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At
one point, during the early days of my bouts with severe adolescent
depression, I accused my parents of being responsible for my mental
illness. Looking back I hate to think what it must have been like for
them. My father was a psychologist and my mother a nurse. They were
completely supportive of me even when I made this accusation. And I
know they were terribly frustrated that they couldn't do more to help
me than they did.
I've
always been a big admirer of the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who, like
his predecessors in the psychoanalytic field, viewed mental illness
as something which is socially generated. Laing did a lot of work on
trying to understand schizophrenia as an adaptation to unhealthy
forms of social interaction in families. Critics accused him of
blaming parents for the fact that their children became mentally ill.
He tried to point out that he didn't feel it was anyone's fault, but
that the problem had to be treated holistically and that other family
members also needed the therapist's help. More recently the theory
that mental illness is socially generated has fallen into disfavour.
The concept of mental illness arising through genetically determined
chemical imbalances has become the predominant one. I believe that
one reason for this is that it is comforting to parents. There is no
doubt that mood changes and anxiety states are expressed through
changes in the brain chemistry, but I see no reason to think that
those mood changes or feelings of anxiety are not responses to social
experiences and unhealthy learned ideas.
But
perhaps we can untie this knot that was at the heart of Laing's
rejection.
The
negative feedback loop is central to the problem of mental illness. A
simple example of this would be the situation of a young woman who
feels she is unattractive and seeks comfort from her depressed
feelings by over-eating. The more she eats, the fatter she gets, and
the fatter she gets the more unattractive she feels, and the more
unattractive she feels, the more depressed she gets, and the more
depressed she gets the more she feels the need for the comfort of
food. This kind of pattern can be found in depression, obsessive
compulsive disorder, phobias and, I believe, schizophrenia.
Now
lets go back to me as a depressed teenager. I remember what it felt
like, but when it comes to understanding the thinking which underlay
it I have to speculate. This can seem false to me. I put myself back
into the situation and look at it almost as if it were a mathematical
equation to be worked out. But I think this is part of the nature of
depression. Thinking is the key, but sometimes it is below the level
of consciousness. We spend so long thinking about how we are
depressed, that the short time in which we had the thoughts which
generated the depression are lost to us in retrospect.
There
were no doubt many factors involved. But lets just isolate the
question of my parents and feelings of guilt, and lets assume that
they did feel guilty about the fact that I was depressed. I don't
know if this was true in their case. But parents generally have a
strong predisposition to feelings of guilt even if they don't have a
child with a mental illness. Central to the human neurosis is that we
are incredibly hard on ourselves as individuals. We very easily
resort to punishing ourselves if we don't meet our high
self-expectations and this must be even harder to resist when we are
responsible for the raising of children.
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What
if I felt very unhappy about something and my unhappiness made my
parents feel unhappy. Not knowing how to shake my unhappiness, and
noticing that it was making my parents unhappy, I would have become
even more unhappy. If my parents felt, on some level, that they might
have made a mistake which led to my depression, then they would feel
guilty. I would notice that they were feeling guilty and feel that it
was my fault and thus become more depressed.
Since
feeling guilty is a problem for parents anyway, perhaps we should
tackle it head on rather than trying to run from it.
The
reason that guilt has been a persistent problem for humans is that we
have a strong cultural belief that it is appropriate. We feel that we
are supposed to feel guilty if we make a mistake or accidentally hurt
someone's feelings. We feel we would be heartless or selfish if we
didn't have these feelings. But the truth is that guilt is a
profoundly selfish emotion. When we feel guilty it becomes all about
us. Am I good enough? Our attention is on ourselves not those we feel
we have let down. This is natural. Selfishness is the natural
self-directedness of the suffering individual. Make ourselves suffer
and we will make ourselves more selfish. If we want to not be
selfish, then we have to let go of guilt and practise unconditional
self-acceptance. We always do the best we can in the circumstances.
What keeps us from doing better is that we won't accept this.
If
the cause of mental illness is negative feedback loops, then the
solution is positive feedback loops. If we accept ourselves
unconditionally and allow ourselves plenty of the healing balm of
pleasure, then our warm, loving and playful nature will reassure
others and help them to heal. Even if some people have problems which
can't be fully solved, we will help to take them as far as they can
go.
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