A Story From Another John – A RedSox Supporter
I have been suffering from depression since my early teens although I didn’t discover it until I was almost 50. Also around this time, my marriage was falling apart. Its hard to know if one caused or affected the other but they were both “happening” at the same time. Treatment between then ( approx 2000) and last year was sporadic and only partially effective. Last fall, I hit bottom and ended up in the hospital and luckily the doctors were able to stabilize me and find the right combination of medicines for me. Seem to be doing very well now!
You asked about my ideas on depression. First, I am not a medical person. I am a Linux/Unix Systems Administrator (or a geek as my daughters say). I am a science junkie and try to understand the world as best I can. That being said, here’s my take on depression.
Our brain sits in and regulates a soup of chemicals and electric energy For the brain to function properly, its environment must be kept within a certain range. This environment is in reality a self-organizing chaotic system. Like most “systems” in the natural world, they appear to be organized but are inherently chaotic at lower levels. Hurricanes are a very good example of this type of system. If you are inside a hurricane, all you can see is chaos. Yet, at a macro level, you can see the organization of the storm. The energy flows from the sun, water and atmosphere are the feedback loops that keep the hurricane stable. There is a wide range in which this will all work but outside those bounds, the storm begins to collapse.
Our brain operates much like this. There is NO normal operating mode. Just a range of stable environments. When the environment exceeds those boundaries, mental illness sets in. Now,destabilization can be caused by many factors from illness, physical injury, chemical imbalances and “maybe” even BAD thinking, but I believe they eventually affect the chemical or electrical feedback loops in the brain. I like to think of it as brain arrhythmia.
Although I am not a huge fan of talk therapy, I do recognize that we can create new connections in our brains by thinking/talking about things and that this may help in re stabilizing the system. However, and this is an opinion only, this will only really work if the system is only slightly out of whack. Also (personal biases ahead!), I feel that talk therapy is too vulnerable to incompetents, unscrupulous people, quack therapies and cures and charlatans. I hope I wasn’t too subtle there?
Ok, enough rantings. The RedSox just won! 🙂