“What causes depression?”
I’ve been trying to answer this question ever since I received my diagnosis 11 years ago on a rainy day in November. The first answer I was given by my kind, grandfatherly doctor was so simple and convenient, I stopped looking for another explanation for several years: a chemical imbalance in my brain, something that’s nobody’s fault and just happens to some people. I loved that answer, beause the treatment was just as simple and straightforward: pop a pill and go on with your bad self, no other adjustments required.
Long before I was desperate enough to seek help and get a name for what everybody had always referred to as my “mood swings”, I believed myself to be a selfish, weak, needy person who “acted out” for attention. People usually don’t arrive at this conclusion on their own; they learn it from others. I had heard it ever since puberty from my family members, and even years after I’d moved out and lived far away, those harsh comments continued to live rent-free in my head. It’s a terrible burden to carry around; one could say that living with such a poor opinion of oneself might be reason enough to get depressed.
It wasn’t until two years ago that my therapist gently pointed me towards another fact of life I’d been blind to until then: the patriarchal world we live in.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, during a time when women finally “could have it all”. What that looked like in my experience was that all mothers I knew had jobs while still running their households and raising their children. “Having it all” translated into “doing it all”, which meant most mothers were overworked and stressed out. It didn’t occur to them to complain though, because Germany is the land of the stoic rule followers, and if circumstances were too tough for you than you were simply not strong enough.
There was another reason why women didn’t dare to complain: men were quick to put them in their place. “You wanted equality – this is it,” the men would say, gaslighting their women into believing that equality meant women had to be doing more than ever before. It was in the patriarchy’s best interest to maintain the status quo: men didn’t want to give up their cushy lives of having a comfortable home, a warm meal waiting for them, and a woman running their lives and raising their children withough lifting a finger. Convincing women that working a paid job on top of all their unpaid labour was “equality” was a stroke of genius.
Men weren’t the only ones telling women to quit whining: their own mothers did the same thing. They had grown up during a time when they couldn’t even have their own bank acount without a man’s signature, and where being slapped around by their husbands was seen as completely normal. What did their daughters have to be ungrateful about? They had it so much better today!
It was no time to be a sensitive, shy child. Mothers believed that it was their responsibility to toughen their daughters up, because they would need it to survive in a world that asked so much of them. “Tough love” was the parenting style in our house, which in short means it’s big on criticism and short on praise. It was also short on the words “I love you”, and when I challenged that during my rebellious teenage years and shouted at them “do you even love me?” the answer was: “you know we do – we don’t have to say it”. Oh, but you do, mom and dad, you do.
Kids need to hear those words and receive acts of love; using criticism as a substitute doesn’t make kids tougher, it makes them feel inadequate.
Being a teenager during the 90s was a fraught time for another reason: it was the heyday of diet culture. Magazines were the social media of my time, and publicly shaming women for their appearance was a popular sport that magazine editors gleefully participated in. Covers with “hot and not” women at the beach appeared like clockwork every summer, as did endless diet tips year-round. A visibly uncomfortable Victoria Beckham was forced to step on a scale on live television two months after giving birth and then had her weight read out by the host to the entire nation. Magazines oscillated wildly between calling female stars too fat or too skinny, often without any visible change to their bodies. And it wasn’t just the magazines doing it. Openly and derisively discussing women’s bodies was an obsession shared by men and women alike, and no inch of a woman’s body was safe. Is it any wonder our mothers urged us to make ourselves as attractive as possible?
On my mother’s suggestion I started dying my hair at 14 to make it “shinier and less mousy looking”. She was less successful in convincing me to put on make-up every day, something that’s never been my thing. It frustrated her to no end that I didn’t try harder. “You would look so much better with make-up,” she told me regularly.
Even though I pretended it didn’t bother me, subconsciously it does something to a person when the people who are supposed to love you for who you are keep telling you that you are not good enough.
Looks are important in a patriarchal society because the opinion of men matters when they have power of you. You get further if you’re pretty and witty (but not too witty), and don’t forget – a patriarchal society won’t value you if you don’t catch yourself a man. The cliché of the sad single woman in her 30s and beyond is one that refuses to die; being able to “get a man” will make a woman appear more valuable than when she’s on her own.
Once women are married or in a relationship, they have to do a lot of the heavy emotional lifting. Women are the designated emotional support givers, the soothers and cheerleaders. They are still commonly held accountable for their spouse’s happiness or unhappiness, blamed for their cheating (“she didn’t give him enough attention/she let herself go”), and are automatically assigned the role of caregiver for kids and aging parents.
If all that makes you understandably angry, hold on to your horses: being angry is not acceptable for women. When they gave you your vagina you were also handed the role of peacemaker, the smoother of ruffled feathers, quieter of hot temperaments, the nice girl who makes everyone feel better. Anger has to go somewhere though, and if it can’t be let out it goes inward. Anger turned inward can manifest as depression – a perfect set-up for the patriarchy, since depressed people usually only hurt themselves and will still fulfill their responsibilities.
I wasn’t aware of all that underlying dynamic. Denial was the name of the game in our family, and I was in denial about it all: the dysfunction, the toxic message that women can’t be trusted (that I internalized without noticing), how hurt I was by the lack of support and understanding. Mental illness was a dirty word in my family, something for weaker people than us who lacked toughness and a work ethic. Therapy was also something for people who had it much worse than us (after all, we were fine, remember?), as dirty a word as feminist.
So what does a woman who feels unworthy, unloved, and betrayed, but can’t talk about it to friends (“it’s nobody’s business what happens in the family”) or seek professional help (“you’re not depressed, you’re just too sensitive”) do?
That’s easy: she drinks to forget.
Alcohol seemed the perfect solution to a problem I couldn’t identify because I’d convinced myself there was no