A Recommendation: Born to Transcend — 26 Years of Depression, a Long-Form Work in Progress
"Merely staying alive has already exhausted all my strength." This is the shared voice of people with depression, and some patients lack even the strength to live and choose suicide. For example, yesterday's trending search included one item: "Rapper An Dahuo has passed away from depression." This 31-year-old female singer, like the missing-child-turned-searcher Liu Xuezhou who took his own life not long ago, had long been tormented by depression.
On Douban Read, an author using the pen name "Shuntian Jiejie" (Sister Shuntian) is serializing a long-form work about her struggle with depression and cancer, titled Born to Transcend — 26 Years of Depression.
In this long work, the author Shuntian Jiejie describes in detail the daily life and inner journey of a person with depression, as well as her arduous process of self-rescue.
It is hard for healthy people to imagine how agonizing it must be to suffer simultaneously from two stubborn diseases, depression and cancer. The author has been entangled with "depressive episodes" (bipolar disorder) since the age of 11, unable to study normally at school. Yet she possessed an extraordinarily strong will to save herself, constantly trying every means to improve and transform herself, hoping to return to a normal state. There were times when she cried for hours every day, unable to communicate normally with others, unable to live or study normally.
Depression is an emotional disorder that is extremely difficult to escape. When a person is controlled by depression, her normal life is almost completely destroyed. As for the cause of depression, there is still no clear explanation to this day — for more than 90% of psychiatric disorders, humanity has not yet found their cause.
Some scholars believe that life is simply a series of chemical reactions, and that diseases like depression arise when one or more bodily functions malfunction, leading to a deficiency of certain essential substances, so that the person cannot regulate their emotions through the chemical reactions that healthy people use. Other scholars believe that the causes of depression are multiple, involving both biological and social factors.
In the real world, the cause of each patient's depression may be different. The only thing certain is that no two people in the world are identical. Biological common sense tells us that the number of protein species in living organisms ranges from 10 billion to 1 trillion; because of differences in genetic material, living conditions, and the influence of epigenetic factors, each person's proteome is not exactly the same as anyone else's. So in theory, the entire life process of a living being is indeed a series of chemical reactions, but the chemical reactions of each living being are different, and how a person falls ill is very hard to answer correctly.
A patient like this author, troubled by depression from age 11 and diagnosed with cancer at 32, certainly has biological factors at play. There are some unknown defects in her genome; it is by no means as simplistic as those unlearned yet boastful charlatans claim, that her illness was caused merely by childhood trauma and bad moods. Her negative emotions were first a consequence of genetic defects, and only later a partial cause of other illnesses. Her cancer also has biological factors; negative emotions are only a partial cause, perhaps not even that.
Depression is a disease misunderstood by too many people. In the eyes of many, a depressed patient is simply being stubborn in thinking, being overly "dramatic," unable to see reason, or moaning without illness. Some even feel that depressed patients are merely cowardly, chronically lazy, or bad-tempered.
Moreover, for a long time our culture has discriminated against psychiatric illness — for instance, we often insult people by calling them "crazy" or "mentally abnormal." This kind of remark, which most people blurt out many times in their lives, embodies discrimination and prejudice against mental illness. Because society as a whole is prejudiced against psychiatric disorders, patients and their families also carry stigma, which means very few depressed patients can obtain effective help.
But now the incidence of depression is rising so fast that the WHO predicts that by 2030 depression will overtake chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes to become the number one contributor to the global disease burden. Perhaps many families in the future will be troubled by depression; this is already a social problem that cannot be ignored.
Why are there so many depressed patients now? Scholars offer many explanations, but none is conclusive. Personally, I lean toward the view that the speed of human evolution cannot keep pace with the speed of social development and environmental change, so many people cannot adapt to the current living environment.
If we follow the evolutionary view that nature applies the law of survival of the fittest and elimination of the unfit, then depressed patients could be said to be candidates nature prepares to eliminate. But human society is a civilized society, and the greatest purpose of building a civilized society is precisely so that fellow citizens who would be eliminated in a savage society can also survive in ours. The level of a society's civilization is determined by how it treats the weak.
The elderly, the weak, the sick, the disabled, and pregnant women are unquestionably the weak, and depressed patients deserve greater understanding and care from society. One of the author Shuntian Jiejie's purposes in writing this long work is to call on society to show more understanding and care for depressed patients. But because her influence is limited, despite her painstaking serialization of so much text, the work has received only a little over a thousand views so far, and most of those who read it are themselves depressed patients or doctors who follow this group. I am recommending this long work to you for the same reason she wrote it: I hope society will understand and care more about this group.
Listening to other people's inner voices is part of my work. Because I have delved into the inner worlds of all kinds of people, I can almost accept everyone and every behavior that others find hard to accept. In a doctor's eyes, most people in this world suffer from mind-body disorders of varying degrees — one might even say that there is no person on earth completely free of any mind-body illness. Our calling is to help people alleviate suffering, not to discriminate against them for being ill. It is just that the lifespan and capabilities of our species are very limited, so every doctor, devoting a lifetime of effort, can only achieve distinction in some tiny branch of medicine and cannot cure every disease.
