Anne Baring's Website

This seminar or paper is offered to people who suffer from depression but who are not under psychiatric care.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, as the words of his poem suggest, suffered from depression. Depression for him, as for so many others today, was a serious, life-destroying state of being, where one is not really living but existing from day to day in a miasma of misery, apathy, anxiety, guilt and despair. It may be compared to a living death. Some people spend their whole lives in this state, yet may never know the name of what they suffer from. Many forms of illness derive from it.
         The ramifications of depression extend far into the social fabric of society, causing profound and permanent disruption of family life and affecting the well-being of millions - perhaps 100 million worldwide. In the States depression affects some 19 million people (National Institute of Mental Health). In the UK prescriptions for anti-depressants have increased from 9 million in 1991 to 39 million in 2008 to 43 million in 2010. Prescriptions for sleeping pills rose to 10.2 million. There are currently (2011) 3 million people suffering from depression. "Some 25% of women and 12% of men suffer major depressive disorder during their lifetime…and depression affects up to 35% of the medically seriously ill." 1 (Powell 2002) Beneath the hidden and, until recently, neglected statistics of wife-beating and the sexual abuse of children; beneath chronic alcoholism and drug addiction, beneath the "modern" symptoms of anorexia nervosa and bulimia, beneath the restless, driven activity of so many people or the powerlessness, apathy and despair of many others, is depression. Finally, the omnipotent and aggressive behaviour of tyrants, bullies and oppressors of every shade and degree needs to be considered as a possible symptom of this underlying affliction.
        For the person experiencing it, depression feels like a perpetual punishment. There seems to be no end to it nor any possibility of respite from it. It is like slow, constant torture or the insidious "eating away" of leprosy. If, for a while, the depression lifts, there is the constant apprehension that it will return without warning, turning the bright day into night. Consequently, the most frequent compensatory mood or mode of life for the chronically depressed person when he or she is not transfixed by apathy, is manic activity or compulsive behaviour of one kind or another for, in these ritualistic patterns, there is some hope of warding off the fear of the return of the helplessness and black hole of depression. Behind depression lie one or more of four very powerful emotions: terror, grief, shame and guilt.
        For someone in the grip of a depression, the feeling is like being caught in the tentacles of an octopus, of being incarcerated or buried alive. The bodily appearance changes; hair and clothes are neglected or one simply puts on yesterday's clothes for months at a time. Deep, restful sleep eludes one. The voice has a different inflection and a lifeless, tone. The simplest daily routine tasks seem insurmountable. The most attractive surroundings take on a monotonous uniformity and pass unnoticed. Other people become threatening, irritating, even arousing paranoid feelings of distrust and dislike. If the depressed person speaks at all, it may be to criticise or attack other people - particularly partners or children. Alternatively, the attack may be internalised as a constant undermining, critical voice which has a devastating effect on the balance of the psyche, as well as the psycho-physical immune system. The memory of happy relationships or a happier mood, vanishes as if it had never been and will never return. It is as if the personality has been invaded and taken over by a destructive entity. One is left, as Dante describes it, in the midst of a dark wood, with no indication of a way out.

People may fall into a depression as a result of certain life situations, such as poverty, redundancy, bereavement or conditions of restriction or impotence which seem to offer no escape. But I believe that the incidence of depression increases in a culture which recognises no dimension of experience beyond sensory gratification, when the horizon of the human spirit is confined to this material world alone and there is no feeling of relationship with the "eternal" or with a transcendent entity or dimension. How many people commit suicide because there was no one to talk to about disturbing feelings that are difficult to articulate in a frenetically busy culture? Forty or so years ago, suicide was regarded as a crime and there is still a lingering stigma attached to it; this stigma may extend to depression whose symptoms are still not properly recognised and responded to in a society that has not yet developed emotional intelligence. 2 (Goleman 1996)

The Roots of Depression:
If you suffer from depression, it might be helpful to ask yourself these questions before you read any further:

As a child, did I lose one or both parents due to their death or disappearance through war, illness or divorce, particularly my mother?

