Unstable Equilibrium in Asymmetric Perspective: or Why You Should Think of Depression as a Choice

I have a shameful secret.

I was not a happy or productive high schooler. Even by listless teenager standards, something was wrong. I was sent to a psychologist. I was diagnosed as depressed. I graduated to a psychiatrist who prescribed me antidepressants. The whole nine yards.

That’s not my secret, but we’re getting close. There was a seminal moment for me in treatment. Not from my doctors, or similar authority, but from an essay from a faceless blog and even more faceless blogger (think geocities written in comic sans.) It was titled “Depression is a choice.” It didn’t pull punches. The author said it was my fault I was depressed, and I should do everything a normal person does to be happy: socialize with friends or acquaintances. Talk positively with them about my experiences. Get exercise. Set goals. The author was persistent that if I chose to wallow in sadness, it would be self-reinforcing. He knew I was doing this. He told me I had another option, I could choose to be happy, and I eventually would be.

The premise was offensive. I didn’t initially think much else of it, I never bookmarked it, nor did i reread it. But something stuck with me. Some mental circuit flipped - I stopped thinking of depression as something happening to me, and started thinking of it as the repercussions of my own action, (or, more accurately, inaction.)

This didn’t yield a seismic event. I would be noticeably depressed for years to come. But the fundamental idea that the depression was something I had agency over never left me. Nowadays my mental health is fairly robust, even compared to some of my more temperamentally gifted long term friends.

Here’s the secret: I believe my own depression was a choice. The truth is, I believe the essay changed my life.

II

But not everyone’s story ends up like mine.

One of my favorite authors is David Foster Wallace. As a teen, I made it through all 1,000 plus pages of Infinite Jest and wanted more. The Broom Of the System (okay,) A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster (both excellent.) Really the entire bibliography, including the sometimes crude Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, which I remember for the fictional interview of a man with a curious ailment:

"It's cost me every sexual relationship I ever had. I don't know why I do it. I'm not a political person, I don't consider myself. I'm not one of these America First, read the newspaper, will Buchanan get the nod people.... I freaked out about it one time and called a radio show about it, a doctor on the radio, anonymously, and he diagnosed it as 'the uncontrolled yelling of involuntary words or phrases, frequently insulting or scatalogical, which is coprolalia is the official term. Except when I start to cum and always start yelling it it's not insulting, it's not obscene, it's always the same thing, and it's always so weird but I don't think insulting...."

Q. [what is it you say?]

"'Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!" Only way louder. As in really shouting it.

At the time the funniest thing I had read in my life.

Tough segue from my chosen quote, but Wallace was a deep thinker. Widely hailed as a genius, he sent out his talent broadly, he could bounce between funny, profound, and extremely conscientious in his writing. His depth led to considerable success, both critically and monetarily. He was an incredibly formidable human.

But depression killed him. (Did he not read enough blogs on geocities?)

III

I have theory about all this. In some far away land, for the sake of narrative I’ll say the 1950s, there was no depression. Everyone knew their lot in life was given to them by God, and it was up to them to do what they could with it. Happiness, success, they were all what you made of it.

This was good. Most smart, conscientious people who could make good choices were content. And it’s not like they had it easy. They faced the same hardships as generations past: wars, genocide, infant mortality, disease, civil strife. We shouldn’t underestimate their circumstance.

But, under a microscope, a dirty secret lurked. A sprinkling of individuals with a malaise even the South of France couldn’t cure. Being that there was no public acknowledgment of depression, they felt isolated. Worse, if they were to share their true feelings, it would be evident to others that there was something truly hysterical about them: if depression is a choice, then deep within the soul of the depressed person there’s something ugly, something for which they deserve blame.

Still, a few of these tortured souls found themselves in the care of kind doctors. They confided to their shrinks they had made what they thought were all the right choices: they had a spouse / friends / a successful career as a critically acclaimed novelist. They were polite at parties. Why did they feel dead on the inside? And the doctor, in his most authoritative voice, replied that they had a chemical imbalance. He said, ‘it’s okay, don’t fret, it’s not your fault.’ He did everything he could do help, including the prescription of psychiatric medication.

And thus the doctor had a huge and profound positive effects on their lives. So profound that intellectuals with a moral bent realized that there were many thousands suffering who weren’t getting help. They sounded the alarm bells. “Depression is real,” and “Mental health is not a choice.” And, in that moment, the seeds were set for society to get a lot worse.

IV

Here’s a ruder example. There was once a narrative timeline where we all knew bodyfat was a choice. All your neighbors were a normal and healthy disposition. But occasionally there would be someone really far on some polygenetic spectrum, or maybe with some metabolic disorder where, even with normal levels of self-control and self-belief they were destined to be fat. But because the cultural knowledge was ‘obesity is well within your control’ the normal social reaction was to shame the fatties (they must have eaten all the cake.)

The result was that someone’s very sweet aunt (a conscientious contributor to society) was ostracized endlessly by her friends and family; she spent her whole life feeling a deep guilt for something that was effectively a medical condition.

