What is this Hydra?
Strategies of Thought The Divine Disease: Exploration of Depression
2012 Lisa Lorenz Manchester Metropolitan University
THE FOLLOWING THOUGHTS GREW WITHIN THE STRATEGIES OF THOUGHT LECTURES HELD BY STEVEN GARTSIDE DURING AUTUMN AND FALL TERM. NOW EDITED AND CONNECTED WITH HER PROJECT BY LISA LORENZ DURING HER FULL-TIME DESIGN AND ART DIRECTION MASTER’S PROGRAMME AT MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF CLINTON CAHILL.
© Lisa Lorenz Manchester 2012 All sources used can be found in the appendix. All images used are either property of the author if other specified in the appendix. For further information on topic or content please contact the author: hej@frau-lorenz.de or www.fraulorenz.com
INTRODUCTION
Question: What have got boredom, memory and space in common? Any idea? Well, yes at first all of these words capture a thought, a concept humanity invented, most probable subconsciously, to make our existence bearable. Maybe we have not even forced it to grow in our culture but it was sleeping within us from the very start. However, also these pregnant words are linked with each other and, even more important in this case, build the essential foundation for my research on depression. Yes, the mental illness, disorder, this silly, little inconvenience growing steadily in our society. Of course, it has always been there. Throughout history one can easily trace depression back to the ancient Greeks. Well they called it melancholy then but in the end it was the same and a lot less stigmatized than it is in Western society today. People got along with it. It does not affect me, does it? Why should I even bother? In my opinion all of us should. It does not matter if we know someone who is suffering from the illness depression or got diagnosed ourselves. As a matter of fact, as a part of a community, school, workplace, town, country we should all feel obliged to try and remove the stigma from this illness. Naturally it is hard for us to understand how something can be broken if we cannot even see a scratch or at least a black shadow on a radiograph image. We are just human. It is good that we do doubt things we got told. Nevertheless, we should not stop here. We should go on and try to understand what is so hard to capture and couch in terms as it is essential for patients to recover. (Clark, Narrative and Depression, 2008, p.83)1 If one intends to do so a lot of empathy, courage and sensitivity is needed.
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In the course of one year within my Master project at Manchester Metropolitan University I intend to find different and new ways of approaching depression and make it understandable to a broader audience. I want to break down walls in the heads and evoke a new sensibility for the topic. Within this essay I will outline how different philosophic drafts from thinkers like i.e. Heidegger, Foucault or AugĂŠ influenced my own thoughts on depression and let grow ideas in my mind.
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HEIDEGGER
Arguing that there is a connection between time, falling asleep and boredom Heidegger is opening a door for me as I clearly see a similarity between the state of being bored and the state of depression. Let me outline this: Heidegger is debating that ‘boredom can return at any time’, so we try and keep us busy at anytime to avoid the return. Steadily we live with the fear, this shadow in the back of our heads it may come back and catch us on the hop. Also, if sleep is a metaphor for boredom and being awake the same as activity or productivity we can comprehend how much easier it is to wake somebody up compared to watching somebody not falling asleep. It is natural. We cannot stop this process it lays within human nature. Maybe we can delay it for a couple of hours but in the end it will be the inevitable truth. It has to happen. Another thought of Heidegger is that a quality of boredom is that it prolonging our time, at least we feel like it does. Time almost becomes unbearable, too long. Even though it is our most precious good in life, we are not able to use time when we are bored. Where did all our ideas go? We feel faint, useless and paralysed. Inevitably, I had to think of the state of depression all the time: interview partners described this feeling of permanent fear of falling back to the state of depression. Also being depressed does not implicitly mean a person is feeling sad, instead it is rather a feeling of hopelessness and a lack of motivation to do anything. Also the other qualities quoted can be easily connected with depression instead of boredom. The interesting point in Heidegger’s argumentation is that he considers the state of boredom as nothing alien but something occurring in the natural circle of daily life. Also to him it is almost necessary. It is a tool for us to appreciate action, creativity and life itself. Also if we could
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be able to relate the characteristic ‘depressed’ completely to the illness as an object and not to the ‘patient’ as the subject, this step would help to remove the stigma currently and still existing in society. Then again Heidegger is offering a very helpful comparison to being bored whilst reading an interesting book. Yes, we can read a book, a boring on and naturally, we will get bored by it. But also it can happen that even we are reading a very interesting book all of a sudden we will lose interest and it will turn from a lovely activity to a torture. We cannot find a logic explanation for this incident, it will almost take us by surprise. The same thing will happen to a person suffering from depression. The most joyful activity, the most beloved person all of a sudden will not be able to evoke any interest or feelings anymore. A great dullness is covering up all good things. Time will become unbearably long. We are just ‘attuned’ like this. There is no ‘cause-effect relation’. No explanation for it. We can overcome depression will always be the sleeping Ying of our Yang of happiness just like there would not be activity without boredom and no waking up without falling asleep.
