Random Ruminations on Depression

Preamble
I want to take back the word ruminate. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains that the word “ruminate (v.)” dating from the 1530s, means “’to turn over in the mind,’ also ‘to chew cud’ (1540s), from Latin ruminatus, past participle of ruminare ‘to chew the cud; turn over in the mind,’ from rumen (genitive ruminis) ‘gullet,’ of uncertain origin.” Merriam-Webster Online gives the definition of ruminate as

transitive verb
1: to go over in the mind repeatedly and often casually or slowly
2: to chew repeatedly for an extended period
intransitive verb
1: to chew again what has been chewed slightly and swallowed : chew the cud
2: to engage in contemplation : REFLECT

But psychology — and in general I have real respect and genuine gratitude for the healing and support psychology and psychotherapists provide; if I kept a gratitude journal, my therapist’s name would be on every page — has come near to ruining this abundantly apt word that perfectly expresses the way many of us need or choose to take the time to ponder and deliberate rather than hasten to judge or get embroiled in the consequences of an ill-considered decision. Psychology, as a field, has decided ruminate should mean obsessively thinking about whatever is bothering one, over and over, round and round… ¹

 

I think one of the reasons that this definition has become popular, not only among psychologists, but in the general public as well, is that we have such short attention spans and have come to prize speed over all else. We rush to embrace technology that robs us of our privacy, we don’t stay to watch the credits after a movie (unless there’s an added scene), we expect to know the results of every election before the votes are all counted.

 

Take a breath, people.  

 

Being ruminative used to be a positive attribute, one that indicated one was a careful, thoughtful person, not inclined to fling one’s self pell-mell off a cliff. Now it is a weakness, a character flaw that indicates one brings one’s misfortunes upon one’s self because one can’t control one’s thoughts. 

Join me in my mission. Let’s rescue ruminate. Start using it in its proper sense. Fling it with abandon into your philosophical conversations: “I was ruminating upon the meaning of life the other day and wondering just what 42 really has to do with it.” If someone tries to push you into making a snap decision, say, “You know, in order to give you the thoughtful answer you

https://pixabay.com/photos/pensive-female-woman-window-staring-580611/

deserve, I need to ruminate on that for a day or two.” When next asked to describe yourself, pause for a moment,  then declare, “I am an attentive, measured sort of person with a ruminative cast to my mind.” (Just don’t tell anyone you’re a ruminant. That will totally undermine our goal.) 

And after we save ruminate, we’re coming back for you, enable.
*****************************

Every so often, the New Yorker slips a suggestion for an archived article into the inbox of my e-mail. That how I came across Andrew Solomon’s article, “Anatomy of Melancholy,” that appeared in New Yorker’s January 12, 1998 issue. It’s a pretty harrowing description of the depths down to which depression can pull person and of the biases that still pertain when it comes to admitting to others or to ourselves that we have a mental illness and, worse, might be so “weak” as to need chemical (or electrical) interventions. As I moved through the essay, I came upon this proffered bit of wisdom:

Accuracy of perception is not an evolutionary priority. Too optimistic a world view results in foolish risk-taking, but moderate optimism gives you a strong selective advantage. “Normal human thought and perception,“ Shelley Taylor writes in her 1989 book, Positive Illusions, “is marked not by accuracy but by positive self-enhancing illusions about the self, the world, and the future. Moreover…these illusions are not merely characteristic of human thought; they appear actually to be adaptive.” As she notes, “The mildly depressed appear to have more accurate views of themselves, the world, and the future than normal people. [They] clearly lack the illusions that in normal people promote mental health and buffer them against setbacks.”

Charles Darwin
Photo by hulki-okan-tabak-SKadYI4E7OM-unsplash

So — why are those of us with depression and accurate perceptions the ones who are mentally ill, while the “normies” with their illusions are the ones who are considered sane? Why are we the ones who are seen as less evolved? Am I the only one who thinks this assessment is a little bit off?