Was I an adopted child or one brought up in an orphanage?

Was I ever separated for a long time from my mother when I was an infant or child under the age of seven?

Did I have to witness one parent physically or verbally abusing the other?

Did I suffer chronic abuse myself, either physical or emotional?

Did a parent or grandparent suffer from depression? (genetic inheritance can be one cause of depression)

Was I the victim of bullying (by parents, siblings, teachers or other children)

If the answer is yes to any of the above questions, it is possible, though not inevitable, that one or more of these life events could lie at the root of your depression. The following section will attempt to explain why.

Depression as the Symptom of a Wound to the Autonomic Nervous System:
Working with depression over many years, I have come to the conclusion that there is one very important primary cause which may be overlooked in the various approaches to treating depression: a trauma inflicted on the most fundamental, archaic and unconscious aspect of our psycho-physical organism - the autonomic nervous system or limbic brain. The limbic brain is the matrix of our primary instincts, our deepest feelings, and our capacity not only to respond to and survive difficult life challenges and situations, but also our ability to thrive, to make happy relationships, to fulfil our creative potential. If this fundamental aspect of our nature is injured, we may go through the whole of our lives carrying an unrecognised and untreated wound. Depression from this perspective is the symptom of a deeply unconscious psychic trauma which has injured or "frozen" the autonomic nervous system. More specifically, the optimum health and balance of the nervous system and the hormonal balance of the organism will have been affected. This in turn may ultimately manifest as physical or mental illness of some kind.
How did this limbic brain system come into being? To answer this question, we have to look at the long evolution of the nervous system and the instinctive responses of reptiles and mammals learned over hundreds of millions of years. We, as humans, have inherited not only the fundamental structure of our nervous system but many of the instinctive reflexes and patterns of behaviour that are found in both reptiles and mammals. These reflexes are embedded in the neuronal pathways of our limbic brain system. Observations about the relationship between human beings and animals have been unpopular because they seem to conflict with the idea of human free-will and self-determination. So there is today a general lack of understanding about the relationship between animal and human behaviour and how we, living in the twenty-first century, may still be controlled by instinctive reflexes that belong to our primate ancestors and even to the dinosaurs.
Of all the memories carried in our millions of years' old limbic brain system, those of being either predator or helpless prey are paramount. Palaeolithic man intensely lived these two patterns of life experience. In order to survive he had constantly to protect himself from becoming the prey of the great carnivores that roamed the plains and had their lair in the caves in which he sought shelter; at the same time he had to act as predator towards other animals in order to secure enough food to survive. We carry these ancient memories as part of our own biological inheritance: we are still deeply conditioned to act instinctively and instantaneously in certain situations as both predator and prey. These primary defensive and survival instincts are common to all of us, without exception. The predator behavioural pattern is a habit laid down over hundreds of millions of years in certain species which have learned to scent, track and kill their prey. Throughout this vast expanse of time preyed-on species have learnt instinctively to sense the approach of predators and to take evasive or defensive action in the face of the threat posed by them.

The Three Principal Responses to Danger:
Why are these instinctive responses related to depression?
There are three primary responses to danger/terror/life-threat that we have inherited from the reptilian and mammalian phases of evolution which are deeply embedded in our own survival reflexes. The first and second are widely recognised but the third has not received the attention I feel it deserves in our efforts to understand the roots of depression. All three are instinctive survival strategies.

The instinctive reflex to attack or to fight

The instinctive reflex to flee or to withdraw
Paralysis - the inability either to fight or to flee.
One example of this is a rabbit's total paralysis when confronted by a stoat, a much tinier animal but a lethal predator.

