One of our sons is suffering from depression…twenty years ago perhaps, and certainly fifty years ago, one wouldn’t speak of such a thing…the taboo of mental illness was just unmentionable. I had a great aunt who had serious mental health issues way back when, before we had heard the term bipolar, and when she was really in the throws of her so-called eccentricity her family would say she was just having one of her spells. There were no health insurance questionnaires back then, but had there been, when the question arose: “Have you been diagnosed with mental illness?” The family would have certainly answered , “certainly not.”
In my son’s case I have chosen to look at it this way… and I don’t mean to be blithe about the weight upon him right now, nor do I intend to be about the process of denial….I recognize that this is a crisis in his life and in the life of our family….but I have chosen to see this as a watershed event…an opportunity for his transformation, and perhaps ours…not so much about health or illness, but about a process of wholeness, a process of becoming who one is made to be…the so-called polarities of illness and health but an illusion…illness and health both parts of one sacred process of becoming whole and mature…..illness perhaps a necessary evil, as it were, to move us towards a deeper humanity. Thinking this way doesn’t lessen the pain of the process, but certainly in seeing things this way there is cause for hope for all of us when in the “winter of our discontent,” a winter that will surely come in its own time.
T.S. Eliot says it in Four Quartets: that we are to obey the dying nurse who reminds us that to be restored our sickness must become worse….I think this is an admonition that we must at some time in our lives grapple honestly with our mortality….grapple with the ashes and dust of our being….grapple with the reality that death and life play their respective dramatic roles even while we live out our brief period of existence on this earth….and that means that there are times in our lives wherein there is pain….but the pain is a part of a greater process…pain that can in its time be transformed by hope….This is counter-cultural in a world in which pain is an alien intrusion…(and I’m not arguing here against the responsible use of modern medications) But I have this notion that our individual dealing with pain, might have ramifications beyond ourselves, certainly within our families and possibly within the greater community.
This is not to say that we suffer for suffering’s sake….but that when our time comes, as it surely will….we bear the pain of transformation with sure and certain hope that there is life waiting for us…and that it is a life renewed and perhaps more meaningful than before….at least we can hope as much….for sometimes hope is all we have.
Jim, I think it’s worth noting that Winston Churchill, Abe Lincoln, and many other great people suffered from depression. Churchill called it his “black dog.”