Depression at a psychologist from Russia: history and treatment. Life, Illness, Science, and Job search

But we are moving towards a bright, reasonable future, and the end of the 9th and the end of the 11th grade will put everything in its place. At the beginning, I was preparing for the Unified National Testing (in Kazakhstan), and in the end I took the Unified State Exam (USE). In essence, both are the same thing: stupid tests instead of checking knowledge. But at these wonderful exams there will be no opportunity to cheat from anyone, to peek anywhere, or to exchange cheat sheets in the toilet – Nothing. You’ve had enough, you who don’t know mathematics! We’ll expose you! And get out of high society! Sweep the floors, or whatever else you’re good for… And how can you stay calm here? To whom and how can I prove what? Who can I approach and say that I’m not an ass if I don’t like and don’t understand mathematics? There’s no one. As a result, several years of life awaiting the highest pedagogical court. The math teachers pour out their sadistic venom at every convenient and inconvenient opportunity, lamenting about those who do not understand math, that they need to go to a vocational school for everything (this is kind of an insult, because, as a rule, stupid kids go to study in such schools).

Yes, I hated math teachers. It was hatred. A very intense and long-lasting feeling. And my body allocated mental resources for this. Very expensive and traumatic for a schoolchild. It is very annoying to hear unpleasant words and not be able to find support for your position from the outside. Not in the sense of friends or parents, they were on my side. But in the sense that taking an exam on tests was invented by people without brains, approved at some high level, passed down to the math teachers of all schools in the country, and these teachers broadcast this, feeling such influential people from politics behind them.

They were the ones who were carrying the “truth”, since they approved it at the federal level, and put a blue seal on it. And what about me? And I’m sitting and reducing my anxiety in class by beautifully copying numbers from the board into a notebook. For me, the notebook was like a canvas, like a sheet of paper on which i “draw with numbers.” I’ll sum up the paragraph – here, for the first time, I probably encountered a manifestation of mass idiocy in a serious and global way – society is forcing me to learn something that I can’t stand and don’t want, society is threatening to give me a tough final exam, and the same society has come up with the most idiotic form of conducting this exam. Society continues – if I don’t know mathematics, then I’m not much of a person. But I’m smart, I have my own point of view, and I declare that it is this stratum of society that is characterized by a decrease in intellectual abilities, and not me. But our social roles and powers are different: I am alone, and I am a schoolboy, but there are many of them, and they are teachers, head teachers, school principals, and higher and higher and dumber… I couldn’t just brush it off, like forget, ignore, say to myself something like: screw them… No, here I was faced with the fact that this is such a global problem of humanity, of society.

How can I live in a world where a large mass of God knows what kind of people can depress the life of another person with their quantity? I’m not the only one who doesn’t like math. And math is not the point here, I just showed an example with it. I’m not the only normal person who has an unpopular opinion who suffers from the fact that my opinion and tastes don’t fit into this Procrustean bed of yours. This paragraph will probably flow smoothly into another topic. After all, okay, the exam, to hell with it, I’ll pass it, I’ll survive it, but it’s not just the exam that awaits me ahead. As soon as I finish school and the gates are closed behind me, there are already “collectors from the motherland” waiting for me, or, to use everyday language, representatives of the military registration and enlistment office.

