Depression and RET

Abstract

The main point of this chapter is to share, as fellow professionals and “wounded healers” (Rippere & Williams, 1985), what we have experienced with our own depressive illnesses and, more important, what we have learned from them. Certainly, as therapists, we had seen depressed patients and read a great deal about depression, but until we experienced depression firsthand, we felt we had never received as rich an introduction to the pain of this illness nor appreciated the fortitude of the patient who has it.

I want to register a complaint about the word depression.... Melancholia, as opposed to depression, would appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a term with such a bland tonality that it lacks any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.... for 75 years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control. As one who had suffered from the malady in extremis, yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. “Brainstorm,” for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed. Told that someone’s mood disorder had evolved into a storm—a veritable howling tempest in the brain—which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else—even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that depression evokes, something akin to “So what?” or “You’ll pull out of it” or “We all have a bad day.” Styron, 1989