My life experience tells me that the more one listens to others' inner voices, the broader one's mind becomes, the stronger one's empathy grows, and the easier it is to understand and be considerate of others. I am not yet perfect and cannot yet fully understand everyone, so I keep listening, correcting my past views in the process, and becoming more accepting. I also recommend that others adopt this method to help others and improve themselves.
By the way, in this long work Born to Transcend — 26 Years of Depression, the author incidentally describes a highly efficient learning method — I say this because my own learning method is the same, and I have benefited greatly from it. Because of her depressive episodes, the author could not complete her schooling normally, yet she stubbornly wanted to attend the best high school and the best university, and even went on to complete graduate school. In the eyes of most doctors this is unimaginable, or at least many doctors would take it as evidence that her depression was not particularly severe, since she could still complete her studies.
But I think she benefited from misfortune. Because her illness prevented her from receiving a normal education, she struck a blow at modern education and completed her studies through self-study. Because she found it hard to concentrate, she did not follow the conventional routine when studying on her own; instead, she concentrated on one subject at a time, often devoting a week or two entirely to one subject, rather than dividing the student's day into small chunks as school education does, studying several subjects each day. Purely from the standpoint of learning, she should thank her illness, because from my own experience the method she used is far more efficient than modern school education.
I am different from her. I never had learning difficulties; my learning ability was strong, and from high school onward, because of my excellent grades, I was specially exempted from attending classes routinely and completed my studies entirely through self-study — for which I really must thank my teachers for giving me special latitude. All my teachers closed both eyes to my unconventional ways, rather than keeping one eye open and one closed. In my self-study, like her, I often studied only one subject for a week or two, and I still do to this day.
Many educators may think our learning method is unscientific, but in fact it is not. Long, highly focused study is far more efficient than dividing time into fragmented pieces. In high school, being brash and fearless, I sometimes joked with classmates that I was not pursuing first place but merely a perfect score. This was not entirely a joke, because with this method I did often score full marks in math, physics, and chemistry. This depressed author could not keep up with her teachers at school and often scored only a few points, yet after adopting this method, even while entangled with depression, she managed to pass the first-tier university entrance cutoff. This shows that modern education, judged purely by educational outcomes, is quite poor.
In Born to Transcend — 26 Years of Depression, the author also describes the process of her cognitive transformation. Depressed patients are an extremely sensitive and value-deprived group; they are very sensitive to how others evaluate them, so they are always in an irritable state. A casual remark from someone else may make them cry for days, immersed in self-denial from which they cannot extricate themselves.
This is somewhat similar to allergy sufferers. My son's math teacher is allergic to flour; one evening, hungry and craving a snack, she secretly ate a small piece of bread, triggering a severe allergic reaction. She was rushed to the hospital emergency room and stayed there for more than two months. We may be more tolerant of this kind of allergy, because these patients show obvious organic pathological reactions, yet we find it hard to accept the emotional irritability of depressed patients, because we cannot see with our own eyes what pathological reactions they are having.
In reality the two are highly similar; irritability is a typical reaction of patients with emotional disorders. Last year there was a news story about a woman who became emotionally agitated after a dispute with someone on a high-speed train; her behavior in the carriage was filmed and posted online. At a glance I could tell she was a bipolar patient, but our ignorant society used the whip of morality to mercilessly flog this patient. The netizens who joined in this cruel cyberbullying of a mentally ill person each felt themselves to be the embodiment of justice, as if they wished to drown her with their spittle, as if afraid she would not kill herself soon enough.
Engels said a classic line: "Ignorance is a curse." At least on the issue of mental illness, Chinese society is currently in a very ignorant and backward state, so many people have blood on their hands yet smugly believe they are doing good. Science popularizers have an unshirkable duty to raise the scientific literacy of the whole society. Only when more people have higher scientific literacy, understand these disease phenomena, and are tolerant and caring toward these patients, can our society become more civilized.
So the author of this long piece describes in her memoir the process of change in her view of those who criticized her; even after the change, it still carries a whiff of retaliation. I understand this very well, because her whole life has been lived in tension and confrontation, and she has not yet reached the realm of clarity and peace. Because of this passage, I know she has not yet fully recovered. She needs to deepen her understanding and compassion for the world, further transform her adversarial feelings toward her critics into complete tolerance, and see that those critics who seem imperfect to her are, in some sense, like her — also, through various karmic conditions, endowed with this or that defect, so that their cognition and conduct are imperfect and they are worthy of compassion, not resentment. Perhaps on the day she can do this, her illness will be cured.
In my essay "On Spiritual Cultivation", I mentioned that the ultimate goal of spiritual cultivation is to achieve three reconciliations: reconciliation with oneself, reconciliation with others, and reconciliation with the world. Reconciliation is not muddying the waters; reconciliation does not mean believing that everything is already perfect. Reconciliation is tolerance and understanding; after reconciliation, if we find shortcomings, we still strive to improve them.