Driving into desolation

Pakistani society forces a depressed person into a deeper state of agony

With the recent, extremely tragic, incident of Robin Williams’ suicide, depression has become a rather popular topic these days. I don’t remember having read about depression as much as I have since the actor committed suicide after a long battle with chronic depression. I personally admired Robin Williams a lot; the man gave the world so much. The beauty of his tragic death lies in the fact that his death gave the world something too; the world has finally started acknowledging depression like never before.

Society has glamourised depression. Beautiful, cold hearted models smoking cigarettes and handsome well dressed men taking sleeping pills — that is the image of depression that we have. Every now and then, I see a quote about this silent killer written in beautiful font on a picture of a girl with perfectly messed up hair sitting in a comfortable bed. As far as I know, that isn’t even remotely what depression looks like. It reeks of hopelessness. It makes you ugly not only on the inside but on the outside too. The cigarettes make your fingers smell of despair; the pills stop working after a while. Depression means you lose the will to get out of bed for days. It means you sit for hours in front of a computer screen and fail to complete the sentence you started. It means the only reason you drag yourself to your workstation every day is because you have bills to pay; at times even that doesn’t convince you to work. You don’t enjoy going to your favourite restaurant with your friends because when you are depressed, there is no favourite restaurant and you have no friends. This sounds more serious, right? That is what depression truly is and that is the reason why society refuses to acknowledge it as a serious threat. There is nothing more threatening than hopelessness and depression is the epitome of hopelessness in an individual.

Society has glamourised depression. Beautiful, cold hearted models smoking cigarettes and handsome well dressed men taking sleeping pills — that is the image of depression that we have. Every now and then, I see a quote about this silent killer written in beautiful font on a picture of a girl with perfectly messed up hair sitting in a comfortable bed

In Pakistan’s conservative society, depression is still a taboo. The masses refuse to acknowledge it. The experts try to take advantage of the lack of awareness regarding the issue amongst people. It saddens me to admit that we live in a society where even the experts in this field try capitalising on the vulnerability of their patients. Your parents’ divorce becomes the underlying cause of your depression the minute you enter a psychiatrist’s clinic; no further investigation into the matter needed. You’re given a number of pills that you don’t even need and are given therapy that usually doesn’t help. You see, all efforts are directed at an underlying cause that doesn’t even exist. Depression needs no external reasons to exist. If it did, the world’s jolliest man wouldn’t have committed suicide.

We, as a society, like to take the easy way out and blame an external factor as the reason behind why an individual is depressed. It is always easy to justify that an individual is depressed because he doesn’t make enough money, because his wife left him or because his child died. It isn’t easy to explain that a happily married person with a decent job struggles daily because of his depression. The process of ‘curing’ the underlying cause costs the depressed individual his or her life. While it is true that external factors can trigger bouts of depression, underlying factors do not cause depression on their own completely. Chemical imbalances in the brain are involved. Telling someone with depression to stop being depressed about a certain situation is like telling someone with cancer to stop having cancer.

While it is true that external factors can trigger bouts of depression, underlying factors do not cause depression on their own completely. Chemical imbalances in the brain are involved. Telling someone with depression to stop being depressed about a certain situation is like telling someone with cancer to stop having cancer.

Sadly, however, the most common approach towards the treatment of depression in our country is a group of friends coming over on mom’s request to tell you to ‘snap out of it’. The main reason behind being depressed is because you failed a test, because a boy left you or because your parents got a divorce. With the diagnosis made, your close friends and immediate family members tell you to stop being an attention seeker, to stop acting crazy. If a relative comes over and asks why you seem so low, your mom quickly changes the topic. Nobody should know that there is a depressed individual in the house. Society shuns depressed people as a result of which they are forced into hiding while the disease slowly eats their insides till nothing is left. Yes, depression has physical symptoms too. Your joints hurt, you feel exhausted most of the time. Getting out of bed on most days seems like an accomplishment. You have every symptom of a severely ill person, yet nobody understands. At one point, you too start believing that you are just making things up as a result of which you get thrown into a state of self-loathing. Society just makes it worse.

If an individual somehow manages to convince people that he is depressed without any specific reason, he is labelled as an ungrateful person. At this point, the depressed person starts feeling bad about being so ungrateful. He’s told to ask God to forgive you for being so ungrateful. He starts to repent for a sin he never committed.

Pakistani society forces a depressed person into a deeper state of agony. A person who is suffering at least expects his suffering to be acknowledged which is something our society fails to do. In most cases, depressed individuals have no choice but to keep it to themselves. Putting on a plastic smile is not that difficult once you get used to it; maintaining a façade isn’t the most difficult task in the world and that is exactly what depressed people end up doing. With every breath that they take, the suffocation increases. Society just adds to the intensity of the suffocation. You see, depressed people don’t just die. They get killed.