It is difficult for men to cry, more difficult if they are Victorians, and worse still if they are the son of an ex-Presbyterian minister whose idea of education involves praising and punishing dry book-learning into a child from the age of three.
I would urge anyone who suffers from depression to read the autobiography of Victorian philosopher, John Stuart Mill. I first encountered Mill's life story when I was doing Masters research on late nineteenth-century psychology back in the early 2000s. Mill's story is a fascinating one. The son of the utilitarian philosopher James Mill, John Stuart received an extraordinarily intense, hyper-rationalist education designed and administered by his overbearing father with the sole aim of producing a genius to continue the utilitarian tradition. From the age of three, Mill began learning Greek. By the age of eight, he was acquainted with classical authors such as Herodotus and Plato in the original, as well as a great deal of arithmetic and history in English. He then began latin, algebra and geometry. By ten his reading list included most of the Latin and Greek authors commonly read in schools and universities, and by fourteen he had undertaken studies in logic, political economy, as well as chemistry, zoology and higher mathematics from specialised schools and private tutors.
At seventeen, Mill joined his father in a post at the East India Company and began proselytising for the utilitarian cause. Then, aged twenty, Mill had a breakdown. As he describes it in the autobiography, in delightfully Victorian language, he fell into a 'dull state of nerves' in which he was 'unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement[...] One of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent'. In this frame of mind he posed himself the question, suppose his life's ambitions for utilitarian reform were achieved? Would he be any happier as a result?:
Mill published in 1863, and we ought to marvel at the courage it took for him to share his crisis with his Victorian audience. The accounts of others who have waged and won their own battles with depression are so valuable when you are utterly alone, which is arguably what drew Mill to the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; for like Mill's autobiography, Coleridge's poem 'Dejection - An Ode', is a beautifully solemn, honest and potent reflection on depression, and again I would advise anyone so afflicted to read it. Indeed, it was precisely this kind of encounter with literature which catalysed Mill's eventual recovery:
That morning as I lay on my sofa at 8 am, fully dressed in cycling waterproofs, ready to battle against the wind and the rain to the doctor's surgery, I couldn't stop thinking about poor old John Stuart Mill - numb, despondent, leafing through sentimental scenes from Romantic literature in a forlorn attempt to convulse his joyless soul back to life. Friends had recommended that I try to cry, and now I really felt that I should in order perhaps to challenge this numbness. I needed a trigger, so I went up to my attic room and found two large boxes of old family photographs, teenage notebooks, letters and keepsakes from the early years of my relationship with my ex-wife. The wind and rain continued to fall, the radiator hissed, and I sat there for an hour, trying to cry.
And I did. A little. Tears fell down my cheeks a few times that hour, and I felt my face girn and grimace, as if I was on the edge of a much desired fit of wailing and sobbing. But that is as far as I got, mostly, I suspect, because my barriers went up, and the imaginative bubble burst through the weight of self-consciousness.
But miraculously it worked. I unfroze. The brain fog lifted, and my perspective shifted, as if some binary switch had been flicked. I looked out the window. Bruised clouds still scudded across the sky, rain still spattered against the glass and drummed on the roof. But the scene was transformed. Everything was suddenly so near, so real, and I was again part of it all.
Like a drowning sailor clutching at a tiny piece of wreckage, I clung to this delicate morsel of pleasure and let it, as far as it could, nourish my soul. I desperately hoped that this moment might be an end to my isolation, my unfreezing. But I hardly dared move, since everything seemed so precariously balanced. Slowly I made my way to a large cushion next to the radiator where I had again begun meditating, and tried to lock in these gains. After some minutes repetition of my mantra, I folded the beat under the sensation of connectedness, tending this vital feeling as one might a fragile form of life.
I awoke from the meditation still feeling connected, but now with a strong desire to go to work. I had been alone, experimenting with my psychology all morning, and now needed some kind of normality. I also felt, uncharacteristically for these weeks, that stimulation would be good for me, and afford more opportunities to focus on this sensation of connectedness.
I left the house and cycled to work. Half-way there joy suddenly flourished in my heart, and my eyes again filled with tears. Not many, but shed with abject gratitude and relief.
At work no one was around but a PhD student who was working on her thesis. I entered the room where she was sitting with her back to me and greeted her with more warmth and energy than I had anyone in weeks. Something was wrong, her cursory response was flat, eyes still trained on the screen. I moved around the room and invited her to make eye contact. Nothing.
