Thursday, February 18, 2016
Note: Mild profanity and stuff is included in the below, but is all appropriate in the context...really...
More Notes: This is LLLOOOONNNGGGG cus I ramble lots, so get a fresh cuppa and settle in.
Preamble –
Useful context for the piece below - Dr. Tad Dabrowski is the founder of the legacy environmental consulting company Komex. He is an enormous presence in both the industry, and physically. He still talks with a more than mild polish accent (that gets worse the more he wants to avoid understanding you) and has been in the industry here since forever. He still works most days at age 70+ and is the "soul" of this environmental office with an additional advanced degree in "banter".
The author and Not-Dr. Sean Kelly is a 20 plus year man, and is considered by others to be moderately competent (and himself to be an indispensable linchpin to this operation). He shares with Dr. D an actual like of people and is probably something like the "fingernails" of this environment office –sometimes performs a useful function but mostly just hangs around and needs to be cut back every once in a while.
He has been not-diagnosed with some mystery neuro-thing that has baffled Dr's in three countries since 2002 - he suggests he thrives on the "air of mystery" so provided - He did think he was a spy when loaded up with enough morphine…
Oh yeah, morphine, in 2011 he discovered that just because you've been hit in a crosswalk before, doesn't mean you can't be hit there again and much harder - thus the morphine. 3 months in hospital and some pretty mangled calf muscles later, he returned to work with both his legs and most of his brain still attached – cars really hurt…
And if you want to be pedantic, the brain has atrophied around the injury, so is all still attached, but whatev. Brain damage is an awesome excuse for almost anything though!! It kind of sucks that the brain, in re-mapping itself around the damage, sent some signal where it didn't really belong so my brain thinks that my skin really hurts all the time…silly brain.
Other individuals mentioned are generally awesome folks, but are otherwise tangential to the tale.
It should be noted that the contest at the end was unfairly won by an early, original recipient of this missive at my location office - they received it last week…it wouldn't have included airfare in any case.
-End preamble
So...funny story...a couple of weeks ago Mrs. Fothergill sent around an email regarding mental health problems. I asked her if she thought it would be helpful to write a missive on dealing with depression and mental health stuff. The funny part is that she suggested I so do this week and I find myself in the midst of a depressional episode just in time to live the moment as it were. Many are aware of my past history with Churchill's black dog, for those that aren't, depression has been part of my life since, like, forever.
I'll start with an explanation of the "black dog" comment above. There was this English politician guy called Winston Churchill, who, despite his issues with depression, was kind of a big deal. He tagged his episodes with the moniker "the black dog" and dealt with it, for the most part, by drinking himself into a coma and making exceptionally witty insults to anyone who interrupted his meditation - or bombing the crap out of the Germans - which method was more destructive to be on the receiving end of was...nope, even I can't follow through on a "joke" involving killing tons of people, nevermind...
The most commonly quoted take down is likely "Winston, you're drunk" - "Well Ms. Astor, you are ugly...and tomorrow I'll be sober" - not a guy to get into a banter session with, I mean, he made Tad look like a softy. It is a good historic point for the whole Woman's Day thing to point out that she was the first woman UK MP and this was only a mild example of the shite she had to deal with...
The Black Dog nomiclature works as a bit of a code phrase between people who get to deal with it, as most folks with depressional tendencies have come across mention of this Churchill guy as a famous fellow traveller, so recognize the phrase and most folks with depressional tendencies realize that one must be careful about whom one lets know, as responses to admitting "weakness" will vary...My ego has become SO YUGE (even Tad says so...I point out that everybody knows his self-referential comments are just False Humility, which is worse, but whatev) I'm past it.
The big thing for people not "in the know" to understand is that, despite the common usage of "depressing" and "depressed", depression has little to do with sadness. It is, rather, a dis-attachment and absolutely may include sadness, but the sadness is a...sad byproduct. It is impossible to "fix yourself" after a certain threshold is reached, because you just don't care...I mean really...don't...care. You can sit in bed and recognize that by not getting up, you're totally flushing your life down a drain, but just not care enough about that whole life thing to bother. Strangely enough, realising you are flushing someone else's life will usually get depressional folks up, but your own life? not so much. My path through Hamlet's slings and arrows have got me to a place where I really like lots of people, and like my job (mostly) so I get out of bed, because if I don't, folks will bug me until I do, and/or I'll be letting those folks I like down by tuning out. Once up, I'll engage with those people I like and it's a virtuous circle...hmm...There's not a lot of places I can use the word virtuous in a context referring to myself, and not start laughing, but this works!! This set of circumstances are my "circuit breakers" that keep me from drifting too far into the maelstrom.
