Those interventions consist, in brief, of expressing gratitude, knowing your strengths and crafting everything you do to use them as much as possible and discovering an activity that consistently challenges and entertains you. For some people that might be studying nuclear fission, for others it could be doing a jigsaw puzzle. It doesn’t much matter. What matters is that it is sufficiently absorbing to lose yourself in and sufficiently challenging to keep you eagerly anticipating the next moment. Mine is gardening. When I am in the garden, I forget everything but the task in hand. Seligman also discovered that a single act of kindness makes people feel far better about themselves (for a full day) than any transient act of pleasure, such as buying a new pair of shoes or going to the movies. He calls the feeling it inspires, elevation. An act of kindness might be helping an elderly neighbour to do their shopping or standing aside to let somebody pass instead of barging past them and making them feel they don’t matter or exist.
When we think about how other people are feeling, we stop concentrating so hard on ourselves. We expand rather than contract, and so the world expands along with us. We can change our whole day (and other people’s) with a single kind word, or ruin it by an angry exchange. By thinking outside ourselves, we also stop thinking about how life isn’t giving us happiness and how we might give a little happiness to life.
There is, though, a final route to optimism. Here’s Seligman again:
There’s a third form of happiness that is ineluctably pursued by humans, and that’s the pursuit of meaning…There is one thing we know about meaning: that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are. The self is not a very good site for meaning, and the larger the thing that you can credibly attach yourself to, the more meaning you get out of life. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about.
Whether we feel that way through a spiritual practice, a walk in the park or (as in my case) sitting around with a bunch of depressives or alcoholics doesn’t much matter. What matters is to feel that we are not alone.
Every story deserves a happy ending. Here is mine.
Tom and I met again, three years after we parted. We had not seen each other at all during those years but he was never far from my mind—or from my heart. We met in a pub. He bought me a drink, lime and soda. Then he bought me a cup of tea.
‘You’re a cheap date these days,’ he laughed, but I noticed his hands were shaking. So were mine.
He said, ‘How’s your love life?’
I felt as if I was about thirteen. Was he asking me as an old friend, or because he wanted to know if I was available? I searched for a right answer and then, because I could find no right answer except the truth, I said, ‘Non-existent. We were too much of a hard act to follow. How’s yours?’
He was silent for a while, and then he smiled at me. ‘The same.’
Two years later, we were married. It is, in its own particular way, bliss.
Notes
To wage war Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon, Chatto & Windus, London, 2001
personal account Sally Brampton, Daily Telegraph, 5 March 2003
The dirty little secret Interview with Martin Seligman, ‘Eudaemonia, The Good Life’, 23 March 2004. Edge magazine. Edge is also a website devoted to an interplay of science, society and culture. www.edge.org
Around 5 million Study of treatment-resistant depression at the Clinical Neuroscience Research Centre, published in Biological Psychiatry, 15 October 2003. The Clinical Neuroscience Centre, Dartford, UK, is headed up by Professor Tonmoy Sharma and dedicated to innovative research into more accurate diagnoses of, and more effective treatments for, a range of conditions including depression, schizophrenia, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s disease.
If by ‘cure’ Interview with Professor John F. Greden, director of the University of Michigan Depression Center, published in Medicine at Michigan, Volume 4, Summer 2002. John F. Greden is Rachel Upjohn Professor of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Senior Research Scientist at Michigan’s Mental Health Research Institute.
My creative powers Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774. Goethe was famously a depressive.
Mild to moderate depression The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) is published by the American Psychiatric Association and covers all mental health disorders for both children and adults. It lists known causes of these disorders, statistics in terms of gender, age at onset, and prognosis as well as research concerning optimal treatment approaches.
Most depressives Smoking and depression. Dr Gregory A. Ordway, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and collaborator Dr Violetta Klimek, compared brain-tissue samples from long-term smokers with samples from non-smokers and concluded that chronic smoking produces ‘antidepressant-like’ effects on the human brain. This may contribute to the high incidence of smoking and difficulty to quit in those who are depressed. Archives of General Psychiatry, September 2001. In September 2006 researchers at Duke University Medical Centre gave nicotine or placebo patches to a group of non-smokers diagnosed with depression, then measured their symptoms using a standardised questionnaire. They found that who wore the nicotine patch for at least eight days experienced significant declines in depressive symptoms.
Beck Depression Inventory The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, BDI-II), created by Dr Aaron T. Beck, is one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of depression. There are three versions of the BDI—the original, first published in 1961 and later revised in 1971 as the BDI-1A, and the BDI-II, published in 1996.
The severity of depression Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999. Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She has bipolar disorder and wrote a first hand account of her illness in her first book, An Unquiet Mind, Picador, London, 1995.
