Depression can strike at any time in life. It often appears for no reason, plunging us into a world of disturbing strangeness.
We no longer feel like ourselves. It reveals itself to us insidiously, with its procession of symptoms: dark thoughts, loss of pleasure in our daily activities, no longer wanting to get up in the morning, sleep and eating disorders, but also social isolation. Relationships with loved ones are disrupted. We no longer recognise ourselves. Deep down, what’s really going on?
Unless it emerges in the wake of a specific event (the loss of a loved one, an accident, a trauma), depression is often linked to the past.
The aim of this article is to shed light on the multiple causes of depression. Depression can be linked to multiple causes, present or past. It may also be that a current event rekindles an old, poorly-healed depression. Depression creates a physiological disorder in the brain, which is always linked to a life episode that cannot be integrated into the psyche, and comes back as a symptom, literally consuming the individual and his or her resources. Psychotherapy is then necessary to understand the causes and free the individual from the weight of his or her affects.
Depression linked to burnout
Before opening this chapter, I’d like to talk about the difference between depression and burnout, a diagnosis often confused by specialists. Burnout, unlike depression, is an illness linked to a difficult and unsatisfying work context.
This is linked to long working hours, the constant fear of losing one’s job and ultimately having little time or leeway to find another.
Burnout can also reveal itself in work situations that are impossible to resolve, with the company failing to allocate the resources needed to carry out the mission, plunging the individual into a paradoxical injunction.
Faced with these new challenges, the individual gradually becomes consumed and drained of strength. There may come a morning when he is simply no longer able to get up and go to work. Anxiety overwhelms him and he finds himself at the end of his tether. He is literally consumed from within in an impossible struggle. Quick and effective treatment is required, and medication is often necessary.
This must be complemented by psychotherapy, to work on the causes. If possible, action should be taken on the work environment, but also to relieve anxiety and pressure. Burnout is more likely to occur in people who make high demands of themselves and are intolerant of failure.
Depression and bereavement
Depression can be linked to the loss of a loved one, a trauma, or something else in our lives that challenges our ability to adapt. Not everyone experiences these events in the same way, and this is linked to each person’s resources. These resources and the ability to cope with grief and trauma are linked to the strength of our “deepest self” and, of course, our past.
An individual who has grown up in a secure environment and thus acquired a solid foundation to build on, with parents who are supportive and grounded in reality, will be better able to cope with life’s inherent difficulties.
On the contrary, an individual who can’t rely on his or her resources, due to a less secure experience, will be more at risk, confronted with traumatic events.
Mourning can then go as far as collapse, leading to what is commonly referred to in psychoanalysis as melancholic depression.
This is an inability to mourn: the loss is unbearable for the subject, threatening his or her very integrity.
Mourning is in fact made up of several phases. First there’s the denial phase, when we cannot admit the loss of our loved one; then the anger phase: “why did this happen?”.
This is followed by the grief processing phase, when the bereaved talk to their loved ones, then the depression phase, with its inherent sense of sadness, and finally the acceptance phase, when the bereaved can assimilate the loss and rebuild their lives.
The melancholic subject is stuck in one of these phases. This can also sometimes be linked to conflicts with the deceased, leading to mourning tinged with ambivalent feelings, in a love-hate register, but this is not always the case.
Family depression: the narcissistic pact.
In the family circle, it’s possible for the family to bond around what we in psychoanalysis commonly call the narcissistic pact. This is a joint depression shared by the entire family group.
Children are often the repositories of depressive affects that have not been processed by their parents, and which are linked to the parents’ own history. Indeed, a parent who has had a difficult past that has not been metabolised because it has not been integrated into his or her psyche can pass on this psychic content in a totally unconscious way to his or her children.
Nobody talks about it, but you can sense that something is wrong: it’s the narcissistic pact. A pact born of denial of depression, denial of the family’s past, and which protects the whole family from a depressive experience that’s impossible to work out. Parents who have lived through wars, difficult bereavements or conflictual relationships with their own parents. The child, being a little sponge, will sense this malaise and will either become the family’s nurse, sink into depression himself or herself or, on the contrary, develop behavioural disorders linked to an internal malaise that is impossible to understand or process.
In-depth work on the family group’s unconscious issues will then be required to undo this pact and psychically liberate each member of the family group.