Depression, by definition, is a subjective condition. A psychiatrist, a few weeks into treatment, will ask, ‘So, how are you feeling?’ Sometimes, the answer to this question doesn’t come in easy shades of black and white.
It’s true that in recent years it’s become easier to talk about mental health. Cricketers like current England captain Ben Stokes have been very open about their struggles, as have others like Australian fast bowling great Mitchell Johnson. It makes a difference when professionally fit sportsmen talk about it, for it busts the romantic myth that depression is a creative person’s bugbear.
Speaking of creative people, there was an important pop culture moment in the 1990s, when a clutch of bands, loosely grouped together as ‘Alternative Rock’, began to sing about depression. Patterns emerge only in retrospect, and when I look back on the music I was listening to then, it’s striking how many of the lyrics were about mental health. The narrative was about owning your depression.
The idea was embedded in song and album titles. Nirvana has a song, ‘
Lithium‘ , named after a chemical compound used to treat bipolar disorder, while Gin Blossoms named their album, ‘New Miserable Experience’. Stone Temple Pilots’ ‘Creep’ (bit.ly/3VrmBq4) has the refrain, ‘Take time with a wounded hand/ ‘Cause it likes to heal/ I’m half the man I used to be.’ There were others: Blind Melon, Radiohead, Alice in Chains, all of whom didn’t hesitate to explore the darkness within.
As someone who has had his own battles with depression, I’m often bemused by the advice dished out by irritatingly well-meaning ‘non-sufferers’. For one, depression is not a fashion statement. No one wants to be willingly ‘sad’. Stop telling us to ‘snap out of it’. If we could, we would have done so a long time back.
Another one is: ‘Seek professional help, and you’ll be fine.’ But seeking professional help is not as simple as calling an electrician from Urban Company. One might have to go through multiple psychiatrists and therapists, before one finds the appropriate ‘team’. People are also fond of repeating the mantra, ‘Take your meds.’ This, too, is a little more complex than it sounds. There are times dosages have to be tweaked, or a particular medication might stop working, or worse start backfiring.
This happened with Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, who was taking a drug called Ativan. While Ativan is supposed to help with anxiety and insomnia, its listed side effects include increased depression and impaired judgement. Cornell committed suicide.
Check out some of the American commercials for antidepressants on YouTube. It’s disturbing to see how Big Pharma often perpetuates the worst myths about depression. The commercials usually feature a before-and-after scenario: the depressive wallows in a dark room until help arrives in the form of a magic pill. Next shot: sunshine, blue skies, happy faces.
Many Indians think of antidepressants as an American invention, a crutch they want to avoid at all costs. In Strangers to Ourselves, a new book about mental health, author Rachel Aviv points out that it was the ayurvedic use of the plant Rauwolfia serpentina that gave rise to antidepressants – a fact generally written out of the history of psychiatry.
Aviv also explores the popular ‘crutch’ notion: ‘I’ve been oppressed by psychiatry, and if only I free myself from psychiatry, I will be well again.’ Using her own example of being on and off a medication called Lexapro, she investigates ‘the idea there’s some sort of pure, unadulterated self, free of medications, and that this self is necessarily worth fighting for.’