”Depression no longer controls my life”

Depression does not usually warn. At least the first few times. It is true that you notice sadness, discouragement, pessimism, but we have all gone through these states, without attaching too much importance to them, convinced that they would be transitory.

Depression is a fallen tree

Having a family history can be a good warning, but almost always we think that misfortunes will never affect useven if they have been incarnated with loved ones.

The seeds of depression

I I lost my brother at the age of twenty, when he committed suicide after a life full of ups and downs. Expansive, affectionate, brilliant, he would suddenly become harsh, aloof and uncommunicative, isolating himself from the outside world. He never visited a psychiatrist or a psychologist. No one examined his case or made a diagnosis.

Son of my father’s first marriage, tuberculosis took away his mother when I was only nine years old. Twenty years separated us. I know about her childhood and youth from family stories, which are often not the most reliable source.

I know that he was vulnerable, obsessive, fickle, but those traits coexisted with a seductive and affectionate character. As an adult, he became more reserved and aloof, with a certain harshness in his treatment that could be mistaken for arrogance.

I I especially remember his voiceas serious and profound as that of my father, with whom he maintained the inevitable confrontation of the sixties, when even in Spain the pillars of the traditional, deeply repressive and intransigent society began to be questioned.

The roots of depression

A little over a decade elapsed between my brother’s suicide and my first depression. I also suffered a premature orphanageWell, my father died of a heart attack when I was about nine years old.

I was a troubled teenager, with a sharp intolerance towards any form of authority. My grades were incredibly irregular; it ranged from outstanding to embarrassing suspense. I took incomprehensible pleasure handing in blank exams, not bothering to prove my knowledge, which would have guaranteed me a good grade.

Now I think that I mortified myself, inflicting irrational suffering on me. I felt very angry, almost as if my father had abandoned me. That rage was exacerbated by my brother’s suicide, throwing me into a depressive and self-destructive spiral.

I could say that my suicidal fantasies they started at that moment, but my mind had already been thinking about that possibility for a while, which I perceived as a liberation.

The crust of depression

At university, I started a relationship that has lasted until today. My grades improved to the point of getting a research grant at the end of my degree. I left home to live with my girlfriend, I began to view life more optimistically, I published several articles, but an avalanche of calamities ended the good run.

My partner got seriously ill, the research grant ended without me getting a position as a professor, my publications stagnated, we ran out of income.

Something broke inside me and the symptoms of depression unleashed like an unstoppable waterfall: insomnia, apathy, crying spells, irritability, concentration problems, hopelessness, fatigue, loss of self-esteem, lack of interest in sex, inability to enjoy the things that until then rewarding, social isolation, feelings of failure and worthlessness.

I think I suffered something similar to anorexia, because I lost my appetite and lost twenty kilos in a month, causing understandable alarm in the people around me, who insisted that I have all kinds of tests to rule out cancer or something similar.

Depression: cutting life

I have not forgotten the night that I noticed with unbearable clarity my emotional collapse. A movie buff since he was a child, movies had become an escape valve. Far from taking refuge in comedies, he preferred dramatic stories, with tormented characters and devastating endings.

The happiness of others seemed to me a very distant experience. I felt much more attuned to suffering, because it made me think that I was not completely alone, isolated in an experience that no one could understand.

the good star is a film by Ricardo Franco that tells the story of an unusual love triangle made up of Rafael, an impotent butcher (Antonio Resines), Marina (Maribel Verdú) and Daniel (Jordi Mollà).

Daniel and Marina are a young marginalized couple who live on the streets committing crimes to continue their journey to nowhere. Not without many conflicts, they will come to live together as a family, but Daniel, unable to adapt to a normal life, will leave and rob a bank, which will cost him his return to prison, where he has spent most of his existence.

Rafael goes to visit him. They talk in a booth, separated by glass that duplicates their images, creating a slightly unreal atmosphere. Deeply dejected and looking deteriorated, Daniel comments: “This time they have been able to me.”

I heard that phrase feeling that perfectly reflected the limit that I had exceeded. Until then, I had managed to recover from my states of sadness, but what happened to me then was no longer simple grief, but a collapse that had overwhelmed my tolerance for suffering.