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AUGÉ
As inevitably as one has to make a connection between Heidegger’s boredom and depression, Augé’s excerpt from ‘Non-Places’ made me think of a quote from a song written by Ian Curtis: ‘Existence, well, does it matter. I exist on the best terms I can. The past is now part of my future. The present is well out of hand.’ (Joy Division, Heart&Soul). Time and place are lost in a non-place. What counts is the present. ‘A space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.’ (Augé, From Places to Non-Places) Suffering from depression this feeling does exist in our heads in the same way. All good things are forgotten. We cannot connect to our past anymore, neither are we able to picture a way out of the unbearable and empty present. Visiting non-places could give us a glimpse at this unfamiliar feeling a person is experiencing within a depressive stage. These places, according to Augé are created by as he calls it supermodernity. To him this state, this lifestyle we lead in the Western World, makes us create or live in non-places. These could be characterless suburbs or the Chinese restaurant around the corner, the shopping mall in your city or a train station you are passing through on your way to work. The lack of history in these places gives us a constant feeling of being nowhere and everywhere most of the time. We are ‘born in the clinic and die in hospital, (…) transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions.’ (Augé, From Places to Non-Places) So actually, we should all be familiar with this feeling of disconnection: we feel alien in a place even though we know it, exactly like patients suffering from depression would often express their daily condition in public places. Eventually, these people are just more sensitive and their illness is working as an amplifier for supermodernity. Is depression maybe connected with
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supermodernity in the same way as non-places are? This begs the question if one could use a non-place to teach the public more about the feelings a depressed person experiences in their mind when they try to interact with their environment. Additionally, do depressed people react and interact in the same way with non-places as everyone else or could a non-place eventually even improve their condition as these places, although providing no history, offer a sense of familiarity and security? What could enforce this feeling of familiarity, what could provide orientation if one is lost in time and space – in a non-place? Even though this nonplace might only exist in someone’s head maybe a map could help. We can ‘create a presence of the past in the present: destinies, actions, thoughts and reminiscences rest on a bass line they mark the position that used to be occupied there by ancient ritual.’ A map would be able to deal with the ‘abolition of place’ this ‘consummation of the journey, the traveller’s last pose’. Even though a depressed person is ‘only’ travelling in their head if one could explain their state of mind with metaphorical language (Bunyan, 2009, The Pilgrims Progress, p.102) this could make it easier for themselves, as well as for family, friends and others, to locate where they are. An example would be: A: ‘How are you feeling?’, -B: ‘I am having a stroll in the City of Insecurity at the moment.’ Or B: ‘Very good, I’ve been to Good Council the other day.’ Definitely, using maps and narrative could make the approach to depression much easier for both parties, remove the alienation and bring it within one’s grasp.
