The Velvet Underground - Beginning to see the light

This song is a clinic in how to live with depression.

Depression In High Places

Depression is in the news this week, as Jerry West releases a book that features his experience with it. I’m sure that many people will react with surprise: what does Jerry West have to be depressed about? Others of us will understand.

We all view the world through filters, depending on our individual make-ups. The filters color our experience in every particular. Some of these filters are fact based, filters such as physical appearance, and Whiteness/Blackness (etc). Some are chemical, such as the filter of the emotions. Some are hard-wired, such as temperament, personality and intelligence. Depression is a hybrid filter. I would characterize it as an emotional filter, but one made up of chemical and hard-wired components.

Note that I am not talking herein about mere situational, short term depression, such as when a beloved pet, or parent, dies. No, I’m talking about the clinical, permanent, stuck-with-it-forever kind. That's what Jerry's talking about too.

These days we understand depression better than we used to and it is no longer a taboo subject. Jerry West is the latest in a long line of celebrities to come out and admit to it. We are, however, still a long way from understanding how to deal with it. Many ways have been proposed, such as:

Psychoanalysis: this approach is now disfavored, but it was the hot set-up for most of the 20th Century. “Talk therapy,” and re-living childhood trauma were seen as a way to help us to understand why we felt this way, to bring it all up into the conscious mind and, it was to be hoped, put the bad feelings behind us. It only went so far, and usually not far enough.

Cognitive Therapy: here the therapist takes a practical approach, trying to help the clients to understand their behaviors and identify their triggers. This practical approach often achieve good results, but the sufferer is still left to live with the problem.

Medication: the new generations of anti-depressants that came up in the 80’s and 90’s are not without beneficial effect, but even where they are most efficacious they offer only partial and temporary relief. Again the sufferer is expected to try to master the depression and find a way to live with it.

Just Get Over It!: this is the approach chosen by most sufferers, and, by far, the one most often suggested by non-sufferers.

Non-sufferers add to the problems of the depressed, because they just don’t get it. Those who stand outside depression looking in, from the bubble of their relative peace and happiness, cannot understand what is going on in the mind of the depressed loved one. They are very likely to believe that the loved one is over-reacting to things, or being lazy, maybe even believing that the depressed loved one is attempting to manipulate the feelings of those around them. Many times the non-sufferers run out of patience, compassion fatigue sets in.

If one is particularly unlucky, the significant others may become angry and accuse the poor depressive of ruining their lives.

Jerry West traces his depression to the parenting behavior of his father. Serious beatings were involved, and serious belittlings, and his father was extremely unpredictable, mercurial even, you never knew what would set him off. Been there, Jerry, done that. In my case it was my mom. I don’t know about Jerry, but I had abandonment issues too.

When this happens, the child lives in almost constant fear. This fear releases chemicals into the brain, including, but not limited to, the chemicals associated with the “fight or flight” reaction. In my own case, the fear was not limited to time spent at home. My town was a pretty scary place too, there was always a lot of fighting going on, including some real curb-stomping, and we got hit at school by the teachers too.

This constant, negative chemical bath soaking the child’s brain in its formative years causes permanent changes in brain geometry and produces structural physical changes that persist for a lifetime, leading to negative consequences on general health. Plus, of course, inappropriate chemical and cognitive reactions to any life situation that you can think of, stressful or not. That’s in addition to the negative patterns in thinking in general, and in the emotions. Taken as a whole, this is what is known as “depression.”

Some people function well in spite of it, however badly they might feel. Jerry West was ultra-successful, by any yardstick. He was one of the all-time great basketball players, at the top of the game really, and he also succeeded as a coach. But it never seemed that way to Mr. West, he tended to dwell on the odd missed free-throw, or all of those play-off loses to Boston. When Jerry West talks about having “low self-esteem,” it’s hard for most people to imagine how someone so immensely talented and successful could even say such a thing. But I get it. President Abe Lincoln was depressed too, complete with the panic attacks and the crying jags, but he was quite a success himself, saving the country and all.

Not everyone is so lucky.

Yes, my own experience provides the sub-text for this post. But I share with Mr. West the general feeling that I am a very lucky person overall. At this point, I wouldn’t change my make-up retrospectively. I'm sure that Jerry wouldn't either. Change one thing, and you change everything. I had a good marriage, and I have two wonderful adult children that I love very much, and who love me. I love the way my sons have turned out and I am very proud of them. But my children are my only success, I have never made much money, very little actually. If I had to choose between the family and the money, I’d have chosen the family anyway, so I’m happy about that. I do wish I could have been a better husband though, and a better friend to some wonderful people that I have known.

At this point I have a job that I like very much, and I think that my employers are happy with my performance of my duties. I have a nice place to live, and I eat good food, and I am not without friends. I hope that my luck holds out, but real optimism is denied me.

Danger! Monkeys!

Just watching a commercial for tourism Malaysia, they're bragging about their monkeys. Here's some news you can use:

1. If you don't get too close to the monkeys, you probably won't get hurt;

2. Never, never smile at the monkeys.

Monkeys, like snow, are best viewed on TV.

Life’s Little Dramas: Good Parents In Thailand

Everywhere, everyday, life goes on, with its own peculiar rhythm and its own various dramas. This story occurred in a big gas station cum rest stop on the main highway north of Bangkok. Come to think of it, that whole area is now under water, another drama.

