The distinction between depression and depression lies in whether it affects social functions and whether it continues to cause trouble to people's emotional will.
What I want to talk about in this article is not only depression that has become a mental disorder, but why more and more people say that they are heading for depression, and why depression has become the background color of our spiritual life ? How to look at it?
(1) Normal, Good and Fear
There is a movie called "Veronica Decided to Die". This is a movie about a depressed patient committing suicide. At the beginning of the film, a girl took a medicine bottle, all kinds of pills, put it on a table, and then raised her head and drank it all - she decided to die.
Veronica is an excellent girl. Her parents have always been proud of her. She has a beautiful face, has been in excellent schools since childhood, and is surrounded by excellent people. After graduating, she found a good annual salary. Gao works, lives in a high-end apartment, and has no worries about food and clothing. It can be said that she is the best in her age. Her parents have always been proud of her.
However, she has always been a depression patient in her heart, and her mind keeps flashing back in her life. The picture is that she has married in middle age, has a stable family life, and can never escape from the boring life. Like most people, it is extremely Live rightly, suffocating... She couldn't find the meaning of life and had to die.
What kind of life is meaningful? Many young people are asking this question. Many young people are also living Veronica's life. They were told from childhood to live according to the ideal model of the social standard: to be admitted to a key university at the age of 18; A marriage with a car and a house... In the lyrics of the Rainbow Chorus, young people say that my relatives and friends wish that I would get married as soon as I graduate, have a baby when I get married, and give birth to a twin at a time... I have been
excellent all the way, and then what? Therefore, depression is often the standard "disease" of the middle class, and it erupts when everything seems to be there.
The false self-concept in psychology means that we have an ideal self in the process of interacting with people. We are not using our true emotions to communicate with people, but using what we think others want to see. It seems to be living. The false self is a kind of personality mask, but after living with it for a long time, the false personality has grown together with the real one.
The false self seems to be the price of civilization. A highly unimpeded social information channel means highly integrated and unified values. Don't look at today's Internet, our information flow is so huge, but our views are almost unprecedented, and the standards of information dissemination are highly consistent and unified, so in fact, our judgment standards for things are consistent, rude, and simplified.
So for the choice of life, you think you can be yourself, but you no longer know which trend of thinking you have been integrated into. In ancient times, in a remote rural area, you could be a reclusive gentleman and have your own set of values. However, today, there is no place that cannot be covered by information, and you will not accidentally be involved in public opinion and evaluation. The so-called ordinary people are just people who follow every step of the way. They have no choice but to follow, but they are often not reconciled to one thousand people.
How is social identity formed at the expense of authenticity? Because civilization requires a highly efficient society, organization and consistency should come first. The price is that everyone is infinitely similar, unable to live the inner difference, what others think is normal, boring, and ideal life, some people just like it, and some people feel suffocated.
The inability of modern society to provide a sense of meaning in existence actually makes people fall into a cultural crisis, where everything is secularized and spiritual values are vacant.
This is also the "hollow disease" proposed by Mr. Xu Kaiwen. Many people's depression is a loss of connection with their true self and a sense of loss of value. Many of them are excellent students and excellent white-collar workers. They are vested interests, but they are also people who know nothing about themselves, and their inner vitality is withering.
(2) Loss of ideals In the
movie, the psychiatrist said to Veronica during a session:
"In modern society, most people replace all their feelings with fear, everyone has dreams, but only very Few people can achieve them, which makes those who don't become cowards."
Veronica said, "Even if they feel it's their right to be cowards?" The
psychiatrist nodded, "Especially, if everyone's dreams come true, this place (referring to the mental hospital) will be empty."
Depression is part of the reason It is due to the awareness of the distance between the ideal self and the real self.
Emphasizes personal struggle, overestimates the meaning of dreams, and ruthlessly belittles the ordinary and Loser. This is also a ubiquitous living atmosphere.
Modern young people are under a lot of pressure. A child may have excellent grades in middle school, but after graduating from college, he has become an ant tribe. How can he struggle to buy a house in a big city? In the end, he finally realized that he might not achieve his ideal achievement in his life. He fell into a sense of powerlessness. Even if he thinks he just wants to live a normal life, but how strong a heart is needed to escape the fear of becoming a loser, I am afraid that only Taoism can do.
