Until then, start keeping a journal of what you think and feel – it can be cathartic to get it out every once in a while.
If you love someone with mental illness, and you are resistant to your loved one getting help, please do your friend or family member a favor and do everything you can do to help. If conscience, or frankly, stubbornness, is stopping you, do as James Lipton, of ”Inside the Actor’s Studio” fame, encouraged directors who worked with Robin Williams to do: ”Get out of the way.”
For the rest of us, let’s not be afraid of silence. My aforementioned friend and I spent many hours in silence. Here is one platitude that I encourage you to live by, when depression rears its head in the life of someone you know and love: ”Silence is golden.”
Tennant is a Warren resident and local pastor. Email him at editorial@tribtoday.com