The Mansion With A Million Dark Rooms
Depression is a MESSAGE from your higher self (...not a "mood" that MUST be drugged.)
I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time.
-Virginia Woolf
Depression is a state of being.
It is a very uncomfortable human plight that got branded in the mid-’80s when Prozac went mainstream—when a state of being became the main dish in an ever-growing buffet of diagnostic delights. What is now the mental-health-big-pharma industrial complex currently “owns the rights” to this state of being. Depression—is now a business model.
Disclaimer: I am approaching this from the PATIENT perspective. This is not some brainy analysis of decades’ worth of published papers examining the supposed serotonin theory of depression. (Though such an analysis got published last year, and it’s damning!) This is just me reflecting on what I think of as:
A mansion with a million dark rooms
Years ago, it hit me that this state of being we label “depression” is a universal phenomenon. It doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor. No one gets a free pass. In fact, it was a lucid moment during a period of “depression” years ago when it struck me:
…I projected myself into a future mansion with millions of rooms. A better life where all my worries got washed away by the guaranteed security of immense wealth. But it didn’t work. Being surrounded by luxury made not one iota of difference.
Every room in the mansion looked the same as the next: very dark. It didn’t matter that the wallpaper or crown molding had dramatically changed from room to room or that some were ballrooms and others had pool tables. Wherever I went, the mansion with a million rooms was gloomy, silent, and empty.
I realized that if given the keys to the kingdom itself, it wouldn’t matter. The darkness is not “because of something” in particular. You could even be fifty years married, have ten children, a hundred grandchildren, and have all your estates and beach houses paid off—yet still feel horrible inside.
In fact, “having it all” might make it that much worse. How horrifying to realize that you’ve got everything one could ever imagine—yet feel like you have nothing. Where would you run?
The pharmaceutical-model fraud.
Depression is not the chemical imbalance still promulgated by the mental health industry. It is an ethereal state of feelings better understood as a signal from the mind that something is definitely not cool.
If you buy into Depression®, the mental-health/big-pharma version of the matter, you become susceptible to a dangerous path of SSRI anti-depressant interventions. I say “path” because I’ve watched many (including myself) flip-flop from one pill to another in a desperate attempt to contain what turns into a wildfire of destabilized thoughts.
Thankfully, Dr. Peter Breggin has introduced medication spellbinding (intoxication anosognosia) to the mental health lexicon.
Medication spellbinding describes the mental impairment that can occur when a psychiatric medication has been introduced to the body. The medication blinds the victim/patient from considering that it might be the drug itself that is causing an escalation of erratic emotions and behavior. What family and friends perceive as a sudden decline of self-control or a rise in compulsive acting-out gets blamed on the illness—not the medicine. This can lead to a miscalculation that the dose of whatever psychoactive substance is at play (which is causing the individual’s decline!) is maybe not strong enough or perhaps requires even a second, complimentary drug for the first drug to work better.
In my experience, many individuals have resorted to playing the lottery of hopping from one pill to the next in a desperate attempt to win back their own minds.
The true meaning of the “illness.”
Aside from body toxicity caused by alcohol, drugs, medication, or an overly-taxed nervous system—depression, in my opinion, is a SIGNAL or MESSAGE being sent to the mind:
The weight of the world has become unbearable. My mind is being lured into a slowed-down, disconnected state—because something’s gotta give.
Depression is an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS.
The life events surrounding the crisis might appear to be the specific cause, including things such as job loss, grief, financial difficulty, relationship fractures, loneliness, and so on.
But underlying everything is a DISILLUSIONMENT or disappointment with the whole damn show:
Life itself—has become a problem.
Anyone who thinks that being in this altered state is an act of cowardliness—that one should buck up and shut up—might suffer from a shallow blindness to anything beyond the material realm.
It’s harder to stare the meaning of life in the face than to press your nose to the grindstone from start to finish. In other words, ignorance is bliss. Pushing the levers and pressing the buttons without ever looking up to the heavens to ask why?—is quite a feat and worth the praise.
But don’t be so cocky.
Face to face with the Demiurge
The Gnostics get credited with the idea that this world was created not by a supreme, all-loving Force but by an inferior “God,” sometimes called the Demiurge: it is the Demiurge who is the tyrannical creator and ruler of this world and the reason for all its cruelty.
—And often, the message of depression is that something is terribly wrong with this place. A paradigm shift in consciousness will be necessary if you are to continue to participate in a ruthless world.
In a way, you have reached the dome of The Truman Show. To return to the island would be ridiculous without a few fundamental changes to its terms of service. You are staring reality in the face and saying, “This sucks—whatever THIS is! I’m considering tearing up the contract! Yeah, YOU know the one? The one I suspiciously don’t have a copy of!!!”
Change the program or take the pill?
An existential crisis requires some existential changes. Unfortunately, medication has become the method of choice of a generation. But this was NOT by accident. It has required a tireless promotional campaign and a massive, coordinated lobbying effort to turn an uncomfortable message of the mind into something “sad…yet catchy”.
I have written lots lately about the madness of the world. And I sincerely hope—given the disturbing phenomenon of a society intent on mask-wearing forever and other strange anomalies—that I can refrain a little more from attacking the madness of the individual. It’s been done to death anyway.
The World barely tolerates those who question its sanity—but has a comfy place for anyone who will call its Bell Let’s Talk helplines or take its drugs. The World bares its teeth at anyone who scrutinizes it, especially when its soundness of mind is brought into question.
If you’re feeling the urge to tear up, Whatever f*ing soul contract you have absolutely NO memory of ever signing! because you’re sensing that there is something fundamentally wrong with this reality—excellent. I can feel your anger. And feelings can be a good thing, not something to run away from or to numb down with some FDA-approved chemical.
They—feelings—might even be the first step into a larger world.