Black Dog Tale

Of all the emotions, sadness has to be the one that seems to leave us winded, gasping for breath and feeling like we got king-hit. Sometimes it comes to us from out of nowhere and at other times it’s like an epic saga that seems to have been going on for a long long time. It’s no wonder then that from it can come depression.

No one likes to talk about depression because of the social taboo attached to the condition. And yet, we must and we should. We should because it’s real and we must because someone somewhere however many degrees of separation they are from us are suffering or have suffered at its hands.

In my limited understanding of the condition, common depression is a chemical imbalance which somehow (to my mind) diminishes the societal misunderstanding of it as a psychological disorder in the first instance.

This is not my area of expertise and neither am I qualified to stray too much further from this basic everyman definition of it. Suffice to say, depression when we experience it, whether firsthand or indirectly requires our compassion rather than the more common derision shown toward the sufferer. The sequestering of the individual (as if they needed that and weren’t already). We can be cruel we humankind.

I think depression scares us. It scares me. And maybe it scares us because as Neitche both observed and wrote “He who looks into the abyss, also the abyss looks into him …” It’s possible then the feelings of helplessness experienced by the families of loved ones caught in the grip of depression are not only real but horrifying at the same time.

Sadness then has alot to answer for as a fire-starter to the condition of depression yet all I can offer by way of a helping hand in understanding is to encourage us to care more deeply for each other, keep informed about the condition and seek practical ways too of caring for the carers of those loved ones caught in depression’s grip.

Somehow it doesn’t seem so scary when we’re all in it together and the gaping mouth of the abyss doesn’t seem so huge, black and cavernous with our arms around each other and holding our own together.

Infact, with the light of understanding held high against the gloom of the abyss, it’s interesting to see the look of terror in the eyes of the abyss .. what was it? … “And the darkness could not comprehend the light” … there’s hope yet.