Looking for Happiness in All the Wrong Places?

A word of warning:  this post is more of an observation than a ‘lesson’;  a question rather than an answer.  I don’t want someone to waste their time reading and expecting a piece of life-changing advice… only to find more things to wonder about! I also need to be brief because I need to get to the office, although perhaps briefness is something appreciated by those who stumble across this site!

I just finished an appointment with a young lady who is facing a number of challenges.  She is 22 and single, and she lives with her preschool-aged daughter in half of a duplex.  In the past month she had quite a run of bad luck.  Her slumlord hasn’t come through with the repairs he promised to make; she has an oven that doesn’t work, doors with broken deadbolts (in one of the more crime-ridden neighborhoods), and a number of other annoyances.  Her attempts to pressure him to fix things culminated in a complaint to a government agency… and now he is taking her to court to evict her, despite assurances in the law that eviction cannot occur after such complaints.

But I’m just getting started!  When the heat comes on,  the unit is flooded with the smell of urine from the unit below, where a disabled crazy man lives with too many cats.  Her child’s doc said that the fecal material from the cats caused the infection that hospitalized her daughter for several days;  the patient’s workplace is too small to honor family leave, so she was fired after insisting that she spend nights with her daughter in the hospital.  Meanwhile the guy downstairs had assumed he had a close friend when she took the upper unit, but at some point she tired of waiting through his several-per-day visits, and asked him to provide some ‘space’.  This angered the mentally disabled man (frankly it is not that safe for a young woman to have this 30-y-o person alone in the house, as obsessions can develop and turn dangerous).  He retaliated by stealing her mail, and eventually convincing the post office that she had moved– causing her to miss deadlines and not get unemployment.

I can imagine dealing with one of these things;  as a 40-something man (for a few more months anyway) I would find the situation frustrating.  It would have been very difficult to deal with these things on my own when I was in my early 20′s!  And to be faced with all of these situations– I cannot imagine what I would do.  I often find that in such cases the problems are self-induced, but with this person that is not the case;  she has done the things that people are supposed to do– but still things have not worked out.  Sick kid, lost job (a crappy job at that), bad neighbor, bad landlord, hospitals, non-functioning appliances, government agencies, court summons for eviction…  and did I mention that all of this is happening two years into recovery from a bad narcotic addiction?  She continues to do well on that front– somehow.

Despite these challenges she has stayed away from narcotics, kept appointments to get her daughter back to good health, found another full-time job, straightened out the Post mistakes, and prepared for court by getting a bunch of supportive papers together.  Pretty impressive for a 22-y-o recovering drug addict!

But now my question…  Why isn’t this woman depressed?  She is not, by the way, taking antidepressants– although she probably should be, just for prophylactic purposes (I am kidding– sort of, anyway)!  Why is it that one person who is twice her age and has half her problems will become stressed and depressed, and she continues to go from day to day, one after the other, without falling apart?  The answer is not ‘Faith’, at least not in any way that I can see;  I have seen patients of strong Faith with severe depressions, and this woman does not have any significant connection to a ‘higher power’.

I know I started by saying that I didn’t have an answer, but one has occurred to me over the past few minutes ( I also said I would be brief!) — an answer that will surely anger many people and that I therefore should keep to myself…  but I won’t.  The reason she hasn’t become depressed is because she can’t.  She simply does not have the time– not with a small child to care for.  I will pause for a moment to let the anger build in people before defending myself in the next paragraph.

No, I am not saying that depression or any other mental illness is a matter of ‘choice’– not conscious choice anyway.  Not in a way that people have any control over.  But I do wonder if there IS a choice component at some unconscious level— I am a big believer in the unconscious, and have watched for years in cases of addiction where the unconscious ‘addict inside’ leads a person around by the nose, destroying more and more of the person’s life.  I have to wonder if in some cases there is an unconscious awareness that ‘this is not the time for a depression’, and in other cases a similar and opposite awareness.

Such a concept would fit with a few observations about society;  the perception that in the ‘old days’ people didn’t get depressed as much– they worked extremely hard on farms and in factories or in kitchens, back when just making a meal would take an entire day to gather, prepare, and cook– not counting all of the other work ‘at home’ before the era of washing machines and dishwashers.  Perhaps in some cases the mind can abort depression by turning to a ‘reserve’ of sorts, recognizing that a depression at THIS particular time could prove fatal for the individual… and for other family members.

I like how in psychiatry we can approach things from ‘psychodynamics’ or rather from a perspective of the mind as ‘chemical reactions’, all mental illness being ‘brain diseases’.  I could do the same with this discussion;  perhaps there is something analagous to the endorphin system for pain, where in horrible injuries the brain is flooded with mind-numbing chemicals that induce analgesia and even euphoria–  perhaps when the psychological stressors become very severe, a similar process occurs that protects us from depression, and that those who DO fall apart in such circumstances are suffering from the dysfunction of such a system.

Even if I am onto something, I don’t know what conclusions should be drawn;  I don’t think it makes sense to recommend that people have lives filled with so much turmoil in order to protect themselves from depression!  But perhaps there is one idea that does follow my logic.  Perhaps we are on the wrong track when we spend all of our resources and energy in the pursuit of a life of ease–  because maybe, just maybe, when we get to that life of ease things won’t be quite as ‘happy’ as we imagine.

I’d love to  hear your responses and thoughts on the issue.

Addendum:  Shortly after writing this post I turned on the TV and watched as the body of David Kellermann, CFO of Freddie Mac was taken from his beautiful home in Fairfax, Virginia.  His tragic death can be interpreted in many ways; I am tempted to try to guess what might have happened but it feels inappropriate to say anything, except to acknowledge the grief of his wife and daughter.  I hope that they can find some peace– after the hoard of reporters are gone, the horrible calls for suicides of CEOs by US Senators subside, and our politicians find better ways to maintain popularity than to stir up class warfare.  Believe it or not, everybody hurts.

JJ

Tagged as: depression, happiness, kellermann freddie mac suicide, modern society, pursuit of happiness, stress