By 2020 Facts on depression taken from the the World Health Organisation (WHO). Depression was the leading cause of disability as measured by YLDs (years lived with disability) and the fourth leading contributor to the global burden of disease, measured by disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), in 2000. By the year 2020, depression is projected to reach second place in the ranking of DALYs calculated for all ages and sexes. Depression is already the second cause of DALYs in the age category 15–44 years for both sexes combined. It is common, affecting about 121 million people worldwide but can be reliably diagnosed and treated in primary care. However, fewer than twenty-five per cent of those affected have access to effective treatments.
Bruce Charlton Bruce Charlton, research psychiatrist at the Department of Psychology, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. ‘The Malaise Theory of Depression: Major Depressive Disorder is Sickness Behaviour and Antidepressants are Analgesic’, Medical Hypotheses, 2000.
According to a study ‘A Swedish National Twin Study of Lifetime Major Depression’, Kenneth S. Kendler, MD, Margaret Gatz, PhD, Charles O. Gardner, PhD, and Nancy L. Pedersen, PhD. Objective: substantial evidence supports the heritability of lifetime major depression. Less clear is whether genetic influences in major depression are more important in women than in men and whether genetic risk factors are the same in the two sexes. American Journal of Psychiatry, January 2006.
Because parents may A three-generation study showing new evidence that major depression can afflict families from one generation to the next. The twenty-year longitudinal family study found twice the rate of depression or anxiety in children whose parents and grandparents also had depression than in children without such a history. Myrna M. Weissman et al., Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005.
conducted a study News Archive, 2003, King’s College London. ‘Variations in a region of DNA next to the serotonin transporter gene help to determine whether stressful even
ts will make you depressed’, lead author Professor Terri Moffitt at the Institute of Psychiatry. Published in Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, July 2003.
‘adapted child’ Eric Berne (1910–70) was a prominent psychiatrist and author who felt increasingly frustrated with the psychoanalytic approaches of the time. As a result, he began developing a new and revolutionary theory, which he called Transactional Analysis. In 1958 he published the paper ‘Transactional Analysis: A New and Effective Method of Group Therapy’, where he outlined this new approach. After creating Transactional Analysis, Berne continued to develop and apply this new methodology, most prominently in his book Games People Play, Penguin, London, 1964.
Depression is the price Alice Miller, The Drama of Being a Child, Virago, London, 1987. Miller, a psychoanalyst, became strongly disenchanted with her chosen field after many years in practice. Her first three books stemmed from a reaction to what she felt were major blind spots in her field. By the time her fourth book was published she no longer believed that psychoanalysis was viable.
an emotional cue The paper on emotional memory and a self-reinforcing ‘memory loop’, by Florin Dolcos, Kevin LaBar and Roberto Cabeza, was published online 9 February 2005, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers are in Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Brain Imaging and Analysis Center.
A study by E. Mark Cummings, the Notre Dame Professor of Psychology, and researchers from Rochester University and the Catholic University of America examined the effect of marital conflict on the 9- to-18-year-old children of 226 parents for three years. A second study also examined the connection between marital conflict and emotional problems over a three-year period, with a different group of 232 parents and kindergarten-aged children. The researchers again found that destructive marital conflict led to similar problems. Published in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of the journal Child Development.
According to research Dr Alan Booth, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Human Development, and co-researcher Dr Paul R. Amato, Professor of Sociology, Penn State University, in ‘The Legacy of Parents’ Marital Discord: Consequences for Children’s Marital Quality’, published in the October 2001 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their data were based on a longitudinal study of marital quality spanning twenty-one years, analysing a sample of 297 parents and comparing the quality of their marriages in 1980 with those of their children in 1997.
Difficulty understanding ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’, Stephen M. Edelson, PhD, Center for the Study of Autism, Salem, Oregon, 1995. www.autism.org/asperger
Whether a child John Bowlby and Attachment Theory, Jeremy Holmes, Taylor & Francis, Oxford, 1993.
Madness need not R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, Penguin, London, 1967. One of the most famous and controversial psychiatrists of his generation, Ronald Laing admitted to suffering from periodic bouts of alcoholism and clinical depression during a BBC interview for In the Psychiatrist’s Chair with Dr Anthony Clare in 1983.
Suicidal thoughts Interview with Professor John F. Greden, director of the University of Michigan Depression Center, published in Medicine at Michigan, Volume 4, Summer 2002.
pilot clinical trial University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, pilot clinical trial; adding exercise to antidepressant medications significantly reduces depressive symptoms in patients with major depressive disorders. Study led by Dr Madhukar Trivedi, professor of psychiatry and director of UT Southwestern’s mood disorders research programme. News release, Society for Neuroscience, 2003.
Another study Thirty-minute aerobic workouts done three to five times a week cut depressive symptoms by fifty per cent in young adults. Study led by Dr Madhukar Trivedi, professor of psychiatry and director of UT Southwestern’s mood disorders research programme. Results published in the January 2005 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
while research at Exercise as effective a treatment for depression as antidepressants. Study led by psychologist James Blumenthal, Duke University, North Carolina. Results published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, October 2000.
A study carried out Study of depression as a risk factor for the onset of severe neck and lower-back pain. Study led by Dr Linda Carroll, professor in the University of Alberta Department of Public Health Sciences, published in the journal Pain, March 2004.
In a study Seattle study findings that fifty per cent of all depressed patients worldwide report multiple unexplained physical symptoms. ‘An International Study of the Relationship between Somatic Symptoms and Depression’ published in the New England Journal of Medicine, October 1999.
As with any ‘Some of the most extensive medical research on yoga therapy is being done in India but will it ever be accepted by Western medicine?’ Timothy B. McCall, MD, Yoga Journal, January/February 2003.
pranayama The National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience (Demeed University), India. The yoga research group in NIMHANS has been studying the therapeutic use of yoga in various psychiatric conditions for some years, with active collaboration from the Art of Living foundation and the Swami Vivekannada Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (SVYASA).
an accessible form Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, Bantam Dell, New York, 2000. Cope is a psychotherapist, senior Kripalu yoga teacher, and Senior Scholar in Residence at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts.
You don’t take Amy Weintraub, Yoga For Depression, Broadway Books, New York, 2004. Weintraub is a senior Kripalu yoga teacher and founder and director of the LifeForce Yoga Healing Institute. She is also a consultant to the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.
Among psychiatric disorders Extracts from ‘Anxiety and Alcohol Abuse in Patients in Treatment for Depression’, Edward H. Fischer and John W. Goethe, American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, August 1998.
study of patients ‘Recurrence after Recovery from Major Depressive Disorder During Fifteen Years of Observational Follow-up’, T. Mueller, A. Leon, M. Keller, D. Solomon, J. Endicott, W. Coryell, M. Warshaw and J. Maser, American Journal of Psychiatry, July 1999.
an emotional memory Bruce McEwen is the Alfred E. Mirsky Professor and head of the Harold and Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at the Rockefeller University. McEwen is a major figure in behavioural neuroendocrinology and the roles of steroid hormones in reproductive behaviour, brain development, gene expression in the brain, brain plasticity in adulthood, and the effects of stress on the brain. He is the co-author, with science writer Harold M. Schmeck, Jr, of The Hostage Brain, Rockefeller University Press, New York, 1994, and co-author, with science writer Elizabeth N. Lasley, of The End of Stress as We Know It, National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2002.
A report ‘High Vitamin B12 Level and Good Treatment Outcome May Be Associated in Major Depressive Disorder’, J. Hintikka, T. Tolmunen, A. Tanskanen, and H. Viinamäki, BMC Psychiatry, 2004.
first study ‘Depression and Acupuncture: A Controlled Clinical Trial’, John J. B. Allen, PhD, Psychiatric Times, March 2000.
a Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, Rider, London, 2002.
Empirically the amount interview with Martin Seligman, ‘Eudaemonia, The Good Life’, 23 March 2004, Edge magazine.
Helpful Reading
Beck, Charlotte Joko, Everyday Zen (HarperCollins, 1997)
Bradshaw, John, Healing the Shame That Binds You (Health Communications, 1991)
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Flow: Psychology of Happiness (Rider, 1992)
Fromm, Erich, The Art of Loving (Thorsons, 1995)
Goleman, Daniel, Emotional Intelligence (Bloomsbury, 2004)
Haidt, Jonathan, The Happiness Hypotheses: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Heinemann, 2006)
Jamison, Kay Redfield, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of
Moods and Madness (Picador, 1997)
Jamison, Kay Redfield, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (Picador, 2001)
Kornfield, Jack, A Path with Heart (Rider, 2002)
Kornfield, Jack, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (Rider, 2002)
Manning, Martha, Undercurrents (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995)
Martin, Philip, The Zen Path Through Depression (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999)
Miller, Alice, The Drama of Being a Child (Virago, 1995)
Puri, Dr Basant K., and Hilary Boyd, The Natural Way to Beat Depression (Hodder Mobius, 2004)
Ricard, Matthieu, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill (Atlantic Books, 2007)
Ridley, Matt, The Origins of Virtue (Penguin, 1997)
Rogers, Carl, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (Constable, 2004)
Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression Page 31
