I have spent the past three years pursuing an MFA in creative writing and it has been thrilling to devote a solid chunk of time to writing. Over the past three years, I have also learned that, paradoxically, writing makes me really happy and really blaaaaaah. A good friend and I have discussed how we always crave "writing time," and then when you get it and spend one or more days doing little besides writing, it can be pretty fucking depressing and mental-sanity hijacking. I read a New York Times article on depression and the ruminating mind that might explain why this is the case. (Article link is here.)
None of this is news, but the article correlates depression to the thought process known as rumination. This verb, says the article, "is derived from the Latin word for 'chewed over,' which describes the act of digestion in cattle, in which they swallow, regurgitate and then rechew their food." This description of rumination pretty much completely describes the way I think. I don't just mull things over casually. I chew, swallow, regurgitate, and then rechew topics in my mind. I masticate. I pick over old relationships and personal conundrums like they are scabs. I marinade in thoughts and feelings. It's definitely disconcerting to have my thought process linked to a major mental health disorder, but, that's an aside.
So this article claims that people with "ruminative tendencies" are prone to depression and also tend to be unnerved by stressful events: "For instance, psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema found that residents of San Francisco who self-identified as ruminators showed significantly more depressive symptoms after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake." Also, because people with ruminative tendencies tend to, you know, ruminate, when they get depressed "we become exquisitely attentive to our pain," and sometimes struggle to think about anything else.
Psychologists have found that ruminators/malaised individuals' (I prefer the term malaised to depressed) capacity for intense focus, relies in part on a brain area called the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), located a few inches behind the forehead. This area is important for conceptual knowledge, verb conjugation, and also maintaining attention, while deficits in the VLPFC are associated with attention-deficit disorder. Basically, neurons in VLPFC fire continuously to allow a person to maintain focus on one thing without being distracted by other information. Studies have found increased brain activity in the VLPFC of depressed patients and and a paper written by Chinese neuroscientists found a spike in "functional connectivity" between the lateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain in depressed patients, with more severe depressions leading to more prefrontal activity. They think hyperactive VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing people to stay focused on their problem. I'm guessing I have a fairly hyperactive VLPFC.
When I was younger, I don't think I assumed that all people were ruminators, but it never occurred to me to operate in any other way. It seemed obvious that the thing to do in life was reflect on things, with a wistful look in one's eye. Analyze experiences (to the extent that a child analyzes), pore over details, introspect, ponder, muse, beat topics to death in my mind as though wielding a machete. It was probably only once I went to college and encountered marijuana-identified individuals who subscribed to catch phrases like "it's all good" and generally embraced a "chill out" mentality that I really understood that some people don't feel the need to think so much about everything -- and, namely, themselves -- in an endless loop of agonizing repetition. People began to tell me, with considerable frequency, "you think too much." I began to realize that there are many different ways that people can operate and approach things.
While rumination is linked to depression, there's an upside to it, according to the NYT article. Ruminative, VLPFC-ish individuals tend to embrace a deliberate, analytical style of thinking that is productive. That's basically what rumination is. One scientist believes that the downcast mood of the VLPFC-afflicted is part of a coordinated system that allows the person to effectively analyze the complex life problem that produced the depression. Basically, if depression didn't exist -- if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations -- we might not resolve our problems. Or, "Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain."
What interests me about this theory is the way that malaise/rumination can link to a productive way of thinking and the creative process -- which might explain why writing exhilarates me and why too much of it can be a major downer.
One social psychologist has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations because, he says, sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” In his experiments, melancholic subjects were also better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they were also much less likely to stereotype strangers. In another study by the same guy, malaised persons were able to recall information better than more upbeat people because, he believes, their sadness rendered them more aware and attentive.
In a survey of writers in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, generally considered the most prestigious writing program in the country, eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. In another study of British writers and artists by a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, it was found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.
Why? Nancy Andreasen, the neuroscientist who did the Iowa Writers' Workshop study, believes that depression is intertwined with a "cognitive style" that emphasizes persistent focus and attention and makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, she says,
“one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.”
Another researcher says that self-loathing, a symptom of depression, tends to result in a critical disposition toward oneself that can improve expressive abilities. He found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” In another study that required subjects to focus intensely on a problem it was found that subjects afterwards expressed a "depressed effect" which leads him to believe that "the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal."
I don't think, as the NYT article claims, that depression has an "upside" because it may facilitate clear thinking, attention to detail, and swift recall. Being sad sucks, and no one should have to feel that way for a prolonged period, but of course everyone does. I definitely wouldn't place myself in the yay depression! camp. But I do think that, for me, writing involves intense, obsessive, ruminative focus that feels natural and easy, and at the same time renders me seriously BLAAAAH. Anne Patchett articulates this ruminative nature of writing in another way:
"My mind is a bad neighborhood I try not to go into alone." At the same time, rumination is how I think and speaks to how I approach ideas and it allows me to express myself creatively.
Image: http://joannagoddard.blogspot.com/
2 comments:
I love readding, and thanks for your artical.........................................
dear LORD you write long posts! damn, girl. i'ma have to spend a long time writing to catch up to you :)
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