If You Recall the Past in Detail, You'll be Less Depressed than if You Recall it Only Generally

Australian firefighters who experienced trauma were more likely to have PTSD if they couldn't recall the events specifically.
That is what the New York Times is telling us.

The Times reports: “People with P.T.S.D. tend to ruminate at a very categorical, general level about how unsafe life is, or how weak I am, or how guilty I am,” said the lead author [of the firefighter study], Richard Bryant. “If I do that habitually and then I walk into a trauma, probably I’m going to be resorting to that way of thinking and it’s going to set me up for developing P.T.S.D.”

Overgeneral memory can protect people from traumatic memories and such people have it easier than those who think back to the trauma specifically--in the short term.

Without detailed memories to draw upon, dispelling a black mood can seem impossible. Patients may remember once having felt happy, but cannot recall specific things that contributed to their happiness, like visiting friends or a favorite restaurant, according to the Times.

“If you’re unhappy and you want to be happy, it’s helpful to have memories that you can navigate through to come up with specific solutions,” Dr. Williams said. “It’s like a safety net.”

Mindfulness meditation can help people accept their negative memories and not ignore them, according to Dr. Williams. “I always tried to forget the past, the very bad past that made me depressed when my husband died,” said Carol Cattley, 76, who attended a mindfulness course here [Oxford, England] taught by Dr. Williams. “I’m much more interested in it now.”

[Image: Meditation by Alphonse Mucha]

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More on Happiness: Can 79 College Students be Wrong?

The New York Times blog tells us that happiness comes from deep discussion, and not from shallow. That's based on the experiences of 79 human guinea pigs at the University of Arizona, and I see the conclusion as an argument for getting a degree in creative writing. The late Carol Bly wrote about creative writing classes as oases of meaning in "American junk culture." So how about a slogan for AWP:
Study writing, get happy.

Farewell, tortured poet. Leave your troubles inside your garret. Come to the cabaret.

You can read about the Suicidal Poet Predictor in Scary Place to see the difference in vocabulary and subject between suicidal and non-suicidal poets. According to Scary Place,The poets who committed suicide used many more first-person singular self-references such as "I," "me" and "my" and fewer first-person plural words than did the non-suicidal poets [according to a study by psychologist James Pennebaker and graduate student Shannon Stirman in Psychosomatic Medicine].

"Issues of identity, isolation and connection to others is revealed in pronoun usage," Pennebaker said in an interview. "One of the most telling words of all is the word 'I.' People who are suicidal or depressed use 'I' at much, much higher rates, and there's also a corresponding drop in references to other people."

The suicidal poets also generally reduced their use of communication words such as "talk," "share" and "listen" over time heading toward their self-inflicted deaths, while the non-suicidal poets tended to increase their use of such words. The suicidal ones also used more words associated with death, but surprisingly the amount of words with negative emotion (for example, "hate") or positive emotion ("love") did not vary significantly between the groups.

Those of you who read this blog know that suffering is included with the price of admission. I remember once when I came home from college I was talking to my aunt B and we had both read The Bell Jar. I told her that Sylvia Plath (pictured above) had described the way I felt. She was surprised. Alarmed. And that was the end of it. I think Plath had already killed herself by then. I have not. She died before the really good drugs were invented. And the good drugs aren't good for everybody.


I met a woman today who lectures and writes about humor in the Bible. The funniest story? The Book of Job, she said. Seriously.

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Suffering

If anybody ever offers you the choice between suffering and depression, take the suffering. And I don't mean physical suffering. I mean emotional suffering. I am hereby endorsing psychic suffering over depression.

Don't get me wrong; suffering, though universal, and though its universality provides the basis of Buddhism, is bad. Today I suffered. It meant being weepy, rageful at the drop of a pin, filled with ire at someone for being 14 minutes late (when it didn't matter at all; and I didn't show my rage) and at a fucking stupid fucking imbecile waiter who didn't know that a goddam fucking matte is supposed to be dark and smoky, and not the color and taste of pale green swill with little green specks in it. (I didn't yell. I had a sharpness to my voice a few notches below sarcasm and I smiled deceitfully. I gave a good tip.) At the coffee house and after I was weepy from time to time and not able to balance in Warrior One pose in yoga because my toes were numb from the horrible Taxol. I wept into my purple yoga mat while folded into child's pose and then wept face up into the open air with closed eyes and sweaty head (my perpetual clammy head, compliments of Taxol and menopause) while lying on my back with my legs in butterfly and then I accepted defeat, that the weeping would not end, and rolled up said mat and walked up the street to the drugstore to pick up some refills and a drug that Nurse L had just called in to combat the numbness. Suffering meant crying out when a person crossing the street with an umbrella over her head nearly ran me down, and suffering was going to the drug store and finding out that the very new dolt of a clerk didn't have my new drug, it would take ten minutes, he said. I was weeping and hovering at the counter like a desperate addict in my rain-dropped-on bald head, t-shirt and torn shorts, and I went back to him and said, Could you give me just a pill or two for now, and finally, Could you make a little faster because I'm in a lot of pain, and feeling a little guilty because I wasn't in pain-pain, not about-to-die-and-double-over pain, but in weepiness pain, the pain of not wanting to be there, standing around and weeping and feeling a hole in my heart of desperation and sadness and rage. A dark wound in my heart. And suffering meant walking home with my three drugs finally, my umbrella above my head, knowing I would be home soon, where I would be able to collapse and even work on the stupid idiotic fucking book review, because I was suffering and not depressed. Suffering meant I knew that crying would make me feel better, once I could stop, and that I knew that underneath the suffering I had a core of appreciation for the thunderstorm that had broken the hot spell this afternoon, even though it had drenched my poor bike and helmet that I'd left moored to a parking meter on the street. Underneath the suffering was psychic pain, which is an entity, but I can deal with an entity, it is better than the erosion created by depression, which is more absent than absence, depression is the oxygen-gulping aridness of the void, and it fills every part of you with the knowledge that nothing matters, the universe is as meaningless as it is infinite. So that there is no part of you left that can slither its way around and get its interest quickened by an idea or person or mind or glazed blue Moroccan tile. There is no room for beauty or Marx or charity or alternatives to war. There is only the ash that's left after a fire, after a long long rain.

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