We walk the same line

I think there are a lot of commonalities between drug addiction and depression and the treatment for both.

The thing about depression, and living with someone who has depression is that it can be so isolating. The depressed person feels entirely alone, cut off from human-kind and unable to make themselves understood.

The person going through "fallout" also becomes isolated from normal social contact and cannot explain the reasons why to those around them.

But in fact what we are going through is not unique.

I know from being around people who suffer other debilitating illnesses and people supported those who have; people who have lived with drug addictions and those who have lived with the addictions of others that much of what I'm going through, they can relate to.

This really hit home when I was listening to old podcasts and came across a program on drug addiction treatment broadcast last year on ABC Radio National. The show looked at residential therapies for addiction and included comments from residents and staff.

Here are a couple of points in no particular order of importance.

One of the women who suffered primarily from alcohol and ampthetamine dependency talked about how she was finally able to see that she was putting her children through the kind of trauma that she had suffered in her own childhood and that in turn had led to her addiction.

I think in my partner's case this is very relevant. His depression is very probably the result of the alcoholism and violence in his childhood. The last thing on earth he wants is for our son to have the same kind of experiences. As a result he is incredibly careful to control any outward signs of aggression and he stopped drinking and smoking when our child was born.

But it is much harder for him to control the more embedded behaviours that are a result of his upbringing - the negative perception of the world, his mistrust of people generally and his incredibly low expectations, his feeling of powerlessness and inability to effect change when he doesn't like a situation and most of all his automatic shutdown mechanism that allows him to withdraw from frightening, dangerous, challenging circumstances.

These are things that I'm afraid can be passed on to our son, with or without the alcohol and the violence.

The other point was one made by a director of one of the therapeutic communities. He talked about how some people went through the program several times and that eventually, one day it just clicked for them. They were able to get it. He said, "It's just their time."

I wonder if it can be like this for depression too. I mean, it's not as if the therapies are magic or something that's really hard to work out like a complicated maths equation.

Perhaps the reason why it suddenly clicks is that it's not sudden at all. In fact it's a result of several attempts at forging new paths in the brain, new ways of thinking.

Of course it can take a while. The old ways of thinking, the old paths are grooves worn deep by years of traversing the same route, day in, day out. The new path has to be hacked out afresh. Maybe it takes more than one or two passes at it. Maybe it takes repetition.

I think there are probably many more similarities between drug addiction and depression, and so often the two go hand-in-hand anyway and it's very hard to tell which is the cause and which is the effect (possibly these are interchangeable).

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any opinions about this.
Flo