Lux et umbra vicissum…

Mental Illness.  That phrase has such a stigma.  It dredges up images of people who can’t function due to severe retardation, or people laughing maniacally somewhere in the far recesses of a hospital.  Depression actually sounds a bit better these days probably because it’s become so common, but somehow it doesn’t really capture the nature of the beast accurately either.  Maybe it’s because so many of the pharmaceutical commercials seem to show depression as someone just being sad or tired all the time.  They show pictures of a woman sitting holding a coffee mug and looking down, or someone looking teary eyed in their living room.  I guess it’s hard to capture all of the facets of depression in a thirty second ad spot, so I don’t know how I’d have them change.  I just know that’s not all there is to this many-headed monster.

“Mental illness” really should make me feel better about it.  After all, it’s an illness, right?  It’s not just an “issue”, it has a medical reason.   Ok, so the psychiatrists still aren’t sure exactly why it happens, but it does seem to have something to do with seratonin in the brain and how it’s absorbed (or not).  So there are chemical and biological reasons that this happens.  And hormonal, or course.  Hormones seem to affect just about everything.  Why is it that I have this knowledge, and yet can still feel like my life will be unfairly judged by anyone who knows of my condition?

I guess thinking of it as a chronic illness isn’t really that far off.  How often do people who suffer from MS or cerebral palsy have to face judgment each day?  How many other chronic illnesses are often hidden from all but family and close friends because people don’t want to feel “labeled” by others around them?  Even asthma has a bit of a stigma for people, having a reputation as being the disease of the weak and non-athletic.  Who cares that any number of people have proven that image to be false?  And so depression and other mental illnesses are really just taking their place among the other chronic diseases that affect not only the people who have them but the way others in society will treat them.

At the same time, I wish that people would think of depression as just another chronic illness.  Then I wouldn’t feel so bad when I have a bad day and can’t function properly.  If people thought of what I was experiencing in the same light as, say, lupus or chronic fatigue syndrome where they expect people to have good days and bad days, well, the bad days wouldn’t bother me quite as much.  As it is, when I have a bad day, the knowledge that many would judge me by that day thinking it’s just a matter of willpower or positive thinking (or even of prayer, which may help but has not yet cured me), that knowledge causes the day to be worse and sometimes to draw out for longer than it otherwise would have.  No one likes to think that people think badly of them, or even that people would think badly of them if they knew how things sometimes were.

Over the years since we’ve had the children, I’ve been hesitant to mention to people that Joel is usually the one who gets up with the children in the night.  People assume that, as the mother, I would be the one to deal with nightmares and sick children.  The truth is, we’ve seen a very definite correlation between the amount of sleep I get and how hard my depression hits.  If I get more sleep, there’s less chance I’ll have depression trouble the next day causing Joel to have to play both mother and father until I get back on my feet.  We decided some time ago that knowing this, it would be best for Joel to be the one to take on the nighttime issues.  And yet, when the topic of getting up with children has come up in various settings, especially when women have stated that they always get up with the children since their husbands have to go to work the next morning, I’ve rarely said anything for fear someone would think me an unfit mother, a terrible wife, or a lazy bum.

Maybe that’s partly why I’ve become far less quick to judge other people.  Much like my need for extra sleep and the way it affects our parenting decisions, others may have more complex reasons for what they say and do than what we see at first glance.  And even when a person’s action is very obviously something to be condemned, who am I to say I wouldn’t have done the same thing if put in their exact position?  We don’t often know all of the factors in a situation, so why do we judge the person involved?  Human nature, I guess.  Judging and labeling, making others seem less so that we can feel like more.