This is not coming on the heals of the report that Massachusetts Governor Duval Patrick’s wife, Diane, is “suffering” from depression. First, why is a person always “suffering” from depression? The verb is “depressed.” The woman is depressed. Or maybe not. Depression is a catch-all term that I think is a logical reaction to modern society. Given everything that we have to deal with today, I think if a person isn’t depressed, at least at some point in their life, then there’s something wrong with them.
It’s an oxymoron to say someone is feeling depressed. Depression, really, is the lack of feeling.
Like the Eskimos supposedly have something like 20 words for that all-important element of their environment, snow, we have a blue-million words for the concept of depression. Down. Blue. The Dumps. A few more from the Microsoft thesaurus: Despair. Gloominess. Misery. Hopelessness. Melancholy. Dejection. Again, though, you can feel all that. You can be gloomy and still get out of bed. Depression, man — real depression — means getting out of bed in the morning and making a bowl of corn flakes seems like climbing a mountain.
People generally can be depressed because of a chemical imbalance, or because of outside influences in their lives. And their depression can spike at certain times of the year. Everyone knows about the spike around the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday season. You’re supposed to feel happy and jolly, and darn it, you just don’t, and you feel bad that you don’t. Like there’s something wrong with you. Like you're some kind of freak.
What people don’t realize is that springtime is an even bigger spike than the holiday season, mainly because it's unnoticed. I remember reading a government report about this, crowing about the discovery as if the scientists had just found another planet. It's like Columbus discovering America when there were people living there all along. There had been people living this all along, too. We could have saved a lot of tax dollars if someone would have just asked them.
The reason is really simple.During spring, the world is wakening up from the long winter. The first really good spring day is so joyful, so optimistic, the universe itself is saying there is hope and joy all around, and darn it, once again, the depressed person just doesn’t feel it. Again, the depression spikes. There could be anger because the person wishes for the umpteenth time in their life that just once they could be just like everyone else. It’s just not fair, it seems.
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