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FOUCAULT
Still we are facing the problem of a strict division, a fear of contact between the ill and the others. The illness ‘now appears with what distinguishes it from all these confined forms as well. The presence of the mad appears as an injustice; but for others. (Foucault, The New Division, p. 228) This actually is what does make the illness an issue. Often unable to talk about it the ill unwillingly leave everybody else out. If there was not a barrier and a hushing-up people would be encouraged to talk about their thoughts and feelings. Nevertheless, after depression has been part of our society for centuries, it is still hard to approach this micro society be it for their own disability to understand or the ill hiding themselves away in self-help groups or mental health centres. Labelled ‘insane, alienated, deranged, demented, extravagant’ (Foucault, 1964, Madness and Civilization, p. 66) people suffering from mental illness are gathering in their own small circles which create ‘a void which isolates‘ them (Foucault, The New Division, p. 228) from the ‘normal guys’. On the one hand of course this might be necessary for them to feel secure and improve their condition to recover and be part of society again, on the other hand this is will build up even higher walls and enforce a false image in the heads of people. Namely ‘an imaginary stigma of disease, which (will) add its powers of terror. (Foucault, The Great Fear, 199 ff.) In this world we have to function, we have to get up in order to work, we have to work to buy things, we have to buy things to be happy, we have to be happy because this is what everyone expects us to be. Because of this vicious circle depression, this state of paralysis, now more than ever, is ‘strangely twinned with crime’. (Foucault, The New Division, p. 228) We have no choice. We have to find a way to face this ‘crisis which slowly appeared on the entire social and economic horizon’ and now finally arrived in our present.
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PEREC
As much as the void is one of the main symptoms people with depression suffer from the never ending stream of worries often will never let them fall asleep to escape them, at least for a time. ‘Happiness is in forgetting, not in remembering. Happiness is in remembering not in forgetting.’ Following this rule basically could be the cure, understanding it the solution to understand. It is a challenge to understand this twisted thinking. Let go the bad memories, remember the good, focus on the bright side and do not let tear you down by the misery. But often depressed people are even overwhelmed with daily tasks, going to the shops, doing small talk, making a plan for the day. The usual and wrong reaction of a stranger would be to tell them to pull themselves together and think of the important things like bills or all the people who are much harder up. See these simple explanations do not seem to convince, eventually an exaggerated visualization could help society to understand. What if a duvet all of a sudden is not light anymore but feels like an iron bar? Or the voices of the people talking in your environment turn from a happy mumbling into malicious gossip about you? In order to understand we have to perceive the world around us with different eyes. Actually experience it physically. Examine it under a microscope, disjoint its parts and put them all together again.2
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CONCLUSION
As we in this ‘supermodernity’ more and more suffer from the lack of history, identity and direction, as borders steadily blur and culture becomes a massive melting pot, to push understanding and openness of our society a step further, there has to happen more than just distributing nice leaflets and building up websites. We have to make people interested in others stories, real stories, not the characters in trash TV programmes, but your neighbour, your friend, your father’s problems. ‘Attitudes in our times are less immediately moralistic, if still stigmatizing.’ (Radden, My Symptoms, Myself; Depression and Narrative, 2008, p. 19) We will make the recipient remember. Maybe imagery is too dull, too separated from themselves to make them want to connect with the ever so terrible topic of depression. We need to send them on a journey where they meet people, feel and experience, listen and be curious again.
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NOTES 1 Clark, Narrative and Depression, 2008, p.83: ‘This sense of incommunicability – that others cannot understand what one is experiencing – fosters feelings of profound isolation and compounds the suffering.’ 2 Perec, L’infra-ordinaire, 1989: We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out. Question your tea spoons. What is there under your wallpaper? How many movements does it need to dial a phone number? Why? (Perec, L’infra-ordinaire) SOURCES BIBLIOGRAPHY 1 Eliot, T. S. (1998), The Waste Land and Other Poems; Penguin Books 2 Boyne (1990), Foucault and Derrida: The other side of reason; Routledge 3 Pereboom (1997), Free Will: Readings in Philosophy, Hackett Publisching 4 Foucault (1961), Madness and Civilization, Travistock Publications Ltd. 5 Auge (1995), Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso 6 Heidegger (1995), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude; Indiana University Press 7 Barthes (1980), Camera Lucida: reflections on photography; Vintage 8 Latour (2005), How to Make Things Public, Routledge 9 Perec (1974), Species of Spaces and Other Pieces; Penguin 10 Bunyan (2009) The Pilgrims Progress; Oxford World’s Classics
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................5 HEIDEGGER.......................................................................................................7 AUGÉ.....................................................................................................9 FOUCAULT ..........................................................................................................11 PEREC............................................................................................12 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................13 NOTES.............................................................................................15 SOURCES.......................................................................................15
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