This week, for Beyond Blue’s series, “How Do You Move Beyond Blue?” I am interviewing John D., who is a fellow mental-health blogger. His site, “Storied Mind,” is full of insights on a variety of topics: anger, tears, marriage, workplace issues, and more. Once I had landed on his pages, I couldn’t stop reading. One post was more fascinating and gripping than the next.
He is a gifted storyteller, that’s for sure. And battling depression from a male perspective, he has given me insight into how male symptoms of depression might come alive and bite you men out there in the butt as you go about your day. Thanks John! To get to storiedmind.com, click here.
Heeeeere’s Johnny ….
1) John, I’m intrigued by this explanation of why you started your site:

The concept of this blog is to build a small community based on the idea that writing stories is a useful method of fighting the impacts of depression and related mood disorders. My experience is that of a life-long sufferer from this quiet but deadly illness. I have no cures or therapies to offer. I have only stories, reflections, impressions, records of moments when a bit of life broke through. I invite you to share this space with me, to tell your stories to others who have similar issues to deal with. It’s a small step, a minor force when contending with the power of a major illness, but one that I have found helpful in ways that medication and therapies do not quite address.

I think that’s the same reason why I started to feel better after I committed to writing Beyond Blue. As I described in a previous post, Walker Percy talks about how writers overcome despair by spilling themselves onto the page (or computer) so to form a communion with the reader. It looks like you’re going after the same thing. Is it working?

So far it’s working better than I could have imagined. What’s probably not obvious to someone who looks at those posts is that each one was a life raft for that day when I was writing it. Each one helped me deal with the immediate impact of depression. Some people process life by talking, some by building things or playing a game or going out to drive or even shop.
I do it by writing. That’s the way I process every crisis.
I’ve written things for years, but doing it through a blog adds a whole new dimension. It’s not a finished work like a book or magazine article that you put out there for one-way communication. I love the kind of community that gathers to react and respond. Writing becomes part of a dialogue. The whole idea is energizing my treatment and giving me different perspectives on depression. So doing the blog – even though it’s just starting and hasn’t yet gotten where I hope it will – is the best therapy I’ve had in a long time.
2) My timing of finding your site is curious (as is usually the case when God gets involved) as I’ve started learning the difference in symptoms between male depression and female mood disorders. Your stories help explain the theories that I’ve just read about from doctors like Peter Rabins at Johns Hopkins. I loved your description in your “Real Depressed Men Don’t Cry” post about how you pulled off the freeway, fighting a surge of tears, as you listened to an NPR story:

And there I am exiting the freeway onto the downtown street a few blocks from my office when these lurchy guttural swellings started rising up in my throat. What the hell is this? Am I about to throw up as I’m pulling into the parking lot? No, it was worse than that. I’m fighting down this sob-machinegun choking my breath and pushing wet stuff out of my eyes.