My resources for neutralizing negative feelings had disintegrated and my mind only contemplated one way out: suicide. However, the will to live had not been completely extinguished and, on the advice of family and friends, I visited a psychiatrist, hoping to improve.

fruits of depression

My first experiences were discouraging, because In the 1990s, the inertia of a repressive psychiatry still persisted., which associated depression with antisocial behavior or weakness of character. Electroshock was used relatively frequently and no health insurance covered psychotherapy.

At the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, Enrique González Duró had spearheaded a reform of psychiatry during the 1970s that had managed to change the mentality of a new generation of mental health professionals.

His disciples had assimilated the theses of Ronald D. Laing, David Cooper, Thomas Szasz, pioneers of antipsychiatry, but without renouncing the advances of psychopharmacology.

branches of depression

It seems increasingly clear that anxiolytics, hypnotics, antidepressants and antipsychotics are abused. Anguish and unhappiness are approached as pathologies, hiding the immaturity of our society to deal with conflicts.

A dismissal, a sentimental breakup or the loss of a loved one produce real, objective suffering, with symptoms similar to those of depression, but they can be overcome without resorting to a pharmacological arsenal. We live in a medicalized agewhich has corroborated Michel Foucault’s hypotheses about the correlation between political power and control of the body.

“Biopolitics” is not an invention of Nazism, but a trend as old as civilization. Religions have always disputed the regulation of the crucial events of our corporeal dimension: birth, love, sex, illness and death.

Life experiences have become sacraments that indicate our passage through life, associating a political and religious meaning to experiences that belong to the sphere of the strictly private. The debate on abortion, gay marriage and euthanasia reveals that politics and religion do not give up interfering in the field of individual rights, fighting to manage the body and its emotions.

Overmedication is another facet of this issue that is not at all trivial. The proliferation of diagnoses in the field of mental health, which has multiplied to the absurd, moves in the same direction, but the conclusion is not that medication is unnecessary. It is simply a tool that can be of enormous value, but only if used responsibly and in moderation.

Fallen leaves

I have talked about my psychiatrists in Fear of being two (Minobitia), a partially autobiographical book about my fight against the disease. I can’t add anything that I didn’t say then. I just want to report that everything got complicated when sadness receded to make way for a picture of agitation or mania.

Hitting bottom, my mind kicked up and shot upwards, going from apathy to hyperactivity. He didn’t sleep more than three or four hours, devised one crazy project after another, talked non-stop, ran instead of walking.

The excitement disappeared abruptly and the depression returned. Exhausted, confused, completely disoriented, I could not understand what happened until an intuition shed some light. I remembered the diaries by the writer Sylvia Plath, which begin with a terrible sentence: “I know I will never be happy, but tonight I am happy”.

Although Ted Hughes removed many pages from the diaries of his ex-wife, what is preserved eloquently shows the mood swings of the American writer, victim of growing instability which led to a tragic suicide.

On February 11, 1963, at just thirty years old, Sylvia cooked breakfast for her two young children, then plunged her head into the kitchen oven, turning on the gas spigots. My brother used the same method.

It is a casual detail, but behind that gesture there was a common fatality, which used to be called manic-depressive psychosis and is now called bipolar disorder. I talked to one of my psychiatrists and told him that maybe I was bipolar too.

The recurrence of the depression and a second attack of mania confirmed that I had not been wrong. In 2006, I tried to commit suicide with an overdose of pills, but the doctors at La Paz University Hospital prevented me from embarking on a journey without turning back.

In the years since, I have improved slightly. Mania threatened blows, but they were ephemeral flashes. Instead, the depression persisted. Apparently, sadness had become chronic. Neither pills nor psychotherapy could get me out of a state of permanent depression.

A friend recommended that I try meditation. I responded skeptically, but finally agreed. In a health center a nurse organized meditation sessions with patients suffering from various personality disorders.

pruning depression

During the first session, I felt comfortable. Lying on a mat I learned to perceive my body as a range of possibilities and not as a set of discomforts. First I relaxed the different parts of my body,
until they become a light presence; later, he relaxed his mind, which meant living with negative thoughts, without leading to anguish.

I could not repress certain ideas or memories, but I let them be, contemplating them as a part of me, that I had to assimilate, without allowing them to hurt me. They were an aspect of my life, something I couldn’t suppress, but no…