In the just-because-you're-paranoid department...I whispered to myself, "joke about the stoic and the cynic" and then did a Google search for it as I didn't remember the joke itself. The first item offered up in the search was what I had whispered. I tried it again whispering, "joke about the rooster and the shyster" but this time the items offered up weren't close to matching what I said. Nevertheless, I turned my microphone volume down to zero. I'll have to remember to adjust it again when I do the next call or recording. It then occurred to me that I'd be still safer if I weren't connected to the Internet. So I've disconnected Wi-Fi and will write this post offline. When I'm ready to post it I will connect again. I had done a full virus scan of my computer just yesterday. It found nothing. But is that software to be trusted? (I use Norton now after the campus cancelled its contract with McAfee.) If I operated in offline mode the bulk of the time, connected only once in a while to download things to read and to post things that have been written or recorded, it would change my behavior substantially. Might that be for the better? I left my browser open as I went offline. There was a tab for my Facebook feed and another for my Twitter feed still open and I noticed that the time of my posts did update even while offline. One wonders what other processes continue in that way. I have it set so Firefox deletes the cookies when I close the browser. Maybe I need to be doing that more frequently as well.
I'll get back to the above near the end of this piece. Now I want to explain the purpose of this post. As a lot of college students are confronting depression, many even before the pandemic, and a whole lot more since, I think it useful for them to hear about how others deal with the issue. My belief is that college instructors and administrators have coping strategies for themselves, for the general stress that work life brings, and more specifically all the additional burdens that the pandemic has imposed. One way that we learn is by imitating those who seem to have their act together. (This is called the master-apprentice model.) Regarding how to keep depression from getting the better of us, I think this way of learning is better than the alternative (the discovery model) where we figure things out for ourselves, for fear that premature conclusions lead to drastic actions that will be regretted later. If your own health is okay and you are able to get enough to eat and you reside in a place that isn’t physically threatening to you, there is no immediate danger. Going stir crazy from the stay-at-home order doesn’t count as an immediate threat. Yet your worries may be substantial and, of course, worries can be a source of depression. Hearing how others deal with this can be useful. Some of what you hear might make sense to you, enough so that you embrace it for yourself. That can be helpful.
I surely don’t want to claim any monopoly on coping strategies, nor am I a mental health professional. But I have been through two episodes of depression in my adolescence. And I had a bout with prostate cancer in 2018, where during treatment they queried me once a week about whether I was experiencing depression. (I joked with the nurse then and said, of course I’m depressed. Everyone in the nation is depressed. But that’s about politics. I’m not depressed about my health. The week after the Yankees lost to the Red Sox in the playoffs I said I was really depressed, and that got a good laugh, because of course I wasn’t.) This is to make a point about language. We all experience disappointments and sometimes we say we’re depressed when we’ve experienced a major disappointment. But disappointment and depression are not the same thing. We rebound from disappointment and return back to our normal selves. Depression is an absorbing state. There is no rebound. There is only sinking further into the hole, unless there is treatment or some radical change in environment. At most, disappointment can serve as a trigger for our inner demons to launch themselves and move us on the path toward depression.
In good company, we normally don’t talk about depression. For college students, however, there was a crisis with student depression that got a lot of play last fall. So students now may be talking about it, if not with their parents or teachers than with some of their friends, or possibly with counselors. Yet part of the crisis is an apparent shortage of mental health professionals to provide counseling so the students can work through their issues. In the absence of a sustained conversation with a mental health professional, students might benefit from hearing a teacher they like and respect talk about coping with stress. Possibly an employer, where the student did an internship and where the student thought the supervisor sensible on work matters, might also talk about coping. After Robin Williams committed suicide I wrote a blog post, Depression in Performing Artists as a Reflection on Ourselves, in part for me to make sense of his actions for myself, but also because my think-alouds in these posts sometimes benefit the readers in their own thinking. Indeed, in this case several Facebook friends thanked me for that post. Yet that suicide was a singular event. The pandemic now is directly impacting all of us. So I’d encourage other college professors, high school teachers, and employers to discuss their own coping strategies. There will be a natural audience for these type of pieces and that audience will appreciate what is written, especially if it is grounded and consistent with what the readers know about the personality of the author.
What follows are a bunch of coping strategies offered up as advice. They are based on my personality as I understand myself. Some of these may be universal. Others may be specific to me.
Express Your Current Thinking
During and after my first experience with depression in 10th grade I developed a habit of mumbling, which my parents found quite annoying. I did it a lot at the dinner table. I don’t think I did it much at all when I was hanging around with friends. The obvious logic in mumbling is to say what’s on your mind without it being heard by those who are around you. The saying what’s on your mind is a felt need. The not being heard is a safety play, for if you were heard it might very well produce an angry response, with that escalating further in some tit-for-tat. If you are looking for a fight then you should be heard. Otherwise, not being heard keeps the fight from happening, even if the mumbling itself is annoying to others.
