Matthew T Grant

When I tell my wife I’m depressed, she’ll often ask, “Why?”

I usually explain that, at least for me, depression is rarely a response to some negative event. If it were, I would call it “sadness” or “unhappiness” or “disappointment.”

Depression, by contrast, is an all-permeating negative attitude or perspective, probably stemming from a genetically determined neuro-chemical fluctuation. In other words, when I’m depressed, I’m not depressed because something bad happened or something good didn’t go my way; I’m depressed because I have a tendency to depression (and, some would point out, a countervailing tendency towards mania).

It’s natural, when someone is feeling down, to try and buoy their spirits by reminding them of all they have to be grateful for (much as this blogger does in response to a recent suicide). “You still have your health!” “You’ve got friends who like you and a family that loves you.” “At least you’re not rotting away in a Turkish prison.” Etc.

The  problem is that depression is not an intellectual error. It’s not something that will go away if you just “look at the facts” or “do the numbers.” In other words, it’s not a (falsely drawn) conclusion which can be rectified if you just check your work and figure out where you  went off track.

The “count your blessings” approach can’t dislodge depression because depression doesn’t arise from miscounting. In my experience, however, it can be addressed with exercise, sleep, proper diet, a change of scenery, time spent with friends, etc. In other words, actions that change the chemical makeup of your body, rather than arguments that change your mind.

Depression manifests in our consciousness; we ought to treat it by way of the flesh in which that consciousness is embedded.

Several years ago I read J. Allan Hobson’s The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness and though I found the book somewhat frustrating, as I wrote in this review, I did learn a thing or two from it.

First of all, I learned a little about the neurochemical states that mark the transition from waking consciousness to sleeping and then dreaming consciousness. (The book is mainly an exercise in mapping the neurochemical footprint of alcohol and various drugs to various aspects of these states.)

Second of all, I learned that relatively little scientific research has focused on exactly what goes on in our heads while we are awake. One attempt at this that Hobson describes involved hooking subjects up to an electric pulse generator and, whenever the subject felt a pulse, he or she would write down what was going on in his or her head at the time.

Perusing the data thus collected, Hobson (or someone very much like him) concluded that most of waking consciousness consists of two activities: Review and Rehearsal. On the one hand, we are reviewing past events. On the other, we are rehearsing what we will say or do in future circumstances (I’m assuming that certain categories of fantasy would fit into this latter category).

So, what are you doing right now? Reviewing? or Rehearsing?