Free Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life by Angela Patmore Page A
Authors: Angela Patmore
their nerves’. This is where they find their brains function at their optimum capacity and where they can produce their magic.
You can use this knowledge when you yourself face a crisis. It may help you get through and appreciate the true powers of your brain and its workings. As Othello puts it in Shakespeare’s play of the same name:
… O my soul’s joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have waken’d death!
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus-high, and duck again as low
As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die,
’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another moment like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.
(William Shakespeare, Othello , Act II)
NOTES
1 . W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis. Jonathan Cape, 1975, p. 138.
2 . Angela Patmore, The Truth About Stress, Grove Atlantic, 2006, pp. 348–50.
8
Stop ‘giving up the ghost’
My reputation as a Heartless Bitch will perhaps have forewarned you that this is one book on depression where you won’t get an easy ride . Unlike many of my fellow advisers on mental health issues, I’m not trying to calm you down or mollycoddle your feelings. I regard it as my responsibility to get you to face the Demon of Despair, deal with it robustly and truly get better. I happen to think you are more likely to do this if you face reality than if you face somewhere else, pop pills and imagine calm scenes.
So this chapter has to start by giving you a fright.
Health warning
Hopeless and helpless people should understand that, even if they have never attempted suicide, they may be allowing themselves to get sick and even to die by their failure to help themselves.
Research on despair shows that it makes the sufferer vulnerable to harmful physiological changes. In America in the 1970s, depressed patients were interviewed about their feelings while they were wired up to monitoring equipment, and the scientists found that even talking about feelings of hopelessness and helplessness may cause a sudden drop in blood pressure sufficient to be life-threatening, even though the speaker may be completely unaware of any physiological change. 1
Earlier, in the late 1960s, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier carried out experiments that were to change the face of modern psychology. Seligman and Maier discovered that:
1 If they exposed laboratory animals or human volunteers to painful situations, their normal response was to try to escape and avoid the pain. This was not unexpected.
2 If they could not escape, most of them gradually resigned themselves and exhibited apathetic behaviour. This was not unexpected either.
3 What was unexpected was that even if an escape hatch was then provided, some of these pathetic subjects continued to behave in a resigned way, putting up with the pain and not trying to save themselves.
Afterwards their resignation was found to have quite dramatically undermined their health. It became clear that giving up is maladaptive and harmful to survival because it disrupts the body’s defences and exposes it to pathogens. The scientists called the behaviour they had seen ‘learned helplessness’ or ‘failure to initiate responses in the face of threat’. 2 Martin Seligman went on to develop a model of depression based on his experimental work.
RESIGNATION, NOT ‘STRESS’
Resignation is quite different from arousal. In fact the reaction is the biological opposite of the fight-or-flight response designed to galvanise our brains and bodies to meet challenges (that many are now calling ‘stress’). Learned helplessness, in contrast, is a kind of biological death wish. It is very useful, for example, to a gazelle about to face imminent slaughter by a predator. Resignation numbs the threatened creature by releasing opiate-like substances in the brain to calm it for its impending ugly fate. It acts as
You can use this knowledge when you yourself face a crisis. It may help you get through and appreciate the true powers of your brain and its workings. As Othello puts it in Shakespeare’s play of the same name:
… O my soul’s joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have waken’d death!
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus-high, and duck again as low
As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die,
’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another moment like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.
(William Shakespeare, Othello , Act II)
NOTES
1 . W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis. Jonathan Cape, 1975, p. 138.
2 . Angela Patmore, The Truth About Stress, Grove Atlantic, 2006, pp. 348–50.
8
Stop ‘giving up the ghost’
My reputation as a Heartless Bitch will perhaps have forewarned you that this is one book on depression where you won’t get an easy ride . Unlike many of my fellow advisers on mental health issues, I’m not trying to calm you down or mollycoddle your feelings. I regard it as my responsibility to get you to face the Demon of Despair, deal with it robustly and truly get better. I happen to think you are more likely to do this if you face reality than if you face somewhere else, pop pills and imagine calm scenes.
So this chapter has to start by giving you a fright.
Health warning
Hopeless and helpless people should understand that, even if they have never attempted suicide, they may be allowing themselves to get sick and even to die by their failure to help themselves.
Research on despair shows that it makes the sufferer vulnerable to harmful physiological changes. In America in the 1970s, depressed patients were interviewed about their feelings while they were wired up to monitoring equipment, and the scientists found that even talking about feelings of hopelessness and helplessness may cause a sudden drop in blood pressure sufficient to be life-threatening, even though the speaker may be completely unaware of any physiological change. 1
Earlier, in the late 1960s, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier carried out experiments that were to change the face of modern psychology. Seligman and Maier discovered that:
1 If they exposed laboratory animals or human volunteers to painful situations, their normal response was to try to escape and avoid the pain. This was not unexpected.
2 If they could not escape, most of them gradually resigned themselves and exhibited apathetic behaviour. This was not unexpected either.
3 What was unexpected was that even if an escape hatch was then provided, some of these pathetic subjects continued to behave in a resigned way, putting up with the pain and not trying to save themselves.
Afterwards their resignation was found to have quite dramatically undermined their health. It became clear that giving up is maladaptive and harmful to survival because it disrupts the body’s defences and exposes it to pathogens. The scientists called the behaviour they had seen ‘learned helplessness’ or ‘failure to initiate responses in the face of threat’. 2 Martin Seligman went on to develop a model of depression based on his experimental work.
RESIGNATION, NOT ‘STRESS’
Resignation is quite different from arousal. In fact the reaction is the biological opposite of the fight-or-flight response designed to galvanise our brains and bodies to meet challenges (that many are now calling ‘stress’). Learned helplessness, in contrast, is a kind of biological death wish. It is very useful, for example, to a gazelle about to face imminent slaughter by a predator. Resignation numbs the threatened creature by releasing opiate-like substances in the brain to calm it for its impending ugly fate. It acts as
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