Words for The Dream

Posted on March 5, 2006 in Depression

We interpret our mental illness according to how it feels to us. Why, when we find ourselves depressed, do the words “I want to die” or “I want to take a gun to my head” come out of the gray rinse water? I think it might be because when our brains encounter the strange pain and we try to put words to it, we come up with a sensation that defies our previous experience, so the words must match that antagonism. “I want to die” suits the ache even though we’re too fatigued to carry out any real plan and, possibly, disinterested in that kind of outcome.

Studies show that most suicide victims who have the chance to catch themselves in the fall do. So I don’t believe the voice. We carry out suicide, perhaps, because of what we have called the feeling inside ourself. I know of a woman who heard a voice that told her to let go of the steering wheel. “Angel” she concluded and she obeyed because in her culture you do not ignore angels. We might call the voice luring us to suicide a demon and tell ourselves that once you are in the claws of a demon you are helpless. A fatal mix of culture and mood disorder leads to death by depression and by mania. Language is dangerous because it allows us to turn our abstract emotions into concrete plans of action.

Maybe we need to train ourselves in a new language for depression, one in which we stifle the call for self-extermination. Bipolars like me hear voices in electric motors. Could the voice in the chalk-pink crevices of the brain be a special kind of psychosis, something that comes out of a tactile hum of dry neuro receptors? Dogs get depressed and so do cats. I do not see them throwing themselves off decks (except in acts of stupidty as when chasing a butterfly) or drowning themselves. I believe that they don’t talk to themselves as we do. They don’t formulate their delusions into words and then try to carry out the instructions.

I am not sure of this. Brendan Maher’s theory can get to seeming like a Scientological simplification of a complex interaction between chemistry and the conscious mind. I have yet to meet a person who could not put the pain into metaphor, perhaps because the agony resides in the brain and the brain is always most interested in itself. But angels — at least of the variety who tell you to endanger yourself and others in traffic — do not exist. Religion and the example of others — men who swallow buckshot propelled by hot gases out of a gun — structure our interpretation of the confusion we feel. We can’t even be sure that we feel the same sensations. That we do is merely an article of faith. One man might have shot himself through the mouth and then others followed because that image spoke to them, helped them make sense of what they felt.

And therein lies the danger. We believe too much in our inner speech. Can we let go and just ride it through without attempting to illustrate it in a conventional, but perilous figurativeness? For bipolars and depressives, this may be our imperative.