************************************

  In a recent car commercial, actor and apparent guru Matthew
McConaughey ruminates (see how easy it is just to slip the word right into a sentence?) out loud about the process of identity formation.

McConaughey muses

“Knowin’ who we are is hard — it’s hard. Eliminatin’ who you
are not, first, and you’re gonna find yourself where ya need to be.”

OK, first: shouldn’t the thrust of the first sentence — the search for identity — lead to a statement about finding out who one is rather than where one is? I guess that’s what happens when one infuses manufactured sagacity into an advert for a vehicle. And never mind the lack of parallel structure in the second sentence.

But what I keep thinking is, “What if we, as is recommended by Mr. McConaughey, eliminate all the people we are not, only to realize there’s no one left?” That’s kind of who-where I keep finding myself.

*********************************

An ethical dilemma: At the recommendation of a friend, I picked up Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, by Daniel G. Amen. M.D. I haven’t read very far into it, but so far there are some sensible observations about the practicality of having one’s brain scanned for damage so one knows whether medical or psychotherapeutic remedies are most likely to be beneficial. However, on page twenty-nine, our friend the doctor discusses things that hurt the brain and things that help the brain. Under malign influences, Dr. Amen notes that “even spending time with unhealthy people [is] bad for the brain.” OK: I can see how that can work; we are the company we keep.

In the next paragraph, Dr. Amen lists things that can boost the brain. This list includes the point that “In many ways, the best thing you can do for your brain is to spend time with healthy people. As we will see, they are contagious. I often say the fastest way to get healthy is to find the healthiest person you can stand and then spend as much time around him or her as possible.” That also makes sense.

Aside from the difficulties of fulfilling this prescription in our COVID-19-riddled age — and you may already see the problem here — consider this: Let’s say I’m a healthy person. I know an unhealthy person, someone with, say, depression, someone who would immensely benefit from spending time with me. Yet if I do spend time with that person, I’ll be engaged in an activity that will be detrimental to my own grey matter. On the other hand, if I choose to protect myself by shunning the depressed person, I’m selfishly depriving her or him of my beneficial “contagion” and preventing that person from attaining the flourishing cerebrum she or he deserves. (Unless, of course, that person has been ruminating. In that case, she or he deserves all the melancholy that infests her or his soul. [That’s an example how NOT to use the word ruminating.]) I’m either allowing harm to come to myself or withholding aid from another, which makes me a pretty lousy human being, and knowing that I’m a pretty lousy human will depress me.

Now let’s imagine that I am the unhealthy person, and I know a tremendously healthy person, in whose salubrious presence I never fail to rally. I have a lot of time on my hands. I easily could spend days with this person and notably sharpen my dulled mental functions and ameliorate my debilitating mood. However, by latching on to this bloom-imparting person, I will be causing harm to that individual’s well-being and will likely disrupt her or his equilibrium. That would make me an insensitive parasite, sucking the life out of someone for my own ends, and being such a draining leech would make me feel horrible and depressed.

So what to do? I hate lose-lose, damned-if-you-do-or-don’t, caught-between-Scylla-and-a-hard-place options.

**********************************

And then Will Wheaton put this up on his Blog:

報復性熬夜
Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, which has a much more beautiful name in Chinese (the literal translation for revenge bedtime procrastination means “suffering through the night vengefully.”), is a phenomena unique to people who feel out of control in their daily lives, so we refuse to go to sleep early, to exert some control over our lives, and to enjoy some quiet time alone, when the rest of our people are sleeping.

I should confess, straight up, that I am, by nature, a night owl. It runs in the family. But I love both this concept and its name. Between the depression and the M.E. and the State of the Union, I’m having an increasingly hard time getting any sleep. I just wish being AWAKE YES I’M AWAKE YES I DO KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS OH ISN’T THAT A LOVELY SUNRISE? would wreak some actual vengeance on the conditions and people who are responsible for my near-insomnia.