Man, you are one secure guy, if you can admit to tearing up over an NPR story. God love you! So, what’s up with that? Do you think men WANT to cry but don’t, or that they simply don’t feel the urge as often as women? I have a female friend who never ever cries when she’s depressed. I don’t get that. When I’m depressed, I cry more often than I pee. Can you enlighten me a little here?
Secure? Not quite. Like a lot of men, I’m running scared a lot of the time! I wrote that post as a tongue-in-cheek way of dealing with a powerful thing that’s been happening since I started getting better.
There’s a John Hiatt song about his struggle with alcoholism, and it has a line about “crying thirty years or so.” It’s the grief of a lifetime coming through at the most unexpected times. It’s odd how the feeling will be triggered by a story about a total stranger.
The first time that happened to me was years ago when I was watching a TV story – perhaps it was on 60 Minutes – about Vietnam veterans suffering terribly from post-traumatic stress. This deeply troubled guy was describing how he got through a day, and the piece ended with his getting into his bed and pulling a blanket over his head as he said how much he liked to disappear. That pulled something right out of me that I hadn’t felt until then. The circumstances were totally different, but there was something he was going through that was identical to what I was keeping wrapped up inside me.??
I grew up shaping myself after the usual male songs – that men are tough, men don’t cry and complain, men can take it and get the job done. The worst thing is to be a coward or a weakling. When you’re a kid, that code is not so hard to live up to. I loved lifting weights and feeling strong, for the first time beating my older brother in a fight, going out for football and nailing a huge dude with a perfect tackle (of course, it wasn’t long before he mashed me).
When you grow up, though, you can’t solve anything in those simple physical ways. The world is much more frustrating, but you still have this male model in your head – you can’t be a weakling or a whiner. And admit to emotional difficulties? Forget it, and don’t talk to me about getting help! Despite all the sophistication you might acquire as you progress through life, there is still that crude role model in your gut.
Somehow, I did turn that around after banging my head against various walls. I can’t explain what the grief I feel is all about, but it’s there and it sure wants to come out. My wife thinks it’s a good thing because my feelings are coming to the surface after many years of my trying to disown them.
3) Kay Redfield Jamison, author of “An Unquiet Mind,” wrote that “tumultuousness, if coupled with discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing. In other words, unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life, one ought to be on good terms with one’s darker side and one’s darker energies.” You say something similar in your “Why Get Well?” post when you quote the author of the site, www.livingmanicdepressive.com: when he says that he doesn’t want to stop being bipolar because by fighting back against the disorder, he has defined and built his inner strength. “I may be better off without it,” he writes, “but I don’t think I would be me.”
I think everyone who battles depression would say they’ve learned a set of survival skills that have come in handy throughout their lives, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t give it back if Peter Pan visits me tomorrow with fairy dust. What about you? Would you waste a genie wish on a happier disposition? Or would you go for a BMW?
No question I’ve learned a lot from dealing with depression, but I realized after I wrote that piece that it could sound a little like glorifying the illness. I don’t want anyone to think that. I’ve read some writers talking about the benefits of depression: how stimulating to have “self-doubts,” how important to maintain your creative edge by experiencing such emotional depths! I don’t buy it for a minute. Depression destroys your mind, your brain – literally. It paralyzes you mentally, physically, emotionally. Nobody’s creative in that state. It’s terrible to live with this. And look what it does to your family and everyone who tries to be close to you. ??What I was trying to say in that post was simply that I can’t waste time wondering about a wonderful future without depression. It’s a part of me, and my life is a day-by-day struggle. In a way, I’m trying to affirm the wholeness of life, but certainly not glorify depression.
I’ve gotten extra sensitive about this as I’ve learned more about the physical and neurological destruction depression causes. Everyone should read Peter Kramer’s “Against Depression” on this issue. That book is a polite scream at the world to wake up. Depression is a deadly disease that has progressive effects the longer it continues. So stop seeing it in any other terms, he says, and let’s get busy trying to cure it!
4) I also liked your post on “anger therapy.” I loved the description of you peeling away from your office, hitting the highway, and getting back to your home to duke it out with Big D, to confront the bastard and tell him who is the boss. Anger is a common symptom among men, more so than women. How have you tamed yours, or changed it into a constructive emotion like you did on the afternoon of the tantrum you describe in your post?
The way I think of it: there’s a big difference between anger and rage.
Anger is an important human emotion, a response to a provocation or threat that helps me survive and comes from a healthy sense of self-esteem. Rage is an outpouring from my inner hurt, frustration, pain, anxiety and deeply damaged sense of self. It has no external cause, though I may fool myself into imagining that it does.
Most of what looks like anger or irritability when I’m depressed is really a more contained version of the underlying rage. For me, rage was common at the time when I was denying I was depressed, denying I felt as empty and worthless as I did. I’m not aware that I’ve consciously tamed that terrible force. It’s more like recovering begins to lessen the inner violence of rage. I just don’t feel it so often, thank God. And I think it’s because my sense of who I am is healing, and more normal emotions can take its place.
So what I was writing about in that sketch was the emergence of a healthy anger that was my spontaneous defense against being taken over by depression. I’ve been personifying depression in some of these posts because I find that’s a handy way of thinking about getting rid of this thing, or at least confronting it. Of course, that other “he” is never really gone, but it’s fun to imagine every now and then that, wow, I really kicked that bastard’s ass out of here.
5) Work issues. Your posts under this category were fantastic. This is an enormous battleground for depressives, especially for men who are more apt to base their self-esteem on work-related accomplishments than women, although obviously women do that too (I do, at least). In your post called “Support or Defeat,” you talk about the frustration you felt in having to step down from the executive team and let others fill in for you while you attended to your depression and began to heal. That is so damn hard. God, it’s brutal if you base your identify, as I did and as so many people do, on professional titles and accolades. Where are you in that process right now? Still letting other in your company chase the big jobs as you mend? Any words of wisdom for the depressive who is having a hell of a time functioning at work?
It’s working well in an unexpected way. It’s clear to me now that I can’t return to what I was doing before.
The biggest damage I feel from having a lesser role at the office is to my pride, not my basic sense of what I’m worth. I’ll always get a boost to my self-esteem from doing well the work I value, but is it this work in this organization?
The impact of depression has forced me to think through what I really want to do, and I’ve gotten energized about building on what I’m best at and going in another direction.
Healing is progressing, although fitfully, and when that happens you want to strip away anything that no longer rings true at meeting your deepest needs.
I’m not so good at giving advice, but there is one thing to say: I would advise anyone with mood disorders to look closely at their jobs and professions and ask probing questions about how the two – the disorder and the work – might be linked. Changing your approach to work doesn’t have to feel like failure – it can be the key to leading a better life.
6) In your post, “Becoming an Activist,” you write the following:

As I came to accept and believe that depression wasn’t the result of my failings or weaknesses, but a major illness, a malignant condition, then I needed to deal with treatment more consciously. Up to that point, I had been through a lot of talking therapies and the newer medications, but while each approach helped for a while, nothing was effective for very long. I realized I had to become more active in my own treatment, and I had learned how to do that from another disease I had recently had to combat. That was cancer. But what I found was that I couldn’t do much about that disease until I had confronted a deepening depression.

I wouldn’t wish a cancer diagnosis on anyone, however much you might learn from it. Nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully, to paraphrase a sage of the 18th century, as the knowledge that you have a growing thing inside your body that will kill you if left untreated. That triggers every intense emotion in the human repertory.
As someone with a few other health complications (a pituitary tumor and an abnormal aortic valve), I am a fervent believer in that you have to educate yourself and be your own advocate in healthcare today. My experience with unskilled psychiatrists has taught me that I should always question a doctor’s diagnosis and treatment plan. Until I know that I can trust her (as I do with my present psychiatrist). What specifically has battling cancer taught you in your struggle with depression?
Battling cancer mostly taught me about dealing with the medical profession and hospitals. It’s a strange illness because you don’t feel sick, at least early on, and there are few or no external symptoms. Yet people are telling you – You could die!
Depression is just the opposite. It’s total misery and pain – symptoms all over the place, yet even today only a few people think of it as a killer disease. As I wrote in that post, I had both conditions at the same time. It was only by telling depression to shut the hell up for a while that I could start thinking clearly about how to deal with cancer.
I took to heart Michael Lerner’s concept of the activist patient in his book, “Choices in Healing,” which is written for people who have a cancer diagnosis. So I marched off to the hospital determined to be treated like a person, thrusting out my hand for a shake and intro to all sorts of people I would only see for thirty seconds. They were all totally bewildered, of course, but it made a difference to me to be present in mind and feeling for everything that was going on. I was positively energized about getting through an operation and all the testing and processing that goes with it.
Six months later I was depressed all over again, but at least I had that reprieve. And it was the first time I had the experience of just forcing depression aside while I tried to save my life. It’s only recently, 11 cancer-free years later, that I’m getting back that same healing frame of mind. And it’s helping once again, this time to go after depression.