I don’t want to encourage mumbling as the answer. Instead, I would suggest either writing out what you are thinking or making a voice recording of your thinking. You probably want to do this in a way where what you produce is hidden from others. If it is writing, you’d call it a diary or a journal entry. I suppose you can have an audio or video diary as well. If you have a friend whom you trust implicitly, then having a conversation with the friend might be an alternative. Such friends are rare, however, and in the current circumstances the friend too may be having coping issues. So the diary or journal would be the way to go.
Now let me explain the benefit from doing this. Absent the self-expression, the same thoughts play over and over again in my head. I stew about things and prolonged stewing about things without doing anything to change the situation can be a source of depression. What I’ve found is that if I externalize this thinking somehow, I can then move onto something else. It’s good to do that.
Identify Your Fears
The idea here is that if you know enough about what really frightens you now, you can make some peace with yourself on an approach where those fears are managed. Sometimes management means avoidance of situations that would trigger the fear. Other times it means working through an internal argument in your head about how you can deal with the fear in an ongoing way. I will illustrate with my own situation at present.
I have a great deal of fear regarding intense physical pain that remains persistent. Momentary pain is a different matter. With the prostate cancer, there wasn’t much pain associated with it. There was some discomfort during the radiation treatment itself, but it was only 10 or 15 minutes per session. The real fear, which remains to this day though I am in remission, is that the cancer would spread elsewhere. I was absorbed with that concern. I’ve made some adjustments to diet on the recommendation of my doctor to lessen that risk. It’s the type of thing that actually combats depression, as it seems like reasonable problem solving rather than lack of agency.
I have a second fear about the potential for dementia, as my mother’s side of the family seemed to experience quite a bit of it, and I don’t have a good way to distinguish between ordinary senior moments, whose frequency seem to be on the increase, from a gradual move toward dementia. I had a rather frightening experience about a week ago, where I drove to the nearby Walgreens to pick up a prescription. I went through the parking lot to get to the drive-thru window. There were an unusual number of cars backing out of the lot when I arrived, so I was checking my rear-view mirrors a lot and did so also after I had gotten my prescription. For some reason, I found myself driving south on Duncan Road yet still looking at the driver’s side mirror. I don’t know how long I was doing that, maybe only a second or two. While it was happening I felt fascinated by what I was seeing. After I realized what I had been doing, I felt horrified. It occurred to me that this is how I will die, in an accident because I wasn’t paying attention to what I should have been doing. As as kid, I often didn’t seem to be paying attention to what I was doing, and would frequently drop the dishes that I was supposed to be putting away after they had been washed. This was my nature then and it is still my nature now. It has proved very productive when I was working, to be so absorbed in some line of thought. But maybe now it is the road to dementia and losing track of the ordinary world.
A third fear, on financial matters, I mainly deal with by avoidance. Senator McConnell argues that states should declare bankruptcy to manage their current huge deficits. In this case the states could renege on their pension obligations to current employees. The source of my income now is my pension through SURS. My wife will retire soon and that will be the source of her income too, once she is retired. If the State of Illinois does renege on their pension obligations, we’ll go from being very comfortable financially to having a very small source of income and inadequate savings for the long term. Partial measures, like making the pension subject to Illinois Income Tax, are not a concern for me. Likewise, getting rid of the COLA wouldn’t bother me. Losing the entire source of income, in contrast, would be devastating. But there is nothing for me to do about it now. I don’t obsess about money. I have recently come to track the Nikkei and the DJIA on a daily basis, more or less like how students track the MyGrades area of the LMS. But this is more to understand the economy as a whole than to consider the situation of me and my family. It is an object of fascination for me that the stock markets can remain relatively stable, after an earlier down slide, while the real economy is going to hell in a hand basket.
A last fear, related to the previous one, perhaps the opposite side of the coin, comes from recalling a scene in Schindler’s List near the end of the movie, where Schindler breaks down because, in spite of saving the lives of many Jews, he could have saved many more. I do charitable giving, some of it targeted to the organization I also support with volunteer work, Universal Love Alliance. Should I be giving that much more now? Is my fear about losing our income simply an excuse to limit my current charitable contributions? I’m a trained economist and yet I don’t know how to think this through. But making some bow to the issue is nonetheless useful.
Confronting your fears doesn’t make the fears go away. What it does do is to keep you from being delusional about them. They remain contained. You can live with that.
Be Aware of Environmental Sources of Depression
The second time I had depression, in fall 1973, I was a sophomore at MIT and the people I hung out with in my dorm all seemed to me very nihilistic about school and life in general. The nihilism was a coping strategy for them. But it didn’t work for me and I could feel myself sliding into the depression I experienced in high school. On a trip to Cornell I developed the sense that things would be different there and I knew quite a few people at Cornell already, including my brother. So it occurred to me to transfer there, where previously that thought about transferring had only gotten as far as asking - could I have moved into another dorm at MIT? I rejected that idea. I didn’t think I could explain it well and I was afraid of moving to a place where I didn’t know people.