The wave of globalization brought about by Western civilization emphasizes individual heroism, takes desire as the source of power, emphasizes dreams, and self-realization. Every day I hear the myth of the new rich, but there is a huge disparity between the rich and the poor, and some people are destined to fail to realize their dreams. . This adds to our dissatisfaction with ourselves, especially when we see the lives of ideal-class people on social networks.
This kind of dissatisfaction with the self and anxiety about the status quo, on the one hand, will increase social violence, people will suppress outward, and their tolerance and tolerance for anger will decrease, and it is easy to become violent if they disagree; On the one hand, they will attack themselves, turning their fear of losers into a form of self-suppression, turning inward and putting a lot of pressure and denial on themselves.
It's also fundamentally a form of death anxiety, if I can't fulfill myself, who am I? This sense of lack is actually hard to get rid of subconsciously.
(3) Out of control and anxiety about out of control
Veronica's parents came to visit her in a mental hospital. They showed concern for their daughter. They were very worried. They kept talking about how good she was since she was a child and everything was fine. Suicide, begging the doctor to cure her as soon as possible and let her return to "normal":
The doctor said, "First of all, your daughter wants to kill herself. There is nothing to be ashamed of. In this society, we always seek happiness, but if we are not happy, we will feel helpless, we will feel defeated."
Vero Nika's parents represent the thoughts of many people. We have a greater fear of losing control of the spiritual world, because if it is a physical disease, we feel that the body is objective and can not be controlled by us, but the spiritual world is out of control, but Bring a sense of one's own powerlessness, abnormal feeling, a deep sense of shame.
This sense of shame is sometimes the source of more depression. Just like when you have insomnia, if you don’t always think that you will have insomnia and worry about insomnia, you will actually be more relaxed. It is the thought of “I have insomnia” that makes you sleepless.
Anxiety itself is a fear of losing control. Because of the sense of shame, I can't speak to outsiders. I'm out of control mentally, which leads to even lower emotions.
If you're depressed, it's that constant saying to yourself get well soon, the fear of losing control that pushes you further into loneliness.
(4) Smart people reconcile
with the environment that has not yet been made. Once, Veronica's emotions broke out. She directly attacked the psychiatrist and expressed her disappointment in the world to him, or demeaned:
"I Hate your rotten table, hate your ugly socks, and those ridiculous socks, I hate everyone locked up in this shitty place"
"I hate my parents, who have everything to keep me trapped In this zoo (referring to the mental hospital), God, they should really live for themselves."
"Is this what they are here for? To be the same as everyone else? I hate the group of people in the office who think they have money. Stupid people who can raise their own weight, what I hate most is the group of walking dead in the subway, because they have forgotten all their dreams, or they have never chased their dreams at all"
Started by expressing outrage, She has actually regained some of her power. But from this passage, you can also feel that she is actually a person who refuses to converge. In other words, perhaps more idealistic and more spiritual people can be keenly aware of the fact that some normal people think that there are some problems in their normal life.
Like many people who are troubled by depression, who are inherently sensitive and perfectionistic, with ideals, Veronica has a fine-grained insight into life, but she has not yet found a way to reconcile herself with the environment, she once doubted everything , and was defeated by this sense of meaninglessness. However, this is not a "defect". In another sense, it is also a process of her self-construction, breaking, and then finding a way to stitch together the self and the world. The
psychiatrist gave her two stories to help her be so sensitive The Reconciliation between Humans and the World:
Story 1: One is a fable written by Gibran, a wizard poisoned the only well in a country, and people in the whole country drank the well water, only the past did not drink it. The whole country was talking about not being mad, but the king was mad, so the king was going to be abolished. Later, the only sober king could only drink water from the well, and the whole country celebrated with the king that the king was not crazy.
Story 2: Actually, when the first typewriter was invented, the keyboards were arranged in alphabetical order. Later, when a person typed very fast, the keyboard got stuck, so this man named Scholes invented the A standard keyboard, forcing people to type slower.
The psychiatrist says "Reality is what most people think it should be, reality doesn't have to be the best, or reasonable, it just needs to meet the overall needs of society. Some things are changed by common sense, but others It's going to change until more and more people think it's what it should be."