Empathy involves reaching out and connecting with another. It involves inserting yourself emotionally into their perspective and feeling what they are going through. When you are depressed, you are isolated, you cannot reach out, or at least, you cannot connect. You can of course correctly recognise the states of mind that others hold, and impute possible causes for these states; depression is not like some autistic spectrum disorders. But, as I have said before, all these behaviours are scripted, as if in a language you can speak but cannot understand, and so you follow the moves impeccably, without a deeper and more significant involvement in the plot.
I grabbed a seat and sat down, not because I knew it was the right thing to do; but because I had become involved in this little drama, I felt her discomfort as my own and now I wanted to do what I could to take it away. And I knew that this would involve listening.
And that is another lesson. When you are depressed, you sometimes find it difficult to listen. For the same reasons that I have just mentioned, the inner lives of others are shut off from you, and your attention is more than likely eaten up with your own unease, anxiety, shame and sadness. You may, as a result, throw out a great deal of energy, either to silence your unease, or to act as a buffer against any implosive collapse. Or you may fail to acknowledge the emotional dimension altogether, and instead focus on the practical aspect as a problem that requires a solution.
I encouraged her to speak about the problems she had been experiencing with an upgrade, and I listened with all of my soul, reaching out and connecting with her, feeling her worries and empathising with my eyes, face, body and voice. I was almost 100 percent in that moment. Almost, because a tiny part of me was watching my own self with abject gratitude and relief that I had momentarily rejoined the world of others.
Then, when I returned to my desk and began working, the spell broke. Heralded by a sense of dislocation, as if the points on the track of my life had suddenly been switched, I departed from the path I had taken since that morning, and entered the fog once more.
Three photographs from my recent travels hang on my study wall: one from the Himalayas, one from the Sahara, and one from the Greek islands. All of these photos I took myself, and often in the days since my recovery I have looked on them with pleasure and fascination, while at the same time introspecting to understand better the origin of this response. For me, the reason I take pleasure and feel fascination for these photos is that I can easily picture myself there. After all, I was there once, and I know how it feels to be there. I know the thrill and pride of climbing snowbound peaks, the playful exuberance of riding in a camel train at dusk, and the deep sense of affinity and love that I personally feel for the heavenly light of the Aegean.
With so much in life, we take it for granted, and only really come to appreciate it when it is taken from us. Every time I wake up from a period of depression, the world seems to throb with pleasure, which makes me draw conclusions about the adaptive value of the condition. Like my photographs, pleasure is always there, but only if we linger long enough to drink it in. My experience of going numb, and unfreezing temporarily, once more pointed to the need to pay attention to the world, to be predisposed and ready to take pleasure wherever you find it, and you can find it almost anywhere.
Beyond this, my experiment taught me a simple truth, which many of us know, but perhaps fail sufficiently to bear in mind. Crying can help alleviate depression. I cannot speculate as to how, since our ego seems to hide this part of the trick from us. But I suspect it has something to do with closing some kind of circuit, or rather letting loose a fruitless cycle of thoughts by throwing them into action. Research on depression points to the key role which rumination without action plays in developing and perpetuating negative and self-defeating patterns of thought. Some of us are unlucky enough to have had difficult childhoods, or unexpected traumas in later life, for which we need to find answers. And I know that I am such an individual: driven to understand adversity by curiosity, the love of wisdom, by perfectionism, by a conviction that the answer is valuable, by an enormous capacity for self-reflection, by the need for feedback, and, yes, by sheer bloody-mindedness that I will not be beaten by fate or ignorance. All of these qualities can serve me well as an academic, writer and teacher, but when these same abilities are continually trained on complex and traumatic life events, whether consciously or not, and when they perpetually fail to yield a satisfying solution, they can foster a sense of learned helplessness, as depression has sometimes been framed.
Our way out of rumination without action is to act to better our lot. I do not know if there is any evidence to suggest that crying is a form of action that allows us to break this cycle. But it certainly helped me, that morning at least, to gain some temporary relief.
To be continued...
I would urge anyone who suffers from depression to read the autobiography of Victorian philosopher, John Stuart Mill. I first encountered Mill's life story when I was doing Masters research on late nineteenth-century psychology back in the early 2000s. Mill's story is a fascinating one. The son of the utilitarian philosopher James Mill, John Stuart received an extraordinarily intense, hyper-rationalist education designed and administered by his overbearing father with the sole aim of producing a genius to continue the utilitarian tradition. From the age of three, Mill began learning Greek. By the age of eight, he was acquainted with classical authors such as Herodotus and Plato in the original, as well as a great deal of arithmetic and history in English. He then began latin, algebra and geometry. By ten his reading list included most of the Latin and Greek authors commonly read in schools and universities, and by fourteen he had undertaken studies in logic, political economy, as well as chemistry, zoology and higher mathematics from specialised schools and private tutors.