I have a theory, which may not be mine and I could have read somewhere and just decided it contained "a truth", so have claimed it, or it could be world changing and fundamentally fresh and new- I'm never that sure with me, but whatev...This theory, that may or may not be mine, holds that the evolutionary push for depressional tendency to not be genetically pushed out of human experience comes from...the nature of most of human experience (lotsa double-ish negatives and poor phrasing choices in that sentence so I'll let you try again a few times...it does actually make sense, it just hides it well).
Being a nomadic herder was a pretty hard life, and when stuff went wrong you needed to not go nuts, so we evolved a mental state where not giving a shit about what happened to ones self was a survival mechanism. Do what the rest of the tribe makes/needs you to do, but don't care much about the self, because "caring" can lead to "bad".
And don't even start on the whole learning to farm, serf/slave thing that covers most of written history. It took 20+ years off of the typical lifespan, logarithmically increased the risk of sickness and that's only if you managed to avoid the whole "conscripted into the lords army" or "be in the place some other lord's army is sacking" stuff. Most people needed a way to close themselves off from chunks of their life, and that's kind of what depression is...what you don't care about can't hurt you.
One of the more interesting things is most sufferers still care about what happens to other people even at their worst, and that's the "hook" that's often most available to help sufferers when they are suffering. Possibly because of the "selfish" nature of our present sociological arrangements, people are often baffled that "people won't help themselves" when suffering, but that's often exactly the nature of it, and likely why so many "individualist" non-suffers are so baffled by it - until they get there themselves, anyway.
I've managed to manage to this point, mainly due to the particular place I fit into this mixed up "society" thing that mankind in this part of the world has decided to organise itself around. It wouldn't have taken a whole lot to be in a situation where a bunch of "circuit breakers" weren't in play to help me through the "dark times" and I would end...badly. - insert another colourful anecdote here...
The worst I've probably ever been was in my return to Calgary in 2004. I had gone from "rising star rolling his Master's into a PhD and moving to London to run that office" to "returning from the UK and going back home to Calgary with some weird illness nobody really understood and an uncertain future"...like might be dead next year uncertain...Oh yeah, had one of those "heartbreak" things thrown in there too.
I didn't come out the other side as much because of who I was, as because of the people who I had the good fortune to be intersecting life experiences with, and an awesomely cool family. There were enough "interesting things/people/experiences" that turned up, and that I ended up interacting with to keep me on this side of "bad".
Things wouldn't have needed to be very different for me not to have had a chance and it was great that life had arraigned itself the way it had - but it was the people around me that had agency then, I was just responding to stuff. If the "things/people/experiences" I ended up engaging with around then had been "bad" I would have responded badly.
If you know people who are struggling, it isn't that they are "unhappy" it's that they aren't "anything" and are scarily susceptible to the vagaries of outrageous fortune for a while. Most of the people I interacted with in this period probably don't know how messed up I was and don't really believe it when I tell them...you learn a certain amount of protective colouring and maintaining that appearance is part of what kept me going...I can't pretend to be this happy go lucky, fun guy if people find out what a mess I am, so I'll have to go out/get out of bed/bother about...anything. Maintaining the façade was part of getting me past it - even if nobody actually fell for said façade and all thought I was just this annoying drunk guy...
....end anecdote, or mostly end really, cus I'm going to continue nattering on about this and related stuff below for a good long time yet...come on, stick with it...
I certainly didn't recognise in real time what was going on, but have learned enough since then to recognize the "Black Dog" marked himself on my life all over the place - and recognise his entry onto the stage in real time now (and, yes, the "dog" and "marked" was used intentionally and I'm worried enough that no one will catch the brilliance of this that I feel the need to draw attention to it).
I'm no longer that fussed about "maintaining the façade" but rather, recognise that it's the damn dog that's keeping me in bed and I'm not about to let that mangy mutt win...anger, when carefully directed at not-people, but rather sneaky, heavy, four legged shits, that are remarkably hard to see despite sitting on your chest choking the will out of you, is a useful tool to get you re-engaged. You can't simultaneously be pissed-off and not care. Once I get over that getting out of bed thing, life presents enough interesting, engaging things to maintain forward momentum - just can't let it get boring!
Having learned to recognize what was going on, by the time the whole "you're generally better off to be in a car, when getting T-boned" thing wasn't much of a struggle...bloody annoying, but not much of a struggle. By that juncture I'll start giving myself some of the credit for dealing with the damn dog, but more because I'm a scientist in an engineer's body and get a kick out of using myself as an experiment, than that the place I have got to is either easy or common - and I sure as hell wouldn't have made it here without the positive input of lots of folks and a bunch of random chance along the way. Now, with the constant nerve pain thing I'm been blessed with, I NEED to be constantly engaged or I notice how much pain I'm in, so I CAN"T LET MYSELF GET DISENGAGED, and I really don't recommend constant pain as a general solution to getting through the "dog" times.
