Routes To Depression
by Thomas Moore

Editor’s Note: Thomas Moore's bestselling books have also provided an adventuresome map of everyday spirituality. Moore was a monk in a Catholic religious order for 12 years and then practiced psychotherapy. He is a Renaissance man whose works are filled with illustrative material from mythology, psychology, philosophy and contemporary spirituality. He has taken the pulse of the times and come to the conclusion that "loss of soul" is the cause of the restlessness, addiction, insecurity and frustration of so many men and women. His latest book is A Life At Work.

It is common to think of depression as one, large, overwhelming fog that descends on you from nowhere. I prefer to imagine many kinds of depression, taking several different shapes, and coming from specific sources. There are the blues, as we know—indigo moods. There are also black depressions, yellow depressions and sometimes white-outs.

It helps to know what kind of depression you have. If you have the blues, you know they may pass. If your depression is deep and black, you can bet that it will affect the whole of your life. If you are feeling pale, lifeless and blah, you know pretty well what has to be done.

Certain kinds of depression might come from lack or loss. In my own case, I need, absolutely need to be creative—write a book, work on music, do a film project. If for any reason I have to curtail my creative activities for a while, I may begin feeling depressed. That is why I rarely go on vacations without an opportunity to give a lecture, teach or at least write.

People often get depressed when they lose someone or something they loved—a person, a lover, an animal or even an object. I was a bit depressed last year when workers took months to build a new workplace for me and my normal way of life was interrupted. I often visit hospitals where many people feel depressed about losing their accustomed health and their normal lives.

I recently published a book, A Life at Work. The workplace has many sneaky sources of depression: a difficult boss, a dead-end job, unfriendly coworkers, monotonous activity or low pay. My book offers many ways of dealing with these dispiriting aspects of work. More positively, it shows how important it is to be on track toward a life work that will be fulfilling and make life feel worthwhile.

Years ago I read about depression in ancient medical texts where, through all the obscure and out-of-date language, I found positive ideas of how depression can actually help you. They didn’t speak of depression then but rather talked about a person being “in Saturn,” the antique image of emotional darkness and heaviness. They said that depression can mature you, take away lingering tendencies towards excessive youthful ambitions and understandings. It can give you a degree of gravitas and seriousness that you need as you grow older. It can help your ideas and thoughts deepen and give your self-expression a style that is clear and ordered.

None of these “gifts of Saturn” arrive without some pain and distress, but that is the nature of this route towards selfhood. You become an interesting, complex person through times of depression, even though you wish you could find a way out of them.

I don’t want to romanticize depression or ignore the fact that it can be dangerous and debilitating for many people. But I have found that even when depression sends a person into the hospital and requires heavy drugs for treatment, a humane approach that deals with it as a meaningful problem greatly helps. No experience is only physical or clinical, because we are always and everywhere human beings with a mind, body, spirit, and soul. Everything is meaningful and therefore needs to be dealt with in a meaningful way.