Dueling with Depression: If This Isn’t Nice, I Don’t Know What Is

I haven’t had a lot of decent experiences with therapists. Maybe it’s just bad luck, maybe it’s my caustic sarcasm. But most of the therapists I’ve worked with (though not all) have provided little-to-no help in my ceaseless melee with clinical depression.

There was this one well-intentioned therapist who kept repeating talking points from books on how to handle depression and anxiety — the same books I’ve read myself, without costing me $100 an hour.

Then there was the therapist who not only forgot to turn off his cell phone during a session, but replied to a text while I was attempting to explain how vacuous and isolated I feel all the time.

I think finding the right therapist is a bit like dating. It’s expensive, very awkward the first couple of times you meet, and most nights you just end up alone on the couch thinking about what you really should have said, all while devouring a pint of dark chocolate gelato in your boxers in front of a flickering television with Simpsons reruns playing on mute. (Or is that just me?)

But there was one therapist who introduced me to an invaluable tool I use often, especially during those weeks when depression claws its way deep into my brain, embedding itself into my skull while feeding greedily on the scant morsels of sanity I have left.

And that tool is mindfulness.

One of the best examples of mindfulness comes from one of the greatest authors of the 20th century. If you’ve never read Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, stop reading this article immediately and pick up a copy. Go now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

(Are you back? Amazing novel, isn’t it?)

Kurt Vonnegut, who fought a lifelong battle with depression and even attempted suicide, fictionalized and satirized his real-life experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II.

He was 22 years old when his entire division was captured by the Germans. In February of 1945, a month after his imprisonment in Dresden, the British Royal Air Force dropped 4000 tons of explosives and incendiaries on the municipality. The bombing and ensuing firestorm killed an estimated 25,000 people — most of them civilians.

By sheer luck, Vonnegut and the other POWs were being held captive in an underground slaughterhouse, the structure of which protected them from the booming bombs and swirling funnels of fire that engulfed the city.

After the air raid, Vonnegut emerged into a landscape of rubble and burnt bodies littering the streets. He and the other POWs were tasked with digging out the corpses and piling them up in large pyres. Angry survivors of the bombings threw stones at them while they worked.

Soon, the acrid smell of scorched, decaying flesh began to overwhelm the entire metropolis, and the corpses were incinerated with flamethrowers where they lay. No effort was made to identify the dead. No one to notify next of kin. Thousands lost forever as statistics in history books.

So it goes.

When Vonnegut returned to the US, his Uncle Dan slapped him on the back and declared, “You’re a man now.” Vonnegut hated his Uncle Dan.

But he also had Uncle Alex, who didn’t ask about the war or about the bombs or the fire or all the young men he knew who never made it back home to their own families. Instead, Uncle Alex took Vonnegut out for a picnic one gorgeous summer day.

It was on that day that Vonnegut learned the importance of mindfulness. “[Uncle Alex’s] principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy,” Vonnegut writes in his memoir, A Man without a Country. “So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

Mindfulness is anchoring yourself in the now and absorbing the present to avoid ruminating about past traumas or obsessing about future uncertainties. One of the simplest techniques I use to ground myself is breathing exercises. I’ve made it a habit to just stop what I’m doing, take in a slow, deliberate breath, and hold it in while concentrating how the air feels in my lungs right before I exhale slowly.

Repeat until mindful.

And best of all, this technique doesn’t cost $100 an hour.

I’ll admit that when my therapist first told me about this, I did an internal eye roll. How the hell does concentrating on your breathing help with depression? The American Psychological Association published an article in 2012 outlining various empirical studies which support the claim that mindfulness has numerous health benefits for those struggling with depression.

“The researchers found that the participants who experienced mindfulness-based stress reduction,” the article reads, “had significantly less anxiety, depression, and somatic distress compared with the control group.”

One study with Chinese undergraduates demonstrated that “students who were randomly assigned to participate in a mindfulness meditation intervention had lower depression and anxiety, as well as less fatigue, anger, and stress-related cortisol compared to a control group.”

Depression is like a parasite, sucking away at the joyful moments in life, gorging on potential vivacity before it can surface. Even the experience of tasting ice-cold lemonade on a hot, summer day can somehow become dull and gloomy.

And so, on those melancholic days when, for example, I’m struggling just to enjoy a beer with a friend, I remind myself to take a deep breath, lift my glass, and repeat the advice of Vonnegut’s Uncle Alex: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”