Setting depression against this primordial background, I think it can be understood as a state of paralysis in the face of what is experienced as a threat to survival: a life-threatening situation. Depression is the mood or emotional state which reflects a situation in childhood (usually repressed or forgotten) where the fight/flight response was inhibited because there was no possibility of flight from a situation of overwhelming terror, pain, grief and suffering, nor any possibility of retaliation against an aggressor. This situation could have been a single event or a chronic one repeated over and over again in family life or school. Later in life the underlying state of paralysis may manifest as a chronic mood of apathy or inertia, an inability to speak or to act, or as an inhibiting block to creativity and also as self-destructive patterns of behaviour, including suicide.
One approach to the treatment of depression may be to understand it as the final expression of a deeply repressed and unconscious memory of an early experience where the infant or child was transfixed by terror or anxiety in a situation from which there was no hope of help or escape. It had to endure unbearable emotional or physical pain - what one therapist has described as soul-murder. 3 (Shengold 1989) It is likely to emerge from this childhood situation imprinted with one of two convictions: that it has done something wrong, or bad, and that there is something fundamentally wrong with it/its nature for it to have been so punished/rejected/abandoned.

There are five major source-experiences which I believe give rise to the unconscious memories which later manifest as a chronic depressive mood:
1. the perinatal memory of a long and difficult birth, where the infant was trapped and compressed in the birth canal.
2. The separation from the mother in infancy and early childhood owing to bereavement or abandonment.
3. The emotional "absence" of the mother because of her own depression.
4. The child's helpless witnessing of a constant pattern of violence, whether physical or verbal, inflicted on one parent by the other. (this can be extended to the child witnessing the horrors and devastation of war).
5. The child's experience of being the helpless victim of a parent/adult's rage, violence, sexual abuse and cruelty, or of bullying by siblings or other children. To this must be added the suffering of a child who is exposed to an ambitious and bullying parent demanding high achievement through a unremitting barrage of negative criticism or failure to praise and encourage.

Stanislav Grof has described in detail and with great brilliance and insight the effects of the birth experience. 4 (Grof 1995) John Bowlby has written the definitive work on the effects of early bereavement and maternal deprivation and I would refer people reading this to their work. 5 (Bowlby 1969,73) I am focussing here on the fourth and fifth of these primary causes which are often connected with each other and which are, I believe, far more widespread than realised. I would like to put forward the hypothesis that someone who is subject to serious and long-standing depression may carry in the unconscious one or both of the following memories:

the repressed memory of being the terrified and helpless victim of a parent or adult or other children who attacked or abused the child physically or emotionally. The child has no possibility of fight or flight.

The repressed memory of being the anguished witness of the violence of one parent towards another or of some other violent incident perceived as life-threatening to the child itself or to a beloved parent (such as the scenes witnessed by the children of cruel and abusive parents or by those in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Rwanda or more recent theatres of conflict such as the Middle East where war and terrorism have replaced civilised society).

Both these situations re-activate the memory, carried in the limbic brain, of the preyed-on animal being hunted down and attacked by a predator. In the work I have done with clients, the memory of a childhood trauma in either category may be expressed in the image of a wounded animal - often a horse or a dog, but sometimes a wild animal like a deer. Here is one such dream:

There was a movement behind me, to the left and I saw a horse, a lovely palomino/gold horse with a pale muzzle. I could see its jaw was somehow distorted, the muzzle enlarged - as if its lower lip jutted forward below the top. It was bleeding too, its skin hanging in ribbons. As it turned towards me, I saw the flesh of its right shoulder shredded and bunched together like a knot of ribbons. A woman said it was in a terrible way, and implied it should really be put down .

