THAT'S MEN:Learning how to enjoy yourself again can help
COULD MORE fun and enjoyment help to get people out of depression? If you’re deeply depressed, the question will seem stupid. One of the worst things about depression is that it robs you of the enjoyment of everyday life, throwing you into a grey zone from which you fear you will never emerge (though you will).
But some recent research leads me to wonder if those who are trying to help people with depression would do well to engage them in enjoyable activities.
Deep brain stimulation is an experimental technique in which electrical stimulation is targeted at specific areas of the brain. The technique has had encouraging preliminary results in people with severe depression.
In one study – but involving just 10 subjects – stimulation of the part of the brain involved with reward and the capacity for pleasure (the nucleus accumbens) was linked to an improvement in mood and a reduction in anxiety for all 10.
A separate study found that people with depression were able to enjoy positive experiences, but that the enjoyment didn’t last. When the experience was over, so was the enjoyment. Most of us, by contrast, get a longer “afterglow” from experiences.
What all this suggests to me is that a series of enjoyable experiences just might help a person in depression to get out of that state.
Dr William Glasser, who developed an approach called Reality Therapy, believed that fun and enjoyment constituted a basic psychological need of all human beings. Other basic needs included power (a sense of achievement, winning, being respected), belonging (to a family, a place or, say, to a football team) and freedom (your own space, making your own choices).
Dr Glasser argued that fun is genetically linked to learning – children learn through play, for instance – and that we therefore always seek to fulfil the need for fun.
Think about the amount of time, money and energy we devote to fun and I’m sure you’ll agree that it might just be meeting a basic need.
If you’ve never been severely depressed I’m sure you’ve had your run-ins with milder forms of depression. You may, to the outside world, have been functioning normally but have had that bleak, grey feeling inside. Then one day you start to get a kick out of things again, you get a sense of engagement and involvement, and it’s lifted.
Very often, it’s the return of that kick, that capacity for an enjoyment that lasts after the event is over, that signals you’re in the clear again.
I don’t want to be patronising or simplistic about this. To say to somebody who is severely depressed that they should go out and have a good time is less than useless. If they felt like going out and having a good time, they wouldn’t be depressed in the first place.
What people need is to be dragged (methaphorically) out by their friends to activities they normally enjoy. As I mentioned above, the depressed person may enjoy the activity, but that enjoyment may fall away the moment it’s over.
Friends need to be able to persevere in bringing the person out again and again. The hope is that the sense of enjoyment will kick in and eventually last, getting the person out of the trough of depression.
Not everybody has friends who can or will do this for them, and not everyone who is depressed will go along with it.
Depression is a mysterious and cruel condition which baffles professionals, friends and family alike. Disagreement continues over whether it is caused by events, thinking habits, chemical imbalances, genetic factors or a combination of all.
Different approaches seem to work for different people and sometimes nobody knows why a person has come out of a deep depression at a particular time.
So I’m making no claims for the promotion of enjoyment as another way of tackling depression except to say that I think it’s worth the effort. The worst that can happen is that those involved will have a good time, at least some of the time.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas