Depression: It’s Not A ‘Wimp Disease’

Dad was only 58 years old when he died, after weeks of agony, from cancer that his doctor did not properly diagnose until it was too late. No stranger to pain, Dad had lived the torment of depression off and on for most of his life.

He has been dead for nearly 30 years. But when my father was alive, his moods would periodically plunge, making him cold and distant. He would sit for hours in his chair, refusing to respond to our entreaties. Smoking cigarettes and letting the ashes fall on the floor. Drinking. Disrupting our lives with his silent control over us.

Or he would rage against us, spewing anger-laced taunts that belittled our beings and burdened our hearts. Once he stacked the household furniture in the backyard and tried to set fire to it. He acted out his anguish without ever talking about it.

As with many others who suffer from a depressive illness, he passed his seeds of despair on to his children. In “I Don’t Want to Talk About It,” psychotherapist Terrence Real explains: “Current research makes it clear that a vulnerability to depression is most probably an inherited biological condition. … But in most cases biological vulnerability isn’t enough to bring about the disorder. It is the collision of inherited vulnerability with psychological injury that produces depression.”

It was not, however, until long after my father died and after I was treated for my own depression that I was able to understand him. Real’s book has given me even more insight into Dad’s private hell.

Depression as a chronic, treatable illness was not understood in men or women until fairly recently. Certainly my father’s family, including his grandfather (who committed suicide), found no relief from their depression pain.

Today, most sufferers through medication and/ or therapy can get help. Real says that men, however, are less likely to get help than women are. He explains that women and men tend to handle feelings differently. And since depression is a disorder of feeling, the sexes differ in how they handle an emotional illness.

Even though men and women share many of the same depression symptoms - sleep disorders, a marked lack of interest in life, fatigue, a sense of worthlessness, etc. - women internalize, he says, and men externalize.

Men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women. Male depression often drives such problems as alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence.

My depression sometimes made me verbally violent. Mostly, though, I turned on myself. Wasn’t my awful behavior my fault? Wasn’t everything my fault? The smallest critical comment could push me into bouts of self-hatred. I wasn’t sure that life was worth living.

My father, we thought, was mean sometimes. He was, however, the father and he was in charge. Even when he was emotionally unable to be in charge of anyone or anything, including himself, we did not challenge his conduct. Real calls this kind of behavior “the cultural cover-up about depression in men.”

He quotes physician John Rush who told a story about a friend who said, “Depression? Hell, boy, that’s a wimp disease.” That is the exact attitude that makes getting help for depressed men so difficult. Men are supposed to be tough. They aren’t supposed to feel down.

In a recent survey, more than half the people questioned do not see depression as a major problem. In another study, more than 50 percent either have experienced depression or have family members who have. Yet half of them still view the disorder as a sign of personal weakness rather than a psychological illness.

It’s past time for universal recognition that chronic depression is just as much a major disease as cancer. If left undetected and untreated, depression - like cancer - can kill.

It’s past time for understanding that depression is not a “wimp disease.”

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