Here's a question, is there a "benefit" for depressed people? If there is anything deep in psychology, it is the sense of existence of "everyone is drunk and I am alone". Although some people are in depression and suffering, they are subconsciously pursuing attention and self-existence. So unconsciously it seems to have turned depression into a need to extricate oneself.
Therefore, sometimes smart people are prone to depression, because they are oversensitive and do not want to be like others, but they have not found a path of reconciliation with the environment, allowing themselves to understand rather than oppose.
What the psychiatrist wants to illustrate with two stories is that sometimes society has its own part of the common sense operation. This is the consensus reached by the group for thousands of years. There is no need to challenge. On an average level, people feel safe. Yes, and being a minority comes at a price.
(5) What is true self-construction?
In the movie, there is a scene where a spiritual teacher comes to a mental hospital and gives them meditation therapy, and he says: All people are mentally ill to some extent, if they can't communicate with people.
This is a metaphor. Depression is not just an emotion, it represents a general uncommunicable existential predicament, but it makes people feel powerless.
It's just the cultural meaning of its naming, so it is constructed. We define it as "it is failed, unhappy, and out of control". As long as it is above this level of anxiety, how we get along with depression is actually controlled by it. of. Because there is a preconceived notion of depression.
In such a society that pursues power, control and success, it will be very difficult for us to love and affirm ourselves, which will lead to an inward attack and a sense of powerlessness, and we will give it a name "depression", And this name makes us deny ourselves even more in fear.
The outbreak of depression may not be a disease, but it may be a "reminder" for us, a correction to our life today: modern people have lived so rationally, seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages, and then focusing on the interests of their hearts , until powerlessness, anger, and nowhere to erupt, subconsciously depriving us of our true desire for life.
I have a hypothesis. If 80% of the people in this society are normal people in the civilized world, then perhaps the 20% of people who are consciously depressed may be taking on the question of civilization on our behalf—we are who? Are we living the right life today?
This pervasive depression should not be seen as a symptom, but as a need.
In the film, the psychiatrist used a white lie to treat Veronica. He lied that she had an incurable disease and would die at any time, because "most people who want to commit suicide will try again and again until they succeed, so I risk it. Having lied to her, I decided to use her to test the only therapy I had confidence in - cognition of life. "Because, he believes that one day, as long as Veronica gets news of her health from any doctor, she will" Treat every day you are alive as a miracle." Instead of dwelling on death.
And fate also helped Riveronica at this time. She accidentally met sincere love in a mental hospital, and her desire for love made her re-establish the value of life and see the sunrise of life again. It also proves that the premise of treatment preset by psychologists is very important and essential.
Professor Xu Kaiwen, a professor of psychology at Peking University, once mentioned such an example in "The Hollow Disease of This Era":
a very good Peking University classmate who was depressed and had a very specific plan to end his life. Teacher Xu Kaiwen told him the story of the statue of Cai Yuanpei by the Weiming Lake of Peking University. Cai Yuanpei is the most important president of Peking University. For many years, there will be a landscape in front of his statue, that is, throughout the year, there will be flowers offered by people who don't know what kind of people. Maybe passers-by, teachers and students, or tourists, they will worship flowers in front of the statue of Mr. Cai Yuanpei and write down their inner feelings. This is a statue, not his tomb or monument, and why are flowers offered all year round?
Teacher Xu Kaiwen said that this is not forgetting the heart. The original intention is that when I am doing good things, when I am doing right and kind things, my inner self must be happy; and when I am doing a less moral thing, or I am doing some harm, There will be guilt inside.
God has the "virtue of a good life". When he talked to this classmate about the statue and flowers, the classmate said three times at the time, "I'm very moved." When he was in the specific entanglement between his studies and where to go in the future, he couldn't find it. When it came to the meaning of life, he never thought that in addition to those things that he should do well, but he didn't want to do, he should have a bigger vision and find the essential vitality of life.
The value therapy of life cognition means that everyone has a desire for value and beauty in their hearts. Without a positive experience of the meaning of life, people will not love themselves and life. This is perhaps the greatest life truth we have ever learned from it, and an important step in leading us out of depression.
Author: Aunt Mushroom, second-level psychological counselor, senior media person, public number "Aunt Mushroom".
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