Depression is White People’s Disease

We screened What A Way To Go at the Community Church in Chapel Hill this past Sunday afternoon. A sizable crowd filtered into the new day-lit auditorium in spite of the beckoning of hyper-spring weather outside. A group at the church called “The Great Turning” has been reading and discussing David Korten’s book by the same name, and also viewing a variety of documentaries on related topics.

After the screening we convened a talking circle, which we do routinely to help people share more openly with one another their reactions and feelings about the very difficult issues we address in WAWTG.

During the talking circle people talked about overwhelm and depression. More than one person questioned whether a mainstream audience would sit through this movie. They suggested that maybe these topics are just too depressing, especially for people who have not been exposed to these ideas previously.

Carolyn Baker, a professor of history and a writer, as she watched WAWTG, tells us she imagined Carl Jung there, and imagined he would whisper under his breath that human beings can only handle so much truth. Carolyn however seems to handle great volumes of truth. This is evident by the tone of her review, as well as the contents of her website.

So, is it true? Is there only so much truth human beings can handle?

Movies like The End of Suburbia, An Inconvenient Truth, and What A Way To Go get in our faces. These and numerous other current documentaries, and growing numbers of books and articles, point to the prospect that life as the people of Empire have been living it, in ever grander and more luxurious permutations, is about to change radically. And the end result of that change is unknown. In response people complain that these movies and topics are just too “depressing.”

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Depression, in this case, is what I’d call a white people’s disease. It’s the disease the civilized have learned to contract in the face of feelings we are afraid to feel. So we don’t. We depress the real, legitimate feelings of sadness and grief, anger and outrage, fear and loneliness. And yet, these feelings are natural, healthy responses to our current human and planetary predicament. When we do not identify and express, and instead “depress,” these feelings, the end result is the emotional fog and lethargy that people routinely label “depression.”

Tim and I have immersed ourselves almost daily for four years in information about peak oil, climate change, and the environmental havoc that’s been wreaked on the planet over the last 200 years.

During the first year or so of our research I was deeply sunk at times in pain and hopelessness. To escape those feelings I took occasional flights into the fantasy of the latest technofix. Eventually I let go of believing in technofixes, which always ended up having some very dark environmental or social underbelly that hadn’t been initially accounted for.

Tim has more facility than I have for sidestepping feelings with analysis, cynicism and a wicked sense of humor. So he kept looking headlong at the information while I remained awash in grief and horror at what the future seemed to hold. Night after night I had apocalyptic dreams. More than once I melted down, angry and tearful, telling Tim that I couldn’t contintue to hold hope or possibility single-handedly while he cooly continued to delineate the doom equation.

In response to my need, Tim shifted. Despite his roots in the soil of Midwestern stoicism, Tim discovered something new in himself to complement his abilities to analyze and create wicked humor. He discovered the amazing capacity to feel more flavors of emotion than “okay pretty good” and “bad.”

I, in turn, learned to deepen my trust in my own strong core. I learned I could ask him for help. I learned also to witness quietly, and to resist any reflexive urge to “fix” or minimize his newfound feelings of grief, helplessness and compassion.

And so began, and continues, our shared ride of the waves of despair and possibility, grief and compassion, dark humor and joy.

During this adventure together, facing into the planetary terminal diagnosis, we both learned a lot. We learned to take time to support each other to feel and express the whole gamut of emotions. We learned to take walks and do yoga together. We learned the great joy of watching birds on our feeders. This has not been easy but it has been tremendously fulfilling.

“Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear; the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future.”
~ M.Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled

Piece by piece, Tim and I work our way through the myriad of emotions that come with staring down the world situation. As we dig into ourselves, always beneath what might have been termed “depression,” we find feelings. We discover that when we identify and express those feelings, the emotional grey goo of depression eventually dissipates. And along the way we discover strong and courageous parts of ourselves that have been dormant.

So Tim and I don’t get depressed much anymore. We’ve chosen the path of feeling instead. It is indeed “the road less travelled by.” And that has made all the difference.