*****************************

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/fantasy-face-branches-woman-3317298/

I hope, dear reader, that my ruminations provide some conceptual cud for your synapses to masticate at the pace of your choosing. And don’t forget: enable is still waiting for us…
_____________________________________

  1. Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D. “Rumination: A Problem in Anxiety and Depression,” Psychology Today (on line). April 20, 2016.

Thirty Reasons to Vote: #27

 

This is Erev Yom Kippur. Ten days ago, on Erev Rosh Hashanah, we learned of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Before the evening was old, Mitch McConnell and the president declared their determination to rush to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat with a far-right judge, an intention they are working hard to fulfill.

So much, for now, for the re-cap. Just put that to the side for a moment; it’ll come back around again.

Every so often during the year — whenever there’s a Jewish holiday — I ask myself why I, as someone on the Agnostic-Atheist Spectrum, keep celebrating these holidays, but I know the answers. A lot of it has to do with being brought up that way, with maintaining an identity and a connection to my family, those living and those dead. (My idea of Pascal’s Wager is reminding myself that, if there is an afterlife, I don’t want to spend mine explaining to my Yiddishe grandparents why I stopped being Jewish. And then my Aunt Lillie would show up —— let’s not even go there.)

But aside from the fear-of-perpetual-guilt, there’s also an emphasis in Judaism on getting this life right, on cultivating right relations between people.¹ And that’s particularly true around the High Holy Days, when one is supposed to try to fix relations between one’s self and others one has hurt or done wrong before one can ask God for forgiveness. The making things right makes sense to me. Ideally, I’d just go around apologizing all year ’round, but I don’t, so I appreciate the yearly reminder. I actually take this ritual pretty seriously. I think I’m mostly a pretty innocuous person, but I have my moments, particularly when I’m angry or scared or just plain stupid, when I can lash out or not realize I’m saying the most keenly hurtful thing possible — either way, it’s important to me to make amends.

It was hard to start apologizing, to say “I was wrong,” but what really set me back was how hard it was for people to hear and accept my apologies. Almost everyone tried to turn the situation into a joke; some even got sharply angry with me, they were so uncomfortable. People reacted as if I were trying to wrong-foot them or as if I were exposing a soft spot for them to poke.

And this is where I want to start circling back to to the beginning of this post. We, as a society, have come to regard an apology — a sincere apology that signals a change of heart, a change of mind, as a fault, a flaw, a fatal error. And we avoid exposing ourselves to such judgement, to the power over us that an apology might give someone.

We see this attitude so clearly in politics. No politician wants to admit to being wrong lest the other political sharks start circling, letting blood, tearing out chunks of flesh. Constituents, too, may feel betrayed and lash out in anger.

We need to make it possible for people to apologize, to make amends, to change their minds. The decision to hurry Justice Ginsburg’s replacement onto the Court would be the perfect place to start. A majority of Americans²  — up to 62% — want to wait until after Inauguration Day to seat a new judge. If you’re one of those Americans, write and call and e-mail your senators. If they’ve come out for replacing Justice Ginsburg before the election or during a lame-duck period (if there is one), tell them you’ll regard them more highly for listening to their constituents and for changing their minds. 

Will it work? I don’t know. But please give it a try. And no matter what, sometime by the third of November — VOTE.
*********************************************

 

  1. And here, everyone who’s Jewish and is reading this, who was probably nodding along during the guilt bit, is sitting up to argue and explain at length why I’m wrong. It’s what we do. You know what they say: where there are two Jews, there are three opinions.
  2. “A new poll showed that the American public agrees with him and opposes Mr. Trump’s plan to rush a new justice onto the court. Of those surveyed by Reuters and Ipsos since Justice Ginsburg’s death, 62 percent said her seat should be filled by the winner of the November election, including the vast majority of Democrats and even half of Republicans.” Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman. “Trump and Democrats Brace for Showdown Over Supreme Court Seat,” New York Times. 25 September, 2020.