From that moment on, grades in math cease to mean anything, and the attention and conversation turns to my morality, whether it is high i have or low. If it is high, they say, then I run to meet them, jump into military suit, make my bed according to the ruler, march in formation, shave my head, love routine and follow orders from representatives of the homeland, leave home for two years, and sing sad army songs in three chords with a guitar (At least that’s what they do in Russia). Well, I kind of pay my moral debt to the homeland. Although, those debts that I took from the boys, I paid them, but those were money. And putting the words “debt” and “homeland” next to each other is such nonsense that I don’t even want to seriously analyze it. And since I don’t run to them and don’t consider myself a debtor, then my morality, in their estimation, is automatically low, and in general, as a person, I admit that I am low-quality. But I don’t give a damn about their assessment of my human qualities. Something else worries me. After all, since I don’t run to them, they run after me, such a low-quality person, but they still run, they want to knock out debts. I can temporarily hide in a “little house” – go to university to study for 5 years. But they will be waiting for me there at the gates. In general, this is not a way out. And hiding, making excuses about illnesses there, tuck my tail between my legs – this is not my taste. Ah, my homeland, my homeland. Ah, the Kazakh steppes and Russian birches. It turns out that my homeland is stalking me. Stalking me. Wow, abuse on a national scale! I don’t want to, but they make me. And in this case, who should I turn to? Who should I tell that I fundamentally disagree with the fact that someone once determined that they have the right to use two years of my life against my will? I was not at that meeting, and if I had been, I would not have voted “for”.

And I still have a conflict in my soul, a feeling of misunderstanding with society, at least with a significant part of it. But still, light was shed on this difficulty of mine, and it became a little, but still easier for me, when I learned about the scientific works of one good man – Erich Fromm. Before he and his colleagues put forward a fresh assumption about the nature of psychopathology, scientists thought and reasoned something like this:

– Are you mentally ill?

– Yes.

– Well, it’s in you fault, let’s examine you, then treat you.

And Erich Fromm and his colleagues formulated their view approximately as follows: it is not the person who is sick, it is society. And then they opened the gates to the field of studying society itself and the manifestations of its diseases. Therefore, I responsibly declare that when I do not like mathematics and do not intend to repay the “debt” to the motherland, then everything is fine with me, but society has gone crazy in this matter. And let there be many “of them”, and few of me. I believe my eyes, ears, brain and heart. Of course, this discovery did not completely solve my life problems. Because it is one thing to know about the limitations of society, another thing to live your life in this society without having the opportunity to influence it. And this conflict, and living my life certainly did not add strength and joy to me, since almost every day I have to deal with the “painful crumbs or grains of sand of society”, because it is clear that the “metastases” have reached not only mathematics and the army, but have dispersed and absorbed into simple, everyday and other aspects of scosiety’s life.

There was something else that had a background effect on my mental state for a very long time – music. I listened to Russian rock. And foreign metal. But metal is okay, but there is something to tell about Russian rock. It is, as I finally understood, many years later, music that strongly suppresses the joy of life. For me, the meaning of Russian rock is the glorification of suffering, adding sweet, enticing shades and colors to the process of suffering. It’s a pity, perhaps, but then I combined flies with cutlets, and took Russian rock as the standard of my favorite music.

Returning to the “flies” and “cutlets”, the “cutlets” were the sounds of musical instruments – guitar, bass, drums, etc. I really liked listening to their parts, separating one while listening and listening, enjoying, imagining how I would play it. Even my body seemed to react to the sound inside. And I liked playing my favorite melodies on the guitar. But my “cutlets” were mixed with “flies” – these are these depressive rockers: more often men, less often women, often using drugs, alcohol, in the lyrics of their songs dissecting sadness, melancholy, meaninglessness, anger, despair, betrayal to atoms, presenting it in a symphony of pleasant sounds.

Of course, in some teenage years they played a positive role, allowing me to react (or live through, or survive, or outlive) my teenage emotions associated with being lost in the World, with not understanding Where is everything going? What is happening around? Who am I?… But some time later this music interfered me, but I did not know clear at once that it affected me so much. It was built into my life like, say, my hand or ear. That is, I did not even think that it (rock music) could be separated from me, that I could leave it and go away myself. I did not understand that there was still music in the world where I could enjoy the beautiful sound of instruments – that is, “cutlets” in their pure form, without depressive “flies.” It is not surprising, because the market of accessible music was Russian pop, rap, chanson, jazz. In pop music, the music is elementary and soullessly electronic, in rap there is no music at all, except maybe bass, chanson – no discussion, and jazz even a child can play by simply plucking the strings or poking the keys out of tune.