If the environment seems overwhelming you need to either change the environment yourself or move to a totally different environment. Either of those can be acts of self-preservation.
I’m aware now that students living at home with their parents might find that difficult and yet there is no alternative for the time being. Given that, the question is whether the student can change some of the circumstances of living at home. The option of moving out might not be realistic for quite a while. So making changes at home that all can accept might be the best that can be done for now.
Limit Your Anger
There may be others who thrive on being angry, essentially all the time. For such people anger is empowering. Anger enables the fight instinct and with fight the person has a sense of agency. Anger also seems a way to combat fear. I want to acknowledge this because it doesn’t work this way for me.
Sustained anger is the path to depression for me. I’m a person who relies on my own sensitivity and on reasoning things out. Anger blocks the good that is in me. When I don’t stay in touch with the good that is in me, I lose my sense of agency.
I’m guessing that most people are like me in this respect. Nevertheless, they are susceptible to being stoked. Further, the subsequent feelings of anger can be addicting, so they end up craving repeated stoking. The media manipulators, on both the right and the left, fully understand that. There is money and power in attracting more eyeballs. Taking a stoking-the-audience approach may very well be a winning strategy for them. But if members of the audience are addicted to the feelings they get when being stoked, this can lead to depression and/or reinforce depression that is already present.
The first step in making an improvement to the situation is to recognize there is a problem. In this case, I think it then sensible to monitor one’s own anger. How frequent are those feelings? Then one might experiment with the environment. If there is some TV show or Website that is monitored repeatedly, stop doing that for a day or two. Is there any impact on the anger? Going cold turkey on an addiction is very hard to do. But understanding there is an addiction can make it more manageable.
Learn About Yourself Enough To Know How You Behave When on Your A-Game
I know that with friends and family as well as in a good work environment, I like to joke around, make wisecracks or puns, and share rhymes I write. This is what I do when I’m not stressed out and am enjoying myself. I also know that when I’m on my own, I try to be reflective and think things through. Writing blog posts like this is a way to encourage that.
Before the arthritis came big time I used to enjoy golf and jogging. Earlier it was tennis or squash. Now I do the treadmill. It’s not the same, but it is something.
The thought is for the person to on a regular basis try for A-Game behavior. Make the trying routine, even if what happens when doing the A-Game is creative and unique to the situation. If you do your A-Game with some frequency and there is some internal (feel good) reward from doing so, it will make you more resilient to handle the inevitable disappointments that come along. Conversely, it you try for A-Game behavior and you get no satisfaction from it at all and this happens over a sustained period of time, it is evidence that you are depressed.
Give Yourself A Break Now and Then
I’ve found this one to be big for me. I have high standards for my own performance. I can get on myself pretty hard when I don’t live up to those standards. Then I’m my own worst enemy. My way of managing this is to lighten up, take delight in ordinary yet whimsical things, and actually elevate them in importance. It’s a way of maintaining inner balance.
Embrace the Creative Attitude
I wrote about this in a recent post. To illustrate, I want to return to my opening paragraph, which may have seemed weird to the point that I might be going off the deep end. What I wrote about really did happen. But writing about it was a judgment call. I wanted to illustrate getting fully engaged in a situation that presents itself, without expecting it ahead of time. In this case, the first question that popped into my mind was this. Has the AI in Google’s search engine gotten so good that it can simulate mind reading? My second thought was whether I’m communicating in a way I’m not aware of but the computer can pick it up. Thoughts of The Tell, which is described in the movie Rounders, occurred to me. When I’m typing into the text box for Blogger, which is what I normally use as my editor, does Google process that in real time so when I then do a search that search is conditioned on what I’ve just typed. Or might it be my inadvertent audio input, which is what I wrote about in that paragraph? For me, having an experience that seems puzzling is a trigger to explore why it happened. I can get completely wrapped up in that without having any prior intent to get so involved.
I don’t want to tell anyone else what they should get wrapped up in. I only want to reiterate what I said in that earlier post on the creative attitude. Being completely absorbed in an activity is a mentally healthy thing to do. Having regular experiences of such absorption is a way to ward off depression.
* * * * *
Let’s wrap up this post. I’ve given a variety of suggestions, each of which makes sense to me. I’ve also tried to provide enough about my own experience to show why these matter. What I’ve said may appeal to a certain personality type only (my Myers-Briggs type is INTP). It may very well be that other types need different coping strategies. On just this one point it would be good to hear from other teachers and authority figures about how they go about things.
There is also the matter of the credibility of the sender of the message. For students, they may be more trusting of their own teachers. This is another reason why it would be good to hear from others about these issues.
Many people are uncomfortable in talking about depression. It’s time to come to terms with that discomfort. The mental health crisis among college students is real. We all should be talking about it and sharing ideas about how we keep depression at bay for ourselves. It’s a necessary conversation to have.
No comments:
Post a Comment