Two key points to be made here - yes I'm finally wrapping this thing up YAY!!, and if there were two points, why didn't you make them instead of nattering on for the PAGES of text leading up to this?? whatev...
Point One, Mental illness is a really shitty phrase and the connotations around it, and the way some people respond to it, kinda sucks lots and lots. It turns out that it's more "many people's" problem, than that of any sufferers...a quote that I'm definitely stealing but haven't managed to figure out from who (even Google doesn't seem to know...song lyric maybe?) goes something like "if you're intelligent and paying even a little bit of attention, you've got to be depressed at least some of the time."
People who recognise themselves in this missive are generally a far more interesting crowd to hang around with...or have a bit more self honesty, than folks that have a problem with it...same goes for anxiety or by-polar or whatev
I look back at who I was 20 years ago, and if I met myself today, I would have totally thought I was a young naive jerk, who'd largely coasted through life - had promise, but largely unrecognised promise. I mean the kid that used to say "of course life isn't fair, it's just that it usually isn't fair in my favour..." had clearly not experienced half the breadth of what life has to offer - and hadn't recognised the tracks the black dog had already left all over the place.
The decade or so since seems to be working a bit of reversion to the mean, and shows why you shouldn't ever say anything the fates might take as a dare. I don't use that "in my favour" line much now, and certainly don't find it quite as funny as I did then. So now I'm an older, less naive jerk, who's hit some of his promise, but still a jerk...get over it, and I'm definitely a better, more interesting jerk for understanding that "this life thing is hard, or you're not doing it right"...another quote I'm pretty sure I'm stealing from some place...
What??, I synthesis information, I don't remember it...I certainly don't remember where I first heard it - just assume that nothing I say or think is an original, unless it's wrong - I've probably been wrong in unique ways, but even that's hard. If it's right, I almost certainly poached it, or at least the seeds of it, from somewhere...
Point two (we're almost there, almost there...) is, if a "society" can be defined as a set of mutually agreed obligations a set of people have to one another, helping out folks who need a hand is one of the obligations of any society I want to be a part of.
There are folks with their own set of mental health "issues" that some fraction of North American societal norms openly rewards. Goldman Sachs was reputed to be preferentially hiring sociopaths for a while, as they wouldn't feel guilty screwing people around.
There is a gentleman with a wee bit of a narcissistic tendency running for President of the United States. Our society can be a much more "human" place if we recognise mental health "problems" are just something that some folks need help with, and it is appropriate and good that all of us have a "obligation" to help people deal with whatever they need help with, no biggy.
We need to recognise it's just as a "thing", like everybody has some grouping of, and not a "bad" that disqualifies a person from contributing within that society - and lets not encourage the worst aspects of person's condition to end up with a Trumpian world - but it honestly isn't totally his "fault" he's carrying the world off a cliff, the people around him who haven't done enough to help him get over himself carry much of the "blame". Doesn't mean he's not a jerk, but it's only somewhat his "fault" he's a disgusting blowhard.
In a functional society, hell, probably even Canadian society, he'd be laughed off the stage. I thought I slide some politics in here towards the end, as I doubt most people will ever get this far, so low risk. Basically, we're all in this boat (blue marble rumbling through space, whatev) together, (at least until that Musk/Space X guy gets us to other planets) and we are DEEPLY social animals. There is no quicker route to madness than social isolation (really, even teenagers don't really want to be left ALONE alone for any appreciable amount of time).
Now all join hands, sing "Kum-Ba-Ya"and "be excellent...to each other" (free lunch at Notables for the first person to place that "excellent" cultural reference...that lunch will need to include me, but hey, free lunch, and I'm good with companionable silence, ok - maybe not, but you can wear ear plugs and I'll still be good. Hell smile and nod a few times and I'll probably not even notice... - and sorry to folks not of my generation-ish, it's a bit of an age sensitive thing, but you may be able to get google to answer it fast enough - at least for the generations that get the whole google thing...Tad's out of luck, but he probably doesn't want lunch with me anyway...)
It's unlikely that many people have read through this WHOLE thing, so your odds are good if you're still with me, even days later...Ms. Joynt, I know you skipped to the end, cheater, but you probably don't want lunch with me any more than Tad does, so whatev.
Postscript -
All observations in here are coloured by my own personal experiences and politics so mileage my vary. Everybody has somewhat unique, personal relationships with the Dog so read what others say and adapt stuff to suit.
I'll probably cover other interests here over time, and Erica Crowther is running the Pool on how long I last before I write something that gets me shut down.
Other Postscript -
Ms. Joynt had skipped to the end, but went back and read it after I called her on it...