Since this weekend, when the news of Aaron Swartz’s suicide, there’s been a lot of discussion of the goverments ridiculous pursuit of him, and of the fact that he suffered from depression. I can’t contribute anything new about his prosecution. It was despicable, ridiculous, and sadly, all too typical of how our government works.
But on the topic of depression, I want to chime in. A good friend of mine wrote a post on his own blog about depression in the tech/geek community., which I feel like I have to respond to.
Benjy, who wrote the post, is a great guy who I have a lot of respect for. I don’t intend this to be an attack on him. But I’ve seen a lot of similar comments, and I think that they’re built on a very serious mistake.
Benjy argues that the mathematical/scientific/logical mindset of a geek (my word, not his) makes us more prone to depression:
Someone whose toolkit for dealing with the world consists of logic and reason, ideals and abstractions, may have particularly weak defenses against this trickster disease.
You realize that it’s lying to you, that there are treatments, that that things aren’t objectively as bad as they feel. But you know, on some level deeper than logic, that there is no point, no hope and no future. And to encounter, maybe for the first time, the hard limits of rationality, to realize that there’s a part of your mind that can override the logical world view that is the core of your identity, may leave you feeling particularly helpless and hopeless.
You can’t rationalize depression away, a fact that people who’ve never suffered from it find hard to comprehend. But if someone you care about is struggling with it, and it’s likely that someone is, you can help them find a new way to access their mind.
Tell them that you care about them and appreciate them and are glad to have them in your life. Show them that you enjoy being around them and that you love them. And above all, spend time with them. Give them glimpses of an alternate future, one in which they are secure, happy and loved, tear away the lies that depression needs in order to survive, and in that sunlight it will wither.
Most of what Benjy wrote, I agree with completely. The problem that I have with it is that I think that parts of it are built on the assumption that our conscious reasoning is a part of the cause of depression. If geeks are more prone to suffering from depression because the way that our minds work, that means that the way that we make decisions and interpret the world is a part of why we suffer from this disease. The implication that too many people will draw from that is that we just need to decide to make different decisions, and the disease will go away. But it won’t – because depression isn’t a choice.
The thing that you always need to remember about depression – and which Benjy mentions – is that depression is not something which you can reason with. Depression isn’t a feeling. It’s not a way of thinking, or a way of viewing the world. It’s not something that you can choose not to suffer from. It’s a part of how your brain works.
The thing that anyone who suffers from depression needs to know is that it’s a disease, and that it’s treatable. It doesn’t matter if your friends are nice to you. It doesn’t matter if you know that they love you. That kind of thinking – that kind of reasoning about depression – is part of the fundamental trap of depression.
Depression is a disease of the brain, and it affects your mind – it affects your self in a terrible way. No amount of support from your friends and family, no amount of positive reinforcement can change that. Believing that emotional support can help a depressed person is part of the problem, because it’s tied to the all-too-common stigma of mental illness: that you’re only suffering because you’re too weak or too helpless to get over it.
You don’t just get over a mental illness like depression, any more than you get over diabetes. As a friend or loved one of a person with diabetes, being kind, showing your love for them doesn’t help unless you get them to get treatment.
I’m speakaing from experience. I’ve been there. I spent years being miserable. It nearly wrecked my marriage. My wife was as supportive and loving as anyone could dream of. But I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything.
The experience of depression in different for different people. But for me, it was like the world had gone flat. I wasn’t sad – I was just dead inside. Nothing could have any impact on me. It’s a hard thing to explain, but looking back, it’s like the world had gone two-dimensional and black-and-white. Eventually, I was reading something in some magazine about depression, and it talked about that flat feeling, and I realized that maybe, maybe that was what was wrong with me.
When I started taking antidepressants, it was almost frightening, because it changed the world so much. ANtidepressants didn’t make me happy. In fact, for a while, they made me very sad, because I was realizing how awful I’d been treating my wife and daughter. But they made me feel things again. A few weeks after I started taking them, I realized that I was noticing colors. I hadn’t done that for years. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see colors when I was depressed, but they didn’t mean anything.
Antidepressants aren’t a panacaea. They don’t work for everyone. But there are treatments that can help. The way to defeat depression is to do something that changes the way the brain is functioning. For some people, the exercise of therapy can do that. For others, it’s medication. For still others, exercise. The key is to get to someone who understands the disease, and who can help you find what will work for your brain.
My point here is that when we’re talking about depression, we need to realize that most of the time, no one is at fault. People don’t suffer from depression because they did something wrong, or because they’re weak, or because they’re flawed. People don’t suffer from depression because their friends and family are inadequate. Depression is a disease – a treatable, chronic disease. It needs to be recognized, and it needs to be treated.
In my case, my depression wasn’t caused by my wife and daughter. It wasn’t their fault, and it wasn’t my fault. No amount of support, love, and appreciation could have helped, because the nature of my depression meant that I couldn’t see those things. The only thing that anyone could have done for me is recognized that I was suffering from depression, and pushed me to get treatment sooner.
If someone you know is suffering from depression, then they need help. But the help they need isn’t any amount of love or appreciation. It isn’t instilling any kind of hope, because depression kills hope in your brain. The thing that you can do to help is to help them get the treatment that they need.