Depression and heartburn.
Comedy: the Tums of the soul.
My mother taught me to consider the value of holistics. I mean, like, not for everything. Some medical problems need more aggressive treatment. Fall and break your leg, go get a cast. Catch cancer from the cancer fairy, go to the doctor, get treatment. Catch gangrene, find a sawbones, get your leg chopped off, problem solved — till it turns out you had gangrene in your arm, then you get that chopped off instead. That’s what you do. Let the treatment fit the seriousness of the illness.
That’s the lesson.
So, like, as an example, if you have a bit of heartburn, you go get a few tums. Which more or less treats the symptoms, and you move on with your life. Simple fix.
But then you have the same heartburn tomorrow. And the day after. Before you know it, a pattern arises. It turns out that maybe you have an unbalanced diet, and what you really need in order to regulate your innards is to eat more roughage with dinner. Or more fat. Or more, or less, of something. Then, at the same time, you maybe need to take a little more exercise after dinner. So you adopt these practices, and you stop having heartburn. Not only that, you reflect on the inanities of modern living and realize from the beginning that tums was a lie all along and never did anything for you except to help you mask your devotion to a lifestyle that failed to address the deeper issue.
Which the keen-eyed among us might look at and go…that’s not holistics. There are no herbs. There is not a single reference to eastern medicine. You did nothing remotely disgusting. What are you trying to sell, here, calling it holistics?
It is holistics. The word “holistic” means, literally, taking the whole thing of whatever it is into consideration. Yes, “holistics” has taken on a specific connotation, i.e., “healthy” practices that are more bitter and less effective and slightly more gooshy. But I like what the word actually means.
In order to understand the part, you must try to understand the whole.
It may come across as a little belittling to do what I am about to do, so I will do it first, for a laugh, and then explain where I am coming from.
The entire field of psychotherapy is exactly like tums.
Now, that is only meant to be a little incendiary. But only a little, because, like tums, or like the treatment that combats cancer fairies — that’s how it works, right? — psychotherapy has a time. It has a place. It has an appropriate use. And just to make it clear that I am far from one of these people who thinks everyone needs to “just stop complaining and cheer up,” I will mention something I mentioned recently in another story.
My mother died not too long ago. And after that experience, I have been participating in therapy with a professional therapist. I may or may not be participating with a group of individuals, but I can neither confirm nor deny that, because it’s the business of no one else.
Because, you see, some kinds of injury may, or may not, heal better with the appropriate kind of help. In my experience so far, I see the advantage.
So I am saying this as someone who has gratitude for an industry that I am currently benefiting from.
And what I have to say is, hey, why is everyone in therapy? Why? What’s wrong with all of us? We can’t all have had our mothers die recently. There just aren’t enough mothers. And maybe that’s kind of a tasteless joke, but maybe I feel like I am in a position to make it right now.
Sometimes it seems like EVERYONE is in therapy, you know? You can look all this up. Twenty percent of Americans have some kind of mental health condition, and that statistic has been rising for twenty years. Depression in youths has increased by around five percent over the last five years. Adults in therapy has increased by about fifteen percent. Depression is up — untreated depressives are down. From which data we can surmise one definite fact: statistics takers have more work than ever.
Because without the benefit of an absolute, definite, comprehensive set of information — which no one has any capacity to absorb — statistics can be used to prove anything. Sure, there are more documented cases of depression, which could prove there’s more depression, or it could prove that there is more documentation and that the actual amount of depressives has not changed in the slightest. More intricacy and success in an industry — and therapy is an industry — leads to better records, as much as it leads to anything else.
Which isn’t to say that I think no one’s depressed, or that no one should go to therapy. I don’t know how many people are depressed. I don’t know, and nobody knows. Nobody can know, because in order to know for sure how many people are depressed you would need to meet everyone while being fairly well versed in your basic psychic mind reading skills, because among the depressives and the anxious there will be as many deluded, attention seeking, lonely, power-play junkies, happily lying, on purpose or on accident, in order to get a rush off of their power to control the little bit of the world under their influence.
Which is my scientific way of saying statistics are stupid.
I don’t know if more people than ever need therapy. I don’t know, and nobody knows.
What I do know is that when we’ve gathered our thoughts and it comes time to act, then the only person we can decide for is ourselves.
What I know is that I am depressed, and that’s information I can make decisions with.
I have been considering therapy. The therapy I mentioned above that I’ve been in does not count, because its nature prevents it from being, as it were, “for me” therapy. But I haven’t gone yet, because I think too much. Mainly.
Which I won’t explain more than I need to, because my proclivity toward thinking too much has been much documented elsewhere. Suffice to say, the thought that entered my mind has been much disabused, as thoughts that enter my mind almost always are. And the thought, “I may be depressed — consider therapy,” entered my mind several years ago.
In more recent history, while I have become fully aware of my depression, I have also been suffering from some chronic heartburn. For a while, it didn’t seem to matter what I ate, this heartburn would plague me. It was just like being a dragon, I am sure, except way less cool. Like a dragon with all the will to breathe fire, but some kind of blockage. Anyway, for a while, I considered stocking up on tums to deal with it. Which is how you deal with your garden variety blocked-up dragon.
I did not stock up on tums, because I remembered my mother. Her idea for a cure for a stomach ache, or any other digestive issue, was a spoonful of yogurt and a conversation about what I had been eating and how I had been spending my time. If it turned out that I had been eating profiterole doused in corn dogs, and that I had been reading the summaries of scary movies on Wikipedia, then it might be that I had a more fundamental issue that needed to be addressed than the momentary relief that tums might have provided.
Which means that where I said two paragraphs ago that it seemed as if it didn’t matter what I ate, I would get the heartburn, that is a complete lie.
It matters entirely what I have been eating. I am experiencing digestive issues, which can only be caused by either the choices I make that cause my innards to go into their incendiary revolution, or by something fundamental and endemic to my makeup.
If I have been making bad choices in diet and exercise, then I give myself heartburn. That is one conclusion to draw here. Which means that my lifestyle choices may be hurting me, and I might need to make some changes. I mean, I don’t need to. It’s a free country. I can do what I want. But if my goal in life is not to feel like an impotent dragon, then I need to make different lifestyle choices.
Or the problem may be fundamental to my makeup. In which case, I need professional help.
Which is why tums are exactly like the entire field of psychoanalysis.
And so are a change in lifestyle choices and professional help. Exactly like the entire field of psychoanalysis, that is. It just depends on my usage of the field of psychoanalysis.
Because tums, or a change in lifestyle choices or professional help, all treat the same symptom, but they address different issues. How effective psychoanalysis would be depends on how I use it
Or it may not be effective, because it may be the wrong treatment of the problem. It could be it’s the professional help I don’t need, because I need to adjust my lifestyle choices. I don’t know. It could be, but I don’t know.
See? Only slightly incendiary. Psychoanalysis may mask symptoms, or help me take care of myself, or it may be exactly what I need to treat something that won’t go away on its own. It depends on the cause of the symptoms.
The point is that we’re talking humans here, so the system is complex. I can’t just chew down three psychoanalysts and appease the murmuring dragon of my belly’s discontent and call it good till the next rich meal of anxiety and self-deprecation. I have a whole life happening here, and unless I try to consider it as a whole life then I won’t get far past the fundamental issues, whatever they are, that keep giving my soul heartburn.
Come adventure with me.
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