Depression and Weather
You can liken the inner workings of the mind to the weather. You can think of swirling thoughts like swirling clouds in the wind. And depression, a disorder of the mind, can be likened to a storm. It comes on slowly, or suddenly. It intensifies. It reaches a crescendo and, thank god, it passes.
And this is where the eastern philosophy of mindfulness and its variants can help us understand and manage mental ailments like depression. As I understand it, you become an observer of your own thoughts instead of identifying with them. Instead of a depressed person, you become a person who is simply experiencing negative rumination. You are not depressed. You are merely experiencing depressive thought patterns. And what’s left is awareness. You are just a conscious observer.
Of course you cannot change the past. It remains. And it is likely that what occurred in the past is what’s giving rise to the putrid cocktail of regret, worry, guilt, shame, comparative thinking and catastrophizing, yet none of it exists here, in this moment. Only your thoughts do. Your thoughts are a thing in and of themselves. In fact it is even a stretch to call them “yours”. As I’ve written before, you are not your mind. Your thoughts are a force of nature akin to the weather, about which you can do nothing but take note and observe.
One might be tempted to take this all the way to its logical conclusion and assume that there is no free will and to even go so far as to say that everyone is innocent of their crimes. Everyone is redeemable. Leftists want to do away with the justice system altogether, evidence of which we’ve seen lately in liberal jurisdictions. And the results have not been good. So how do we balance this?
Let’s consider the hypothetical plight of a fictional person named Silas. Silas murdered someone in a fit of rage when he was 18 years old. I don’t want to go into the gory details but let’s just say that he had his whole life ahead of him; a good job, a beautiful girlfriend who loved him and one night, in a fit of drunken rage and hyper-inflated ego, he killed another young man who he imagined had disrespected him. The young man he killed turned out to be completely innocent and underserving of death.
Silas loses everything he had. His loving girlfriend moved on with her life and now he is stuck in prison alone with his swirling thoughts. Silas is not some sort of sociopath, but a conscientious person after all, so the waves of negative emotion begin to hit him like an unstoppable storm. Regret, shame, worry, catastrophizing in massive sustained waves. A mental deluge. It doesn’t seem to be letting up.
Silas is just an average middle class American, completely unaware of Eastern philosophy. Mindfulness is not a word in his vocabulary. So, when faced with such an onslaught of negative emotion, he comes to the conclusion that he must DO something about it. He must do something to make it stop. Silas doesn’t know that the storm will pass. It is a very intense mental storm due to the severity of the events from which it arose. It has been raging for days and weeks with little reprieve. But it will pass. But Silas doesn’t know that. He just wants it to end. He can’t imagine things getting better and the obvious solution in the midst of the storm is suicide. Silas is seriously considering suicide.
Fortunately for Silas however, he is placed on suicide watch by the institution and he wakes up one day to find that the mental storm has passed. All that remains now is a feeling of calm. The mental maelstrom is done with him for now. He feels neither pain nor pleasure. Just calm. Awareness. Being.
Years pass and while he doesn’t find Eastern philosophy, he finds Christianity which teaches forgiveness. Waves of depression still surge through his mind but he is now anchored by something greater than himself and he is able to weather the storm.
Eventually, he does his time and is released from prison to become a contributing member of society.
Silas has been redeemed. The liberal ideal of rehabilitation has been realized. He is unlikely to reoffend because he felt remorse for his crimes and paid the price. The time in prison is merely symbolic of the real punishment he was dealt by the waves of negative emotion inflicted upon his own mind. The terrible and repeated waves of depression have had their way with him and the tremors will be felt until his dying day. This is a man with a conscience and therefore he is redeemable.
But this is not to say that everyone should be set loose back into society. Silas was redeemable because he had the requisite conditioning which gave rise to his depressive thoughts in the first place. Oddly enough, depression itself can be thought of as a symptom of redemability.
You can easily imagine an alternative scenario where Silas felt nothing for his crime. No remorse. No regret. Just indifference. There are many reasons that someone could end up so callous, ranging from childhood neglect to extreme neurodivergence. I am hesitant to say that such individuals are irredeemable. I have no right to judge another human being in this way. However, I would be hesitant to allow “lost souls” of this sort to walk among those who are oriented toward righteousness. They should be treated with compassion in a controlled environment, not left to flounder in the streets.
I began this post talking about depression and mindfulness and now I have somehow meandered my way into criminal justice ethics. I believe our criminal justice system is rooted in a Judeo-Christian ethic which is why forgiveness is weighted by an evaluation of remorse. When someone is remorseful, they are showing evidence of orienting toward God, or righteousness and can therefore be forgiven. The Bible teaches this stuff.
What does this have to do with mindfulness? Well, both eastern and western philosophies converge upon similar conclusions from a practical sense.
As I see it, mindfulness teaches us that negative emotion are past traumas swirling around in your mind, tremors from past imbalances. It teaches us to observe them, understand what they are, not to identify with them but also not to resist or stifle them. They are there to instruct your way forward.
Christianity teaches us something slightly different. While I don’t really know what the Bible says about depression and what to do with negative emotion, I do know that it is heavy on the idea of forgiveness as long as you vow to orient yourself toward righteousness.
Practically speaking, both philosophies arrive at the same ethical conclusion which can be summed up something like, “it’s ok if you’ve done bad stuff as long as you acknowledge it and vow to be good going forward… and mean it.”
