Depression and Tim Lott

bookshelf
Originally uploaded by niznoz

Sometimes I think I make my blog just a dump because I don't want to be understood. Or it is deposit for my mind and where I haven't understood things. I've been racing mentally. Just keeping going. Because if I were to stop - then what?

I have been reading Tim Lott's The Scent of Dried Roses recently and I can't recommend it highly enough. Coincidentally, there was a piece on the Today programme on R4 saying that depression does greater damage to long term health than many physical conditions like angina, arthritis or diabetes.And the package included an interview with Tim Lott.

Anyhow, in his book he says: "Depression is about anger, it is about anxiety, it is about character and heredity. But it is also about something that is in its way quite unique. It is the illness of identity, it is the illness of those who do not know where they fit, who lose faith in the myths that they have so painstakingly created for themselves. Thus, in this current confused, self-hating England, it is spreading like a virulent, dimly understood virus. And it is a plague - especially if you ad in all its various forms of expression, like alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia, drug addiction, compulsive behaviour of one kind or another. They are all the same thing: attempts to avoid disappearance, or nothingness or chaos."
He adds that in finding a solution to identify, you begin to find a solution to depression. Maybe that oral history MA wasn't such a daft idea after all...