This lasted until a conscientious scientist and important public figure sounded the alarm bells. ‘Natural metabolisms differ,’ he said. ‘Fat shaming wont help. In fact, it is cruel.’

The reasonable reaction from society’s smartest and nicest people was to agree we should change the culture. It became taboo to observe obesity and its relationship to self-control. Briefly, society became much better.

But did we lose something too? What was the long term effect? Does the marginal person become fatter the more sympathy the whole of society holds?

V

There’s some potential for best of both worlds here, and it lies in asymmetric, incongruent perspective. Let’s say I bump into a woman after she spins around suddenly at a at a coffee shop, and she spills her coffee on me. Who’s at fault? Mathematically, our two actions need to add up to 100%, let’s agree objectively it’s 40% my fault and 60% hers. As a fully mathematical person I may respond to the incident “I’m partially to blame, but you should really be more careful.” This is technically correct.

But if my hypothetical response sounds confrontational to you, it’s because the social fault should be 200%. Here, I say, “I’m so sorry I bumped into you, let me buy you another coffee,” (I’m 100% to blame) And she says “I spun right into you, there was nothing you could do.” (she’s 100% to blame.) We both highlight that if we had behaved sufficiently carefully as individuals the incident could have been avoided. Our perceptions are technically incongruent. But they’re both adaptive; we both leave the interaction looking inward, at what we can control.

That’s what my insight was with depression. Not that most people wouldn’t be depressed in my situation. Not that it was really was my own fault. (Maybe we’d agree it was only 10% my fault.) But there was a world where I could let myself be depressed (where no sane outsider would blame me) and there was a world where I could try to take complete responsibility, where I would live my life at complete agency.

Call it fake it until you make it. But it’s adaptive to think of yourself as having a unique ability to overcome agony and hardship. An unyieldingness in the face of uncertainty. A marriage to the knowledge that hard work and politeness will eventually be rewarded. An understanding that such actions will blossom into self respect, satisfaction, wealth, friends, and family. That you can be so light on your feet that no one will ever spill coffee on your again. You should fully believe, no matter the starting point, that your own mental health can be controlled. (I don’t mean this in don’t see a psychiatrist or take medication sense, just make sure you’ve chosen that path if you do.)

But, if applied universally, this perception is toxic. Why are other people depressed, poor, rude, or unkempt? If they too have agency, then this must be their own fault. That’s the crux. And here is the answer: they have experienced worse things. They haven’t been gifted the same unshakable countenance. They need as much help as they can get. In fact, it’s people like us that have the strength to help them.

VI

Unfortunately, this is an unstable equilibrium. It’s very easy for the ball to be dislodged and roll downhill. For example, if you’re somehow a black reader from the hood in Chicago, I have a message for you:

Being poor is a choice. Wearing baggy jeans is a choice. In the age of the internet, speaking only African American Vernacular English is a choice. Joining a gang is a choice. You can leave, go to trade school, get a job doing HVAC that pays a middle class salary. You can find a community that supports you. You can have children and use your middle-classdom to send them to college. Some of these things really used to be impossible. Now they’re not.

Americans have long dragged themselves out of poverty. Many of the Jews, Chinese, Italians, and Irish arrived in this country penniless, with strange customs, skin, and culture. Be like them. Be like the early freed slaves who left the old world behind and built families and businesses in new lands.

I’m not wrong here, but we all agree this advice is rich coming from me. It’s obviously self-serving for those who aren’t ‘disadvantaged’ to tell those who are they should be self reliant. And second, although cliché, ‘disadvantaged’ holds meaning. There’s no way that a kid from the hood could ever (eg) pay for Harvard without financial aid(60k per year.) And if, by some miracle, some large chunk of the hood decide they want to take complete responsibility of their actions going forward, if they say “please ignore the past, grant us no special pass or financial aid” they risk embarrassing themselves and their peers. They risk losing all (necessary) help. Any success they have may even reduce societal goodwill (they could have done this the whole time but didn’t!)

That is, their own perception of self reliance can potentially become maladaptive to the group if it’s contagious to outsiders. That’s the crux. In the unstable equilibrium we all apply complete agency to ourselves, and no agency to others. I look at the hood in Chicago and say ‘wow, I’ve never experienced anything like that, no one could get through that on their own.’ And everyone in the hood says ‘people have gotten through a lot worse, there’s nothing you can do to help.’ But this takes a lot of trust on both sides. It’s easier to fall into the opposite perspectives.

The least adaptive set of perspectives in the natural trough. Here, when someone from the hood says ‘I’ve got this on my own,’ I agree with them. I say ‘ if you were great like me you’d be drinking a piña colada out of a coconut on a sunny beach.’ And then he goes ‘actually, that’s not fair at all, I’ve had to go through so much more, you’re just a trust-fund kit.’ And then everything sort of falls apart, we both get stuck where other people’s problems are their own fault, but all our own problems our outside of our control.

VII

That last section was losing focus. I began trying to shift how other people play the game. This is impossible.

The real point of this essay is the tell you that I shifted how I played the game. And that it helped in ways that society as a whole said it couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Is this sort of thing scalable? Probably not. I was gifted a strong mindset. You probably aren’t so lucky.