Day 265: Red alert

Been deep down the word mines, working on a longer piece about depression, which, in truth, I'm very much enjoying. Elucidating and therapeutic, although exhausting. Here's the rough draft of a bit of it...

When animals run into dangerous events they have a number of automatic responses that come into effect to cope with these events. These responses are about preventing, mitigating, and recovering from harm. The extent each of these is possible depends on the severity of the event. If you see a hazard on the ground then you may instinctively leap to avoid it, and thus prevent any harm whatsoever. But if you see the hazard too late then your instinct will instead be to put your hands out, which will hopefully mitigate damage to your head, your most vital asset, but at the cost of damage to your wrists, your arms, the skin on the palms of your hands.

Life is chaotic, fraught with danger, and your being - your body, including your brain - has no way of knowing what is coming next. But through millennia of trial and error a number of heuristic systems have evolved that make decent guesses when forced to act, because guesses are better than nothing. Thrusting your hands out as you fall might give you blood poisoning and end up killing you, where a little bump to the head would have damaged you less - but your body and brain don't know this, in the split-second of registering the danger and type of threat, and over a lifetime, for each member of each species, thrusting your arms out is generally better than not.

All of which is to say: an awful lot of what we do in life occurs below the level of conscious thought, and runs off relatively simple rules that we apply to a vague and complex and ever-shifting reality.

So it is with depression. Every aspect of this debilitating and much misunderstood disease can be explained by reference to an animal's natural responses to events of major stress and trauma, and to the ways in which these responses can become tangled and counterproductive - to the point of extreme distress - when deployed against the psychologically rich and confusing worlds that humans, with their pre-frontal cortices, inhabit.

Think of the underlying systems of depression as like a sci-fi show where the captain of a spaceship orders all power to be diverted to shields and weapons, because dangerous alien craft are attacking, and it's life and death. But these aliens are new and advanced, data on their tactics are not in the computer's database, and they attack in ways that the shields are powerless to stop, and they cannot be hurt by the weapons the ship possesses.

The aliens attack, dart away, attack again, vanish into the darkness of space. They may strike again at any moment. Meanwhile the ship is still in red alert - the danger hasn't subsided, so the protocols are still active, yet they do nothing to help when the attacks do come. But the captain has no other ideas. And all the while resources are being burned powering the shields and weapons, the crew are pulling triple shifts with no sleep, everyone is keyed up, no messages are getting back to the fleet, no one is free to plot courses or play on the holodeck or cook meals or think of the wider mission. The ship just spins, it limps onward, it drifts.

... Anyway, gotta stop there, brain is fried, it's 2am, I'm done. I'm not sure exactly what I'm saying yet, but I'm enjoying figuring it out.

......

Music: Streethawk 1, by Destroyer.