Learn to forgive and forget for a happier life

By Hugh MacKay,

(Issues/Comments - West Australian Newspaper - 2000

Many people have difficulty coping with the idea that Australia is suffering from an epidemic of depression.

What have people got to be depressed about in a country like ours?  It does seem mysterious, until you encounter the growing body of clinical opinion suggesting that depression is often the result of anger turned inwards.

Could that mean we are actually suffering from a national epidemic of suppressed anger, of which depression is a mere symptom?  As soon as you say it, it seems to make sense.

There are many varieties of depression, of course.  Some arise from personal tragedies that would make anyone sad.  Some are primarily physiological - due, perhaps, to a chemical imbalance in the brain.

But many experiences fit neither of those descriptions.  Perhaps these are the cases where undischarged anger is doing its cancerous work.

I knew an old man who spent the final year of his life burdened by appalling depression.  Nothing brought relief.  Anti-depressants seemed only to make things worse:  he complained they encased him in a fog.

The joshing of his mates achieved nothing, either, except mutual irritation.  He was annoyed by their presumption that he was in control of himself and that, by his own volition, he should be able to snap out of it.  They, in turn, were perplexed by the fact that their old friend, famous for his cheerful disposition, seemed to have 'given in'.

Only at the very end did he reveal to one or tow intimates, and perhaps to  himself, that for much of his life he had been harbouring a seething rage.  He was still angry with his long-dead wife over an indiscretion for which he had never forgiven her.

He was consumed by angry regret over his estrangement from his children.  He had allowed demands of his job to come between him and them and, by the time he realised what was happening, they had lost interest tin him.  So then he was angry with them, too.

Even more tragically, he was angry with himself for having lived what h had come to regard as a life made meaningless by its emphasis on short-term gratification although everyone else had considered him successful.

So his depression was like lava welling up from a sub-stratum of anger that had never been released and cooled.  His pain was intensified by the realisation that it was all too later.  He was powerless to change anything.

Depression triggered by bereavement, relationship-breakdown or retrenchment usually has a component of anger in it, arising directly from that same sense of powerlessness.  How could she do this to me?  They can't just abolish my position: does loyalty count for nothing?

If such anger isn't properly dealt with, it may turn and attack us in the form of chronic and unjustified guild.  Kept on a leash, somewhere deep inside us, it can exacerbate normal levels of sadness and turn them into full-blown depression.

After all, nothing is more depressing than self-hared, especially when it started out as anger directed - rationally or irrationally, consciously or unconsciously - at someone else.  In children, feelings of powerlessness are often induced by living in an abusive and violent environment.  Even feeling ignored or misunderstood by our parents can make us feel powerless.

If anger triggered by such feelings isn't discharged, openly and healthily, it may gradually become part of who we are.  Over time, it festers and ferments, only to emerge later - perhaps much later - as depression.

Our loss of faith, religious or otherwise, is another potential source of suppressed, scarcely conscious anger.  We turn it inwards because we're not sure who or what to blame.  We need something to believe in, something to hope for, something to give meaning and purpose to our lives, but where is our guiding story.

Loss of connections that bind us to community play their part too.  Herd animals feel deeply uneasy when they are cut off from the herd: isolation can easily feel like alienation.  Next stop:  anger, then all stations to depression.

Widespread family breakdown and dislocation, sustained high youth unemployment, the growing gap between rich and poor, uncertainty about the impact of globalisation, lack of inspirational leadership on the national stage: there are plenty of reasons to feel powerless, frustrated, angry and as TV news ratings show, to switch off.

So why is the stiff upper lip still so highly valued, when we see the harm caused by pretending we don't feel when we actually do feel".  The hippies were right all along: let it all hang out.

The quick discharge of anger can be unpleasant for all concerned, but the slow-burning alternative is far, far worse.