Why don’t more depressed people write about getting happy?

Yesterday’s post about books that have helped me feel better got me thinking about why there aren’t more books by people who’ve transformed their depression into happiness. In fact, counting them up on my fingers there are exactly…none. Actually that's not completely true. On the Edge of Darkness edited by Kathy Cronkite has at least one story of someone who found happiness. But as someone with a long and serious history of depression who is now happy for most hours of most days I find the lack of such books amazing. Why are the shelves not full of them?

It’s not as if there are not a lot of effective therapies about. Cognitive, behavioural, TLC (that’s therapeutic lifestyle changes for the uninitiated), ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy), omega 3 fatty acids, interpersonal therapy, exercise (both aerobic and anaerobic), bright light, positive psychology…there are more effective therapies for depression than you can shake a stick at. So where are all the books by people who have found happiness as a result of doing these therapies? This is a message that people suffering from depression desperately need to hear – that it is possible to be happy if you do proven effective things. That's my experience anyway.

Is perfect happiness the goal?

My friends are pretty frank with me, in a loving way. That’s they way I like them. When I showed the story of how I transformed my depression into happiness to my closest friend he said ‘it seems to me that as soon as you have another failed relationship, you’ll get depressed again.’ It's true that rejection is my weakest point, although he seemed to forget that not every break up has been followed by a depression. My break up with him, for instance. But it reminded me that I’m not always happy. I have my down hours, sometimes days. Occasionally I’m up and down for a week or two.

I called another close friend and asked her ‘Is there any point in writing my personal story if I’m not always happy?’
‘People are turned off by someone who’s perfectly happy,’ she said. Instantly I realised that she was right. Someone who’s struggling with depression is going to feel resentful of some Sally Sunshine who claims to be constantly happy. It’s just too high a standard to aim for – it almost sets you up to fail. It’s hard to be accepting of one’s ups and downs if perfect happiness is the goal, let alone feel safe revealing them to others.

After I hung up I asked myself ‘what have I got to say if I’m not always happy?’ I thought about what my life would be like if I had not made the decision, time after time, to pick myself up after each relapse, each bad day, and try again to find happiness. I very likely wouldn’t still be here. But if I was, I certainly wouldn’t have experienced as many moments, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years of happiness as I have. Happiness would not be my default position, something I notice mainly when it disappears. This then is what I have to say. It’s possible to be a lot happier if you try the things that work and keep on trying even when your mood falls over for a while. And that’s worth the effort.

Does health = happiness?

As I walked down the drive today I reflected that there have been days in past months when doing so would have been beyond me, as daunting as climbing a mountain. At the end of my drive my little white and tabby cat Suki was high up in the branches of a tree. I stood looking up into the canopy of green leaves. The crystalline sky beyond was so blue that I could have believed it was summer if I hadn’t been wrapped up in a thick dressing gown, scarf, woollen hat, thermal socks and sheepskin lined boots against the cold! When I glanced across the road I noticed with surprise that the neighbor’s lawn looked like someone had sprinkled confectioners’ sugar over it, but very carefully so that the concreted drive was missed. Just then I realised how happy I felt. It was nice to feel happy and healthy at the same time – the two don’t always go together in my life.

This got me thinking about whether health equals happiness. I remember a friend who was diagnosed in her 30’s with an illness that will get progressively worse for the rest of her life. A woman she told about it said to her ‘You poor thing – I’ve had poor health myself, and if you haven’t got your health you’ve got nothing’. Hardly a cheering thought for someone facing a lifetime of ill health!

But it hasn’t been my experience. When my health improved after seeing my lovely naturopath she said to me ‘you must feel so happy now’. But in fact I didn’t. I felt quite low. Thinking back to the first time I’d seen her, when I’d had to lie on her couch for the consultation because walking from the car had made me too ill to sit up, I remembered how blissfully happy I’d been then. This was despite the fact that I was deeply in debt and having to sell my much-loved house. In contrast, as my health started improving my mood slipped. The two did not seem intimately linked. And recently, when I was almost housebound for 3 weeks with carbon monoxide poisoning and spent most of my time lying in bed reading and watching videos, I was happy almost every day. So in my experience it’s not true that if you haven’t got your health you’ve got nothing – I can be happy and enjoy life even when I’m not healthy.