Which comes first, the job or the depression?
‘Philip Burguieres demonstrates the confusion felt by many people about depression. He refers to it as a disease, yet it seems that the solution to his depression was to change how he saw himself and his world. No physical illness can be cured simply by changing how we think.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ website no longer talks about a chemical imbalance as the cause of depression but instead lists factors such as “circumstances†and says that “things happenâ€. However, it fails to note that what determines our behaviour isn’t what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us.
People who view their flooded home as a challenge to be mastered will behave very differently from those people who look at their house and think: “If I’d been really good this wouldn’t have happened to me.†If we don’t understand that we interpret events and are free to change our interpretations, we’ll make the same kind of mistakes that Burguieres made. As a child he tried to overcome the shame he felt about his unemployed father by setting himself the absolute rule “I shall not fail at anythingâ€. He became exceedingly good, but, like all good people, he felt that he was not good enough and therefore didn’t deserve any pleasure. These two ideas, which he himself had created, ensured that sooner or later his world would fall apart and he would suffer.’
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