Asked to relate this image to what might have happened to her as a child, my client's six year old self came back to her. She suddenly remembered that she had been given a wonderful Chinese painting of chrysanthemums by a friend of her parents - in the expectation that she would colour it. She had been thrilled and did indeed colour in the flowers but then, wanting to add something to the magic, she had cut pictures of fairies and flowers and other images she loved out of her books and pasted them onto the picture. When her parents saw what she had done, she was severely beaten (beatings were a regular occurrence in her family). Not understanding why her parents were so angry with her, she was deeply imprinted with the idea that her instinctive and joyous impulse to create was wrong or bad and would invite punishment. This was the primal wound to her limbic brain that lay behind the image of the bleeding and flayed palomino horse. The negative charge of that experience affected her life forty years after it happened, giving rise to severe episodes of depression whenever she tried to express her creativity (she was an artist). At the root of her psyche was the expectation of punishment if she dared to give expression to her delight in creating beauty.
An account from the second category of experience (reported in The Sunday Times, 7/10/84) gives a vivid image of what it was like to be the helpless witness of one parent abusing another. I cut this article out of the paper several years before the woman who had written it came to me as a client. One day, I showed it to her, telling her that I had been deeply moved by it and had kept it in my files. To my amazement she told me that she had written it (under another name). An extract is reproduced here with her permission.

Going to bed, I would lie, back pressed against the wall, head half-lifted, taut as a cello string, craning my ears for the sounds I dreaded. Even silence was not reassuring, for sometimes the first signs of the storm to come would be a lull, a break in the conversation, More often, the voices simply rose and rose till the pleading started. No! NO! PLEASE! NO! NO! NO! Rising and rising in a harsh crescendo until the cries came, sharp and raw, an inhuman sound, leaving me trembling and impotent, weeping helplessly into my pillow.
There were times when I intervened, tugged at his thudding arms, put my body between them. I was almost six when returning from school I found her, terrified, wedged in a corner, the bruises already rising on her face. Pushing between them, I begged him to stop. He did.
I'm aware there were times of remission. How long I don't recall: once such violence becomes currency, it dominates relationships and the frequency is almost irrelevant. They say that with torture it is not so much the pain itself which breaks people as the anticipation, the waiting. So it was in my home. The violence, the screaming, were not things which happened, ended and could be forgotten until they happened again. Each day of calm simply brought the next attack closer. Our lives hung suspended waiting for the next time…The physical violence was only part of it. There was no room in our house for normal conversation. Words were traps and weapons. Anything, anything at all, could make him rip into us, battering us with words, grabbing and holding us if we tried to go. And when we wept, he smiled.
I learned not to speak without thinking carefully. Like the slum child, I became street wise: learnt to watch for the first sign of drink, to keep out of trouble, to lie, to evade, to bury my self respect: keep a bully at bay. I lived with the guilt and humiliation of being unable to protect the mother I loved.

With this kind of sado-masochistic experience in the background, depression can become established as a steady-state mood from childhood onwards or it may be triggered by any subsequent life event which activates the unconscious memory of the original experience. A difficult or threatening later life experience instantaneously (probably via the amygdala reflex) triggers the childhood memory and the archaic memories of the predator/prey imprinting of the limbic brain. The actual memory of what happened may not be available to the conscious personality but the emotions that were once experienced still powerfully affect it. The conscious personality is then overwhelmed by those emotions (shame/guilt/anxiety/terror/rage) and these, still unconscious and repressed, manifest as the paralysis of depression. In relation to the immense and archaic power of an unconscious instinctive reflex, which acts in the manner of a predator towards the fragile conscious personality, the latter has little or no defence against it. It can neither resist, nor fight, nor control it until it has gained insight into what is happening and why. I have put that passage in italics because the conscious mind may think it preposterous that the traumatised instinct may be capable of overwhelming it with moods that may last for days, weeks, months and years, or with a perpetual state of anxiety..
I find the discovery of the amygdala as the storehouse and transmitter of archaic genetic responses very helpful. 6 (Goleman 1996) The incredible speed with which messages received through the sensory perceptions of sight, hearing or smell travel to the thalamus and from there by a direct, instantaneous route to the amygdala, triggering the fight, flight or paralysis response of the sympathetic nervous system before the more recently developed conscious mind can inhibit it, explains why it has been so difficult for us to change atavistic patterns of behaviour and why consciousness in the sense of insight and the ability to reflect on our thoughts and actions is such a priceless evolutionary attainment.

Yet, as we are increasingly realising, it is not enough. Unless we can learn how to respond to our emotional needs and heal our emotional suffering, we will remain condemned to repeat the predatory patterns of behaviour that now threaten the survival of our species, and to remain the victim of our unconscious traumas. When society is breaking down, people feel threatened and this feeling activates the buried traumas and responses of the limbic brain. What we call civilised behaviour is a very thin skin covering a substratum of instinctive survival responses to danger.

There is undoubtedly a correlation between these emotionally charged experiences and the neuronal balance of the autonomic nervous system; between the chemical state of the body and specific states of mind or moods. Constant vigilance in the anticipation of violence and the absolute terror and anguish that accompany its re-enactment trigger the outpouring of adrenalin. This, coupled with the inhibition of the normal fight/flight response and the inability to act, move or escape from a frightening situation, affects the chemical balance of the bodymind, the neuronal pathways, hormonal and immune systems, which in turn give rise to physical conditions of illness or disease. Candace Pert's pioneering discoveries have shed great light on the relationship between mind and body. 7 (Pert 1998, see seminar 8) The metabolic effects of a chronic situation of childhood suffering may cause permanent lesions in the neuronal transmission pathways of the brain. We know that chemicals can alter a mood and lift a depression but we have not sufficiently explored what happens to the nervous system and the balance of chemicals in the body of a child or young adult who lives in a state of hyper-vigilance and anxiety for years at a time. The chemicals we use to treat depression can lift and alter the mood but they may not reach down to the trauma held in the limbic brain that underlies the mood, nor can they give the person insight into how this situation has arisen and how to transform its long-term effects on their lives and their relationships.

Psycho-somatic Symptoms of Depression:
Many people suffer from depression without being able either to name it or recognise its symptoms. Apart from compulsive habits such as alcoholism and drug addiction, there are many physical symptoms which can be related to depression: abdominal pain, insomnia, apathy, constipation, headaches, muscular pain, backache. Each of these, when no specific cause can be discovered for them, may be symptoms of an underlying depression. Because the individual suffering these symptoms does not know how to relate them to depression or how to express deep feelings of psychic malaise to their GP, or feels ashamed of them, he or she goes on suffering. The GP may not be trained to recognise depression behind the symptoms the patient describes, or to "read" its presence in his or her body language. Because it is untreated, depression can destroy the happiness of countless families. The depressed person can do nothing about the mood which seems to hold him or her in its grip. There is usually, but not always, awareness of the oppressive mood but there is an inability to react to it, inability to take action which could bring release from its overwhelming power. Suicide is a risk because death may seem preferable to misery and despair. This state reflects the programming of the limbic brain memory of the preyed upon animal which has no possibility of defending itself against attack or of escape from a trap or from a predator. 8 A wound to the limbic brain system in childhood may manifest later on as:

a crippling, usually unconscious, predator-like inner voice or critic which continually attacks the individual and undermines his or her confidence. This voice is in essence an internalisation of the sado-masochistic pattern of childhood, where the child was the victim of the sadistic parent/adult or of the belief that he or she was not wanted (because abandoned, adopted or rejected). Memories of pain, grief and despair are carried in the muscles and nervous system and these surface as the critical, destructive voice that can lie at the root of the paralysis of depression.

an unconscious compulsion to criticise, attack and destroy others, so releasing the anger that had to be repressed as a child and off-loading the burden of shame/guilt and misery onto someone else.

A manic defence against the underlying depressed mood which can take many different forms of expression including the drive to achieve a position of pre-eminence or omnipotence in relation to others. On the other hand, depression may lead to a permanent state of dependency on others, financial or emotional.

An inability to relate to other people or to enjoy their company.

The seasonal affective disorder (SAD) which afflicts people living in northern climates during the winter months can (sometimes) be related to childhood memories. The apparently interminable greyness and cold of winter may activate unconscious memories of being trapped in earlier situations where there was no way out.