Depression Is Real

This is a response to a provocative post in the Facebook Men’s Group titled Depression Isn’t Real.

I’ve experienced depression, and took a deep dive into the root cause to work out what to do about it in my own life. I’ve also talked to a lot of other people who experience it, so here’s my take: I disagree that depression isn’t real, but I do think the way modern society and our health care system approaches it is often unhelpful.

Yes, Depression Is Real

I agree with affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp that the core problem underlying most mental illness including depression is emotional dysregulation, and with psychologist John Bowlby that the root cause of this is often unmet early life attachment needs with our mother, and to a lesser extent our father. Unfortunately attachment theory has fallen out of vogue, the dominant paradigm in psychology is cognitive behaviourism which isn’t consistent with how our nervous systems process emotions/trauma, and the dominant paradigm in psychiatry is medication that suppresses the very emotions we need to access in order to heal.

However, recent developments in affective neuroscience, emotionally focussed therapies and the trauma informed care movement give me hope that this can change.

I don’t believe that sadness becomes habitual, but I do think grief can run very deep and we can feel stuck when we haven’t identified the real source of our pain or got to the bottom of it. For example, anger manifesting as sadness can seem to go on forever if we don’t address it as anger; and vice versa. It took me a long time to connect with the anger I had towards my parents that didn’t feel safe to express during their lifetime, because my experience of their anger when I was young was traumatising.

When I talk to other people who experience depression and it’s close cousin generalised anxiety, the healing generally begins when we start talking about relationships with mum and dad. These early attachment relationships frame our world view, program our brain chemistry, and set up behavioural patterns that often don’t meet our adult emotional needs. In most people I’ve met this is where the work needs to start to tackle depression at the root cause, and it takes a strong commitment and an emotionally safe relationship to do it.

Invariably this involves shedding tears that didn’t feel safe to cry at the time, and this was certainly the case for me. In my case this was also complicated by many years of undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea, which is massively underdiagnosed and turns out to also partly be a result of early life attachment issues; namely inadequate breastfeeding.

My advice to anyone experiencing depression would be to get a sleep study to rule out OSA, and find an emotionally focussed therapist who can help you work through your early life attachment wounds.