That’s why I listened to Russian rock, “sat on it” like a drug addict, got depressed, and thought that everything that was sung there was folk wisdom, and everyone who sang there was a sage who had lived a life, and they were sharing it with me, a young man. And I had no reason to look for alternative views on life. “Love is beautiful, but cruel, society is stronger than me, but it is not for me, few understand me, I suffer, but I still hold on” – that’s the whole philosophy of Russian rock.

In the end, I got rid of this music, but it had worn me out and led me astray. In a sense, it was either a friend or a drug for me, which I often turned to. I turned to it when I was sad, when I was really bad, I turned to it when I was happy (oh, it’s so strange…), and this drug-friend always gave me nothing but depression with a good accompaniment. Nothing but. And I am one of those who almost always had headphones in their ears. So it turned out to be such a simple insidiousness of habit: I feel bad, but I know little else except to turn to where this “bad” will be multiplied even more in my soul.

Earlier I talked about learning to play the piano, in this paragraph I will note that it was very painful for me. I did not want to learn to play this instrument, I did not like it. I did not have any pianist idols to listen to on my player, for example. My body did not respond to this instrument. But then I could not defend my right to quit studying. My parents calmly, but very convincingly left me at the piano. It was a difficult time. Studying assumed that I did my homework almost every day, and studied with a teacher twice a week. And I started studying late, at about 11, I think. It was just that age when I incredibly wanted to spend all my free time outside with friends. And it’s not that I sat at the instrument for hours every day, no, but even those minutes that I did my homework were difficult for me, dragging on, suppressing my mood. And I could freak out if something didn’t work out.

The piano teacher was a strange woman, especially when it came to time. She came to my house at 2 p.m., I think. But in fact, she probably came at 2 p.m. several times, all the other times she was late, and she was late for a long time. Half an hour, forty minutes, sometimes an hour. And so every time 2 p.m. came, I began to expect something wonderful from the World. I wanted so much for something to happen, and for these shackles to fall off me. For there to be no more classes. I wanted so much for some phenomenon to take my side, because my parents and the teacher wanted me to study, and I was alone in my unwillingness. And the teacher also burdened me with her lateness. And with every minute that passed after 2 p.m. my hope for a miraculous outcome grew, as if I was falling into a daydream while awake, but at the same time the “voice of reality” was saying “damn, she’ll be here any minute now.” It also added, “while you’re naively hoping for something… she’s already left her house a few minutes ago, walked down the street, and is now somewhere nearby… the outcome was determined in advance, you’re dreaming in vain, you’re only making things worse.” And, probably, in 98% of cases the “voice of reality” was right. Usually maybe 2:19 or maybe, 2:34 p.m. the doorbell was rang, and all the castles in the air built in my mind instantly collapsed, dissolved, replaced by a bad mood and a trip to the door to open it. However, there was still 2%, and sometimes she managed to forget that we had a lesson. Forget, yes. Although this was not a salvation either, since it was the cancellation of only one lesson, and not the entire training.

The roots of depression here are that a significant part of my life was not regulated by me, was not in my power, was not used by me. Inside, I resisted, rebelled, but deep down in my soul, I seemed to consider this one of the characteristics of life, that this is how it should be – that there are some sufferings that I will not be able to get rid of, because this is how life is arranged and that’s it, period. This is very bitter. And if you step back from this situation and look from afar, it becomes clear that I was simply a “good boy” who could not defend his rights to his desires and his unwillingness, for the time of his life. As it turned out, I defended them too “quietly” and modestly. In the end, I did defend them. But it took quite a long time by my standards. And here, using the piano as an example, I understand that there are still many life situations where it will be difficult for me to defend my rights, and where, just like the first time, I will encounter that bitter belief that this is how life is and nothing can be done about it, and only then, after some time, straighten up and stand up for myself. And the story with the piano has a life-affirming ending: before moving to Tyumen, I sold the piano myself for good money, so the instrument and lessons remained in Petropavlovsk, and I left. Well done! And from my performed repertoire, I liked and remembered Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” the most.