I was stretching my legs, we were on a twenty-minute bus stopover. A Toyota VIOS pulled in and parked carelessly. Do they have those where you live? It’s a nice car, small but not too small. A young family jumped out, literally jumped out like the car was on fire, a young mother and father and their daughter, about eight-years-old. The girl was actively throwing up.

Mom took the girl to the bathrooms and dad set about cleaning the back seat. All very business like, without anxiety or recriminations. After a quick go over, dad noticed that he’d parked the car across the lines in his haste to get the little girl out onto the pavement. He got in and moved it accordingly. Mom came back to the car and dad opened the trunk. They took out a suitcase and retrieved a new shirt and pants for the girl. Dad put the soiled clothes into a plastic bag. By now the girl was feeling a little better; she was on the sidewalk playing airplane, turning slow circles with her arms outstretched. Trying to get her equilibrium back, no doubt.

Dad got a wet cloth and gave the back seat one last going over. I didn’t see the rest, it was time for my bus to leave.

I remember thinking that sometimes parents get an opportunity to prove themselves, and that on this occasion this young man and woman had proved themselves to be very good parents.

Not A Restaurant Review: House Of Some Ants

I doubt if anyone in America would ever name a restaurant "House of Some Ants," but that's sure enough the name of this place. It's in Thonburi, a western approach to Bangkok. It's the restaurant of my friend Lo and his wife, that's him in the pictures. The women are his sisters, we were on a good will visit, it's a new place. I neglected to get his wife into the pictures. I neglected to bring a camera at all, these pix were taken with my phone. "Never prepared," that's my motto.

But the ants thing. I thought that it was a little strange, but I've learned to expect the unexpected. When we were leaving, while we were driving along the main drag of Thonburi, I noticed a giant statue of an ant at an intersection. Turns out that the ant is the symbol of Thonburi. Talking about this, I discovered that Thai people have almost limitless respect for the lowly ant. The ant is strong beyond imagining for its size; the ant is small but through cooperation it can accomplish great things. All true, I suppose, but in America we don't see it so heroically.

The food was really good by the way. Totally cheap, it's a small neighborhood place after all. Lo's wife is a dedicated cake baker, she's had an oven in her house for many years to pursue what was her hobby. They have a cook too, a nice woman who worked for twenty years cooking in hotels, she even speaks English (to some degree). Lo still has his day job, he's a computer guy. The restaurant was his wife's idea, and like a good husband he said, "yes, dear!" On this visit, in the pastry case, they had a white cake with fresh whipped cream and a Boston Creme Pie. Both were really delicious. We had five or six plates of Thai food too, all better than average.

Gary U.S. Bonds - New Orleans - 1960

Did this song change my life? Maybe. It turned me up a corner, that's for sure. I was eleven or twelve, getting ready to wrap up grade school, and I was amazed by this song, it just grabbed me by the coat, dangled me off the ground, and spoke to me. I had been way into the Rock n' Roll thing since 1956, but as far as what actually put me on notice, there's this.

After "New Orleans" I was very aware of what records came out of New Orleans, and that's a rich vein to mine right there. Then, when the Rolling Stones came along, the fact that they covered a lot of New Orleans music was a big selling point.

These songs sounded great on juke boxes and car radios, which emphasized the bass and compressed everything.

Proctoring Tests At Ramkhamhaeng University In Thailand

I spent the week proctoring tests, which is always interesting. Ours is an “open” university, there are no admission requirements, so our students tend to be those whose earlier education did not provide them with the foundation necessary to ace the entrance exams for the more prestigious schools. Ram is a giant institution, we have over 850,000 students all together, all over Thailand, we award something like 45,000 degrees every year. At our school, anyone who fails the final the first time around gets a second try, and there’s no requirement to actually attend classes. Almost all of our students work jobs along with school, so we try to be accommodating. Most of our students sign up for about ten classes per term, many never go to class, and actually studying the assigned materials is very rare, they prefer to buy the ubiquitous outlines before the finals and hope for the best, or, more like, see what’ll happen.

Interesting things happen on the day of the test. Many just don’t show up, and there’s no penalty for that either. There’s no “Incomplete-F,” a result that will be familiar to American readers. It doesn’t go on the transcript at all. An easy subject may get a good turnout, let’s say twenty-six out of thirty-four; the harder subjects may get very few, fewer than ten out of thirty-four is common. Of those who do show up, some are completely unprepared.

Some tests are handed in very quickly. On a multiple choice test, some will take the “Hail Mary” approach, filling in the answers at random. On an essay type test, there are three popular shortcut hand-ins:

1. Blank book;

2. Blank with an explanation. “Not doing this test” is popular. Some apologize, “Sorry professor, the test is too hard;”

3. Brief, hopeless gestures at the questions, or only some of them.

Please don’t think that I am being critical, no way! Ours is a very good university, and we’re helping these students. They get a good education, and the degree has value. In my subject, Law, it is particularly good, most of the prosecutors and judges in Thailand are our graduates. We teach Law in twenty-seven provinces. I approve of Ram’s academic policies in every respect. And I admire our students greatly. They come predominantly from a background where no one has really cared about them, or tried to help them, perhaps no one has really tried to teach them anything. They went with the flow in their youth, either in country-side schools where it was all-recess-all-the-time, or in Bangkok schools that were poor and rough. They are young men and women who want to have a better life. They woke up at some point and realized that they needed higher education to escape from a life of dead-end underemployment. So they came to my university, the “open” university, and God bless them, they are in my heart and I wish them the very best of luck.

Teaching them, even proctoring their tests, is endlessly fascinating, and I am grateful for the opportunity.