Daily Times

ecourse to psychology, therapy and drugs is a common antidote to avert bad moods, self-loathing, anxiety and a whole flock of depressive disorders. However, it seems probable that these intended cures hardly help one save the hope of recovery in the near future. Somehow, the whole understanding of therapy miscalculates the reasons behind depression and anxiety as inherent problems of an individual’s mind and doesn’t include in its account his/her relations, life-style, surrounding environment and many other minute details which collectively fail the individual in one way or the other.

It is assumed that standing outside is a somewhat normalcy which has to be brought in as soon as the germs of depression are killed with the use of efficient drugs. The elusive idea of normal human behaviour has permeated the total understanding of society in such a way that everybody who finds the slightest aberration within themselves from the supposed ideal of the normal, starts to feel that some abnormality is creeping in them under different disguises. Lo and behold! Soon the devious depression is ferreted out with all its dark tentacles that previously fettered the individual’s mind.

The conclusions that I want to draw are these: first, depression is not an inborn mental defect as it is maintained by repetitions of certain behaviours, reinforced by social factors, rendered intense by relations unwilling to understand, and thereby made strong until it seems inevitable. Second, therapy and drugs fail to address the problems of an individual’s ghost effectively in the long run and make one sick for the rest of one’s life along with the regret that it could have been different.

Soon after adolescence, as any standard psychology book would agree, with physical changes there are psychological changes that follow and we go through a renewal of our being. Given a turbulent process of emotional changes and at times recurring traumatic memories from the past, most of us find ourselves trapped in a raging bottle of storms. As parents hardly know anything that goes through their children’s heads, they persist in dictating them all the time and expect them to conform to their expectations. They refuse to acknowledge the will that adolescents acquire for themselves with the passage of time. Besides, lack of sexual education, guilt associated with lewd fantasies and the repressions imposed on oneself thereby result in a convoluted mental disorder for the adolescents.

Intricacies of relationships with parents and friends redouble and continue to fold over until an individual finds oneself amidst the general uproar. Though a steady mask of integrity is kept on the outside and everybody pretends to know who is to be blamed, the growing adolescent receives the brunt of it and suffers.

For the accidents that life knocks us with, the relations which fail us and thousand other troubles which trot around us shamelessly, there is not one remedy which will assay all the pain and flatten out the wrinkles in our souls.

The situation, however, is not as desperate as it might seem. Poetry can console one to a certain extent. By poetry, I mean literature at large, except for the romantic digests and the cheap novels. By reading about the lives of other characters, we gradually learn to adjust ourselves from the inside and the outside. Families and friends might not pacify the troubles we harbour but books do alleviate us to a whole new level and reveal to us our own wisdom.

By saying that poetry assists one in knowing oneself and one’s circumstances better, I do not imply that no practical steps must be taken to lessen one’s troubles and that one should only nest in ideal worlds for escape. Poetry and literature can bring us close to life and reality, without engendering illusions and fairy tales. Poetry speaks to the soul and is as truthful as it is clichéd.

Unlike others who believe that depression is a homogenous mental disease which overwhelms individuals like a plague, I consider depression to be a manifestation within all of us that occurs in a unique, exclusive manner. In addition to this, it seems to carry a message which one needs to feel and decipher. I remember some lines from ‘The Letters to a Young Poet’ which talk about a similar situation and make a poem of its own.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

? Rainer Maria Rilke

Given society’s obsession with objects and appearances, the inner world runs fallow and gives rise to demons which no pills can cure. But, writings of poets like Rilke relieve the tangled threads which ordinary hands can’t reach up to or observe.

Another important thing which poetry relieves one of is ‘brooding’. A mind with a mental disorder tends to brood exhaustively over petty objects and issues without knowing how to untangle itself from the mess and move on. Poetry, with its strange mechanisms of its own, releases one from ‘brooding’ and shows a general picture of how existence actually stands. Art and Poetry have always comforted human miseries. Our times need these aesthetic potions more than ever.

The writer is a student of English Literature at Government College University, Lahore and can be reached at rosseautolstoy5@gmail.com

Published in Daily Times, November 4^th 2017.