Kiekegaard scholar Gordon Marino invokes the Great Dane in discerning the difference between depression and despair. Excerpt:
These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.
Depression, Marino writes, is a clinical disorder. But despair is a spiritual one. The two are not the same thing. People who believe they are may either falsely believe something organically disordered in their brains is something they can fix through an act of will, or they may falsely believe that medication will assuage a problem that is essentially spiritual.
The distinction is tied in with Kierkegaard's anthropology. To him, humans are beings caught between the finite and the infinite, between reality and possibility, an eternal being thrown into a temporal situation, and having to forge a self within the bounds of those contradictions. Despair is to be stuck on one side or the other of the imbalance. Here's Marino:
Though it will make the Bill Mahers of the world wince, despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else.
This all takes me back to my undergraduate days, and how reading Kierkegaard, especially John Douglas Mullen's terrific introduction to his thought, revealed to me the nature of my own despair, which I was trying to overcome through liquid therapy (how many readers with 1980s LSU roots remember Double Drunk Night at the Bayou?), and pointed the way to an eventual religious resolution of my spiritual and psychological crisis.
I wonder to what extent the way we celebrate Christmas in America -- yes, I'm thinking a lot these days about Hank Stuever's "Tinsel" -- has to do with Kierkegaardian despair. We're so desperate to escape who we are. One of the main characters in the book is a vivacious suburban Dallas woman who runs around maniacally upbeat during the Christmas season, decorating other people's houses for a living. There is something so desperate about her way of getting through the holiday season, as if she were afraid stopping to be still would cause everything to fall to pieces. She tells Hank that for her, Christmas is about recreating a "Total Moment," a remembered fragment of complete, transcendent Christmas morning happiness from childhood. Her entire life at Christmastime (and, one assumes, in ordinary time) is consumed with the pursuit of Rosebud -- and it seems to be making her husband and kids miserable. That's despair.
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I have seen women who's husbands lost their jobs get prozaced to deal with the concern they should feel about family finances. In their prozac haze they lose the motivation to deal with the problem. Sometimes depression is the spirit's way of telling us we have a problem we need to look at and solve.
I do think that many people who need help fail to get it and that is tragic. But sometimes the help is not just meds - it is understanding and action.
When I went through my own existential crisis a realization I had was how fleeting happiness is. But gratitude lasts. I find that cultivating a sense of gratitude is enormously helpful in maintaining a steady state. The old saw about counting your blessings is true.
I think of St. Augustine, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in You."
So much of the anxiety and despair ultimately are rooted in that one profound insight.
Lord Karth gets us much of the way there with his insight: "That's insanity, brought on by the American disease: excessive sentimentality combined with a near-solipsistic narcissism, aggravated by a lifetime of being goaded to consume by mass media and the marketeers that fund it."
Far too many of us have our identities caught up in what we possess and what we do, and not in who we ARE. That narcissism is what fills the vacuum that is the absence of faith. We yearn for belonging and connectedness, a place for our love to settle and come back to us. Depression can often be the end result of despair when that love is unrequited or abused.
Augustine was a genius.
Great post Rod!
"I do think that many people who need help fail to get it and that is tragic. But sometimes the help is not just meds - it is understanding and action."
BINGO!!!
I had a terrific professor and mentor in clinical psychology who couldn't stress enough that medication should only be used to bring the patient's affect to within manageable parameters in order to be able to do psychotherapy.
Most people don't need the meds, as their affect is appropriately proportional to their cognitions. When meds are given in these situations, there follows a disconect between the cognitions and affect that really messes with people's heads.
Menninger wrote "Whatever Became of Sin?" The next treatise ought to ask whatever became of suffering?
Very interesting story and point about how people should not always feel happy.
All of my life I try to feel happy - both me and my mother agree I have been spoilt for far too long for my own good and that, in spite of severe autism, I need to work - and when things go wrong I turn from a joyful person into violent rage. Worse than that, it tends to be over quite anti-social behaviour or panic at something going wrong when I am not prepared for it.
What I hope, after the latest episode of being banned from a valuable library at Monash University (where I have never been a student but have always loved to read) is that I can be more conscious of the problems in my own public behaviour inherent to severe autism. I need to think and reflect much more on what I have to do to avoid the consequences that come from accosting people or running up and down in public. I have always been attracted unconsciously to people who seem to be my opposite, but never learned from them. Now I think I should try to at least!
There is a distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.Depression, Marino writes, is a clinical disorder. But despair is a spiritual one. The two are not the same thing. People who believe they are may either falsely believe something organically disordered in their brains is something they can fix through an act of will, or they may falsely believe that medication will assuage a problem that is essentially spiritual. Despair is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else.By understanding these thing … try to avoid being like this. You might be happier. For example, if you are yourself, don’t expect to be other people that you can’t be … you might be happier.
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