Depression, Anxiety and Self
Earlier this week I was with a group of people and one of them shared that she had been depressed recently and a friend had told her she was self-centered. Someone else shared they had the same experience with another friend when speaking to them about their social anxiety. A third related something similar when sharing with someone about panic attacks. I was appalled and intrigued at the same time. I have had depression and seem prone to it. I have been diagnosed with social anxiety and have, in the past, had panic disorder.
Am I self-centered?
The truth is that some decades ago when I was in my last year at university and going through a bout of real, black-dog depression the psychiatrist I was seeing fired me saying I wasn’t cooperating with him. I went home one weekend and my mother said to me, “You just can’t be always thinking of yourself.” I then telephoned the psychiatrist and begged to be taken back saying that I would try to do whatever he asked me. He agreed and within days I seemed back to normal. Were my friends right then, that depressives and anxiety sufferers are self-centered?
I think not. Just because getting out of self is effective with these disorders doesn’t mean sufferers are self-centered. Besides, the trouble with that line of reasoning is that if you believe that then everyone who has depression or anxiety or panic attacks is self-centered and what kind of world would that be?
Well it would be a world not unlike that described in Erewhon by Samuel Butler in the 19th century in which criminals are treated as being ill and confined to asylums and citizens with mental illness are put in prison. Erewhon, in its earlier chapters, appears to be a utopia but this is not the case and on close reading it is actually a satire. In other words putting the mentally ill in prison is a joke.
The world of mental disorders, in my experience is a world where only the very frontiers are now being mapped and where neuroscientists are currently revising almost everything we know about how our brains work. Besides if you believe you are self-centered when you are suffer from depression or anxiety then everyone who is depressed or anxious or has panic attacks is self-centered and this would be a world without compassion. It would be a world I wouldn’t want to live in. It would be an Erewhon and Butler called it Erewhon because if you look at it backwards, it is nowhere.