Last update: April 24, 2017
We are a company in which suffering continues to be a silent stigma. We sneak in pills for the pain of life, treat high cholesterol and low moods while asking us "how are you?", As if this were depression, a simple cold or an infection to be treated with antibiotics.
Primary care professionals say it's not enough, that nowadays they assist dozens of people with clear symptoms of a depression or some anxiety problem. It is as if society were a pupil that dilates as you enter a dimly lit room, where the darkness suddenly grips us.
Suffering adheres to the body and mind, our back, bones and soul hurt, our stomach burns and we feel a weight on our chest. The blankets trap us in their warm refuge, like the tentacles of an octopus, inviting us to stay there, away from the world, from the conversations and from the noise of life.
As the WHO (World Health Organization) warns us, in the next twenty years, depression will be the main health problem of the western population, and to curb this impact, we don't just need well-trained means, tools or professionals. We need awareness and sensitivity.
It is necessary to remember that none of us are immune to suffering from a psychological disorder at some point in our life. We cannot trivialize suffering; it is good to understand it, manage it and, above all, prevent diseases such as depression.
Depression as a stigma and personal failure
Marco is 49 years old and is a socio-medical auxiliary. Two days ago he was diagnosed with an anxious-depressive picture. Before asking for an appointment with the specialist, he already sensed the shadow of this depression, perhaps because he recognized the symptoms in the memories of his childhood, when his mother spent those horrible times characterized by bad mood and isolation in her room. A period that marked a large part of his childhood.
Now it is he who hosts this demon; even if they suggested that he go sick, Marco refuses. He is afraid of having to explain to his colleagues (doctors and nurses) what is happening to him, he is ashamed, because for him, depression is like a personal failure, an inherited weakness. In fact, only repetitive, insistent and persistent thoughts reach his mind, which add up to his mother's memory. She was a woman who never went to the doctor and who spent most of her life subjected to a dizzying emotional noria of ups and downs.
Marco, on the other hand, went to the psychiatrist and he tells himself that he is doing things right, because the psychiatric drugs will help him, because it is simply one more disease to treat, as are your hypertension, your cholesterol or your hypothyroidism. However, our protagonist is wrong, because the pills for the pain of life help, but they are not enough; because depression, like many other psychological disorders, needs three additional elements: psychotherapy, a life plan and social support.
The low soul, high suffering and external ignorance
We are used to hearing that suffering is part of life and that sometimes a painful experience helps us to be stronger, to invest in our personal growth. However, we miss that there is another kind of suffering that makes us drunk for no apparent reason, without a detonator, like a cold wind that extinguishes our soul, desire and energy.
Existential suffering is the great virus of the current human being. You can't see it, you can't touch it, but it hurts. Later a diagnostic manual gives a name to what happens to us and we transform ourselves into another label to the point that many health professionals err on the side of the scientific model. They forget that each patient with depression is unique, with its own clinical characteristics, with its own history and that, at times, the same strategy is not valid for everyone.
On the other hand, a further problem we find in dealing with depression is that even today many countries do not have an adequate protocol. Primary care doctors usually diagnose the condition and treat it with drugs. If the patient does not improve, he is referred to a psychiatrist. All this shows us once again that mental health problems are not sufficiently recognized, although they are more than evident: 1 in 6 people will suffer from depression at some point in their life.
Similarly, the social stigma already mentioned is added to the sometimes deficient approach of the medical system in this type of disease. In fact, there is a curious fact that is explained to us in the article of the Psychology Today magazine and that undoubtedly invites us to a profound reflection.
If it is explained to the population of a specific city that the depression is "exclusively" due to neuro-boiological causes, there is a greater acceptance of the same. What's more, the visits to the psychologist or psychiatrist would increase because the single individual would stop attributing to himself this "alleged" weakness, this lack of courage for having allowed himself to be subjugated by discouragement and suffering.
Unfortunately, as we can see, we continue to be rooted in the underground of ignorance, where certain diseases continue to be synonymous with madness, weakness or a defect to hide. The time has come to normalize, to understand ourselves and, above all, to reflect on these disorders that do not require casts or sutures or infusions every 6 hours.
We must stop underestimating suffering and learn to understand it, to be active agents and, above all, neighbors.
Images courtesy of Samy Charnine
