A couple of weeks back a story about a survey of depression on Cape Cod was featured prominently in these pages. (“Depression: Study gauges the Cape blues.”) The sampling was convincingly large, 15,302 local people. Of these 43% “showed signs of depression,” almost twice the national average.
Almost half of us depressed. That’s depressing news to a vacation destination. Afterall, this is Cape Cod, fun capital of the region, where people are willing to invest great quantities of disposable income on a week or two of our good times.
But what with on-again, off-again seasonal employment, elderly population, high addiction rate, we fulltime residents are apparently not as happy as we should be. And the story didn’t even mention the Cape’s weather, which is depressing to many of us much of the time.
The study raises that ever- important question: Are we happy enough? And that other question: what the heck does the first question mean?
I must admit, the word “depression” depresses me. There’s something wrong with the way we think about depression and the word itself is part of the problem. Depression implies a putdown of the less cheerful, the less upbeat. Higher spirits become a norm by which lower spirits are found wanting—and designated a disease which should be medicated and presented to a psychotherapist for treatment.
But when close to 50% of the Cape population is found to be depressed, or even the 25% given for the national average, when so many millions feel the need to be on Prozac or another such mood enhancer (and when none of this was true apparently a few decades back) maybe we should be looking to see what, besides deficient body chemistry, might be making us feel that way.
Maybe, when your whole country is in financial trouble, real income not up in decades, obscene profits for oil companies when the rest of us suffer from frightening inflation in key areas such as home heating, transportation, and insurance—maybe it’s natural, even appropriate, to feel a little “down” (one of the criteria used in the study).
An unprecedented foreclosure rate and being just a paycheck away from foreclosure might cut into your “pleasure in doing things.”
When we are fighting a war widely seen as meaningless, maybe we should all be feeling a little “hopeless. “
When society is systematically making a lot of people unhappy you don’t necessarily call those victims depressed. It wouldn’t occur to us to call the millions of victims of the Great Depression depressed. They were just Depressed. Things are seriously out of whack. Yes, that’s a depressing thought; but it’s also a liberating thought: Whew, it ‘s not just me and my defective chemistry.
The wonder isn’t that there is such a high percentage of depressed; the wonder is that we aren’t all hanging out the window like in that movie, shouting: I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more. (My psychotherapist friends tell me that depression is thought to be anger turned inward.)
Of course we all want to feel better rather than worse, and it doesn’t make you a more effective agent for change if you are depressed. But it also doesn’t make you feel better to learn that your reactions are inappropriate or even diseased. Maybe it’s the happy ones whose chipperness needs correcting downward. (“Survey finds 57% percent wearing rose-colored glasses.”)
A survey like this, and the thinking on which it’s based, doesn’t do justice to the complexities—that is, the realities—of life on the Cape and everywhere else. Calling 43 % of us depressed dilutes the tragic meaning of true depression of the sort that drives a very small percentage to desperate acts.
No Comments