The move to Tyumen started interestingly and as if it were just a fantasy. At first, I just knew that we were moving soon. I told my friends. And in general, it was such a pleasant time, I even felt a little cool that we were going to go to a fairly large Russian city. Especially since I had already been to Tyumen a couple of times, and I thought that it was just awesome here – tall buildings, interchange bridges, big roads and distances, and traffic jams like on TV in Moscow or the USA. There was none of this in my city. Time passed, I finished the last quarter of my school, we sold the apartment, sold the industrial buildings, and the move turned into reality. By that time, I no longer wanted such a reality.

We were leaving my grandparents’ apartment. Early in the morning in November my friends came to see me off, we stood in the entryway, said our final words, hugged and I began to feel sad. I got into the car and turned on the player. Two songs accompanied me the whole way: Pavel Kashin “Black Box”, Mumiy Troll “Go, I Will” (Павел Кашин “Чёрный ящик”, Мумий Тролль “Иди, я буду”). They colored my bitter despondency. There was a hitch at customs, my parents did not declare the money they were carrying with them, and this, how can I say, is not very welcome. The customs officers kept confusing us about this for a long time, they wanted us to come to an agreement with them and give them a bribe. While all this was happening, as when I was waiting for my music teacher, I was daydreaming in the car at customs something like this: “Oh, to hell this Tyumen, how i wish something happened so that we would turn around and go back, we would arrive and everything would be fine, like it was before, hear me, World, please do it.” But my parents shared some money with the customs officers, they were happy and let us go further. And two songs started playing on the player even more tragically. When we entered the city, it was dark. We dragged a few things up to the third floor, I went into the apartment. The move was complete. It was already late, I didn’t want to sleep. But I didn’t want to see myself in those circumstances – in that apartment, in that city, in that cold November i did not too. So it was better to fall asleep. It was sad to go to bed, because I wanted to smoke, take some nasvay, get drunk, laugh with friends like a teenager, but instead there was a sterile and boring family environment, and longing for a home that was already truly and forever lost. I don’t remember how I fell asleep, but I would never want to fall asleep under such circumstances again.

Gradually, the new place of residence revealed itself to me from an unsightly side. We settled on the outskirts of the city at that time, I went to a school where there were plenty of idiots. The neighborhood, yes, like the city as a whole, was configured as if against green vegetation. It was all made of concrete and asphalt. This both upset and irritated me at the same time, how could one live like that at all. By the way, to this day in the yard where my parents now live, and in the house, which is already about thirty years old, there is one birch that accidentally grew and a small tree that seems to have started to die since my arrival, but can’t do it – everything else is in the style of the city: asphalt, brick, garages and a barrier so necessary for human happiness. For several years, I didn’t understand why I stopped feeling autumn the way I used to… Then I understood, and it turned out that there were no yellow-red leaves under my feet that I could rustle and kick. Only bare asphalt, please. Well, not completely bare, of course, but since there are only a few trees in the entire city, there is, accordingly, little foliage.

I don’t like the climate in Tyumen. If it rains, the rain is sure to be cold. If it’s a summer evening, you definitely need a sweater. If it’s hot outside, you can melt. But you can feel with your skin that the air is not warm, and the heat is exclusively due to the sun’s rays. And in Petropavlovsk, the air was pleasantly warmed up. Winter was sometimes wild in Petropavlovsk, but in Tyumen there are some days with a wind that blows through all your bones, no matter what you wear. And all this weather put a lot of pressure on my mental state – I couldn’t do anything about it, and my mood directly depended on the weather, there were rare exceptions. And in general, it was difficult to know that I had moved from a northern city even further north, and I don’t see any noticeable advantages at all that would compensate for this loss.