At seventeen, Mill joined his father in a post at the East India Company and began proselytising for the utilitarian cause. Then, aged twenty, Mill had a breakdown. As he describes it in the autobiography, in delightfully Victorian language, he fell into a 'dull state of nerves' in which he was 'unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement[...] One of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent'. In this frame of mind he posed himself the question, suppose his life's ambitions for utilitarian reform were achieved? Would he be any happier as a result?:
An irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.In vain, Mill attempted to carry on regardless:
At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's 'Dejection' — I was not then acquainted with them —exactly describe my case:
"A grief without a pang,
void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear."
Mill's breakdown has been the subject of retrospective analyses from every major psychiatric school, with radically contrasting diagnoses. The scope for Freudian readings of Mill's relationship with his father are understandably particularly broad. For me, there can be no doubt. The dullness, the indifference, the anhedonia, the thickening cloud, and the cycle of hope and disappointment occasioned by the failure of sleep to reset your mood: Mill was suffering from depression.
Mill published in 1863, and we ought to marvel at the courage it took for him to share his crisis with his Victorian audience. The accounts of others who have waged and won their own battles with depression are so valuable when you are utterly alone, which is arguably what drew Mill to the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; for like Mill's autobiography, Coleridge's poem 'Dejection - An Ode', is a beautifully solemn, honest and potent reflection on depression, and again I would advise anyone so afflicted to read it. Indeed, it was precisely this kind of encounter with literature which catalysed Mill's eventual recovery:
I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's Mémoires, and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them—would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever-present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was, once more, excitement, though of a moderate, kind, in exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public good. Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I again enjoyed life; and though I had several relapses, some of which lasted many months, I never again was as miserable as I had been.It is difficult to cry. I have tried it many times, mostly on the suspicion that there have been times that I really should have but didn't. And it is difficult for men in particular to cry, at least in front of others. But then again, how do we begin to cry alone? As Mill's example reveals, it takes a trigger, and it takes imagination, or perhaps empathy is a better word. You have to creatively place yourself in a scene, fictional or remembered, and paint it out with sufficient detail as to bring the emotional tone of that scene to the fore. Not only this, but you must also let your guard down, which is difficult to do since crying and sadness are a form of pain. Just as you reflexively throw up your arms to protect your face when you suddenly notice a Frisbee flying at your head, so does your ego instinctively mount defences to protect you from psychological injury. But what if you do not see the Frisbee coming? Mill's account also reveals the importance surprise plays in catching us unaware - literally off guard. Undoubtedly this is the best strategy to trigger tears, which is why we really need an attentive and questioning other to listen as we talk about our problems. A good psychotherapist, or friend, is your trigger to reach in, your book of stories to mould your experience along the lines of others', and your own best reader, alerting you when you fold up or skip a page.
That morning as I lay on my sofa at 8 am, fully dressed in cycling waterproofs, ready to battle against the wind and the rain to the doctor's surgery, I couldn't stop thinking about poor old John Stuart Mill - numb, despondent, leafing through sentimental scenes from Romantic literature in a forlorn attempt to convulse his joyless soul back to life. Friends had recommended that I try to cry, and now I really felt that I should in order perhaps to challenge this numbness. I needed a trigger, so I went up to my attic room and found two large boxes of old family photographs, teenage notebooks, letters and keepsakes from the early years of my relationship with my ex-wife. The wind and rain continued to fall, the radiator hissed, and I sat there for an hour, trying to cry.
And I did. A little. Tears fell down my cheeks a few times that hour, and I felt my face girn and grimace, as if I was on the edge of a much desired fit of wailing and sobbing. But that is as far as I got, mostly, I suspect, because my barriers went up, and the imaginative bubble burst through the weight of self-consciousness.
But miraculously it worked. I unfroze. The brain fog lifted, and my perspective shifted, as if some binary switch had been flicked. I looked out the window. Bruised clouds still scudded across the sky, rain still spattered against the glass and drummed on the roof. But the scene was transformed. Everything was suddenly so near, so real, and I was again part of it all.
Like a drowning sailor clutching at a tiny piece of wreckage, I clung to this delicate morsel of pleasure and let it, as far as it could, nourish my soul. I desperately hoped that this moment might be an end to my isolation, my unfreezing. But I hardly dared move, since everything seemed so precariously balanced. Slowly I made my way to a large cushion next to the radiator where I had again begun meditating, and tried to lock in these gains. After some minutes repetition of my mantra, I folded the beat under the sensation of connectedness, tending this vital feeling as one might a fragile form of life.
I awoke from the meditation still feeling connected, but now with a strong desire to go to work. I had been alone, experimenting with my psychology all morning, and now needed some kind of normality. I also felt, uncharacteristically for these weeks, that stimulation would be good for me, and afford more opportunities to focus on this sensation of connectedness.
I left the house and cycled to work. Half-way there joy suddenly flourished in my heart, and my eyes again filled with tears. Not many, but shed with abject gratitude and relief.
At work no one was around but a PhD student who was working on her thesis. I entered the room where she was sitting with her back to me and greeted her with more warmth and energy than I had anyone in weeks. Something was wrong, her cursory response was flat, eyes still trained on the screen. I moved around the room and invited her to make eye contact. Nothing.
Empathy involves reaching out and connecting with another. It involves inserting yourself emotionally into their perspective and feeling what they are going through. When you are depressed, you are isolated, you cannot reach out, or at least, you cannot connect. You can of course correctly recognise the states of mind that others hold, and impute possible causes for these states; depression is not like some autistic spectrum disorders. But, as I have said before, all these behaviours are scripted, as if in a language you can speak but cannot understand, and so you follow the moves impeccably, without a deeper and more significant involvement in the plot.
I grabbed a seat and sat down, not because I knew it was the right thing to do; but because I had become involved in this little drama, I felt her discomfort as my own and now I wanted to do what I could to take it away. And I knew that this would involve listening.
And that is another lesson. When you are depressed, you sometimes find it difficult to listen. For the same reasons that I have just mentioned, the inner lives of others are shut off from you, and your attention is more than likely eaten up with your own unease, anxiety, shame and sadness. You may, as a result, throw out a great deal of energy, either to silence your unease, or to act as a buffer against any implosive collapse. Or you may fail to acknowledge the emotional dimension altogether, and instead focus on the practical aspect as a problem that requires a solution.
I encouraged her to speak about the problems she had been experiencing with an upgrade, and I listened with all of my soul, reaching out and connecting with her, feeling her worries and empathising with my eyes, face, body and voice. I was almost 100 percent in that moment. Almost, because a tiny part of me was watching my own self with abject gratitude and relief that I had momentarily rejoined the world of others.
Then, when I returned to my desk and began working, the spell broke. Heralded by a sense of dislocation, as if the points on the track of my life had suddenly been switched, I departed from the path I had taken since that morning, and entered the fog once more.
Three photographs from my recent travels hang on my study wall: one from the Himalayas, one from the Sahara, and one from the Greek islands. All of these photos I took myself, and often in the days since my recovery I have looked on them with pleasure and fascination, while at the same time introspecting to understand better the origin of this response. For me, the reason I take pleasure and feel fascination for these photos is that I can easily picture myself there. After all, I was there once, and I know how it feels to be there. I know the thrill and pride of climbing snowbound peaks, the playful exuberance of riding in a camel train at dusk, and the deep sense of affinity and love that I personally feel for the heavenly light of the Aegean.
Beyond this, my experiment taught me a simple truth, which many of us know, but perhaps fail sufficiently to bear in mind. Crying can help alleviate depression. I cannot speculate as to how, since our ego seems to hide this part of the trick from us. But I suspect it has something to do with closing some kind of circuit, or rather letting loose a fruitless cycle of thoughts by throwing them into action. Research on depression points to the key role which rumination without action plays in developing and perpetuating negative and self-defeating patterns of thought. Some of us are unlucky enough to have had difficult childhoods, or unexpected traumas in later life, for which we need to find answers. And I know that I am such an individual: driven to understand adversity by curiosity, the love of wisdom, by perfectionism, by a conviction that the answer is valuable, by an enormous capacity for self-reflection, by the need for feedback, and, yes, by sheer bloody-mindedness that I will not be beaten by fate or ignorance. All of these qualities can serve me well as an academic, writer and teacher, but when these same abilities are continually trained on complex and traumatic life events, whether consciously or not, and when they perpetually fail to yield a satisfying solution, they can foster a sense of learned helplessness, as depression has sometimes been framed.
Our way out of rumination without action is to act to better our lot. I do not know if there is any evidence to suggest that crying is a form of action that allows us to break this cycle. But it certainly helped me, that morning at least, to gain some temporary relief.
To be continued...
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