I had a hard time breaking up with my social circle. I had no interest in making new acquaintances, friends – it just happened gradually, somehow, by itself. But there was one event that greatly complicated my adaptation to the new place of residence – it was my falling in love. Already living in Tyumen, during school holidays I went to Petropavlovsk, and my company was replenished – a new friend girl,. I remember how we met, and something started inside me that could not be stopped. We spent time together in the company of friends, got to know each other better, but did not romanticize our relationship in any way. I returned home, another quarter at school began, sometimes I had pleasant memories of communicating with her, but I somehow strictly decided for myself that that nothing will work out between me and her. Simply because we live in different cities, we are far from each other, and I do not need to fall in love, and then suffer from it. Summer was approaching, and the holidays, which I fully intended to spend in my homeland. And a few days before my trip, this girl writes me a message, with which our romantic relationship begins. My previously made strict decision flew into the trash from joy.

This relationship gave me a wonderful period of my life. It had a “main figure and background”. The “main figure” is the brightest, deepest, most beautiful feelings towards a girl that I have ever experienced. And the “background” is the feeling of desired complete satisfaction with the fabric of everyday life, the desire to continue to feel the environment and move, gratitude to the ability to live and Being. Then I know for sure that I was completely satisfied with my life, and did not want to change anything. If I wanted changes, then only simple and pleasant ones, but not those that need to be made because it is no longer possible to do otherwise. I had fallen in love before, even with two girls at the same time, but that temporary infatuation. But that i am believed that i am feeling had for her could not be exhausted, stopped, and therefore I looked to the future with the understanding that my path would no longer be so much mine as ours together. I remember then I was very inspired by the idea that we were now like a single whole. And I could experience this feeling from experience. I was lucky to have met such a person, with whom I did not seem to get acquainted as with someone else, and i feeling that we were with her parts of something one and early. That is why all the processes of our human interaction were instantly set up by themselves. There was no need to rub in, be shy, pretend, convey to each other each our “philosophy of attitude to life”, because they were very similar. These were relationships that included my ideal vision of friendship, romance and simply some kind of magical, and such a harmonious attraction of two living beings.

I remember that at one moment I experienced two essentially different views on life, on existence. Since I was coming to Kazakhstan already as a Russian, I had to go to a government office to register and extend my permit to stay in the country for more than three days. And my girlfriend and I went there together to deal with this red tape. We were standing in line together, but at one point I somehow moved away a few meters. I was busy with something and somehow in the process of all this my gaze shifted to the side where She was standing. And just moments before She appeared in the center, in the focus of my field of vision, I managed to see and feel a gray, meaningless “nothing”. The boredom, abandonment and uselessness of what was happening: the worn-out pocket of a cheap jacket of an uncle, a hastily knocked together tasteless table where a crowd fills out papers with pens on a string (so that they don’t get stolen) according to samples that are always in short supply, the bellies of men and women, such by a bad life, the ridiculous headdress of an elderly woman, and all of this somehow fell on me, and was black and white, lifeless, dead, as if apart from this room, apart from these meaningless activities there was nothing else, everything was reduced to this nothing. The next moment She comes into my field of vision and attention. Her image is so colorful, full of life, breath, interest. Her short stature, the unique way of standing, the knitted hat, clothes, beautiful face. I somehow quietly, quietly, to myself was glad that my eyes see her, that she is, that she exists in that place, in that World where I found myself, that we met, that we are together, we are united, and I am incredibly lucky in this, I cannot want and do not expect any more gifts from fate, everything has come true for me, further – everything is applied, I will do this myself, without expecting miracles from fate.

This view of my life, of my beloved, was constant then. The “peak” of our relationship was the summer that I spent in Petropavlovsk. I really needed that summer, because last fall I was hit by a move, autumn, winter and spring in a still strange city, and it was so good to return to the warm homeland, to forget about the difficulties of my reality and to surrender to love. I enjoyed the time that we spent together – we walked all day long, stayed with friends in rented apartments to have fun, drink, smoke, get high, swimming to river went by trolleybuses and buses to public beaches and secluded places on small country ponds, hugged, kissed, stood for a long time in her entrance before I ran out in order to have time to rush home to my grandparents at the appointed time. After returning home and until bedtime, we hung on the phone. A beige home telephone from my childhood, her voice on the phone, me inside an old cozy checkered armchair from the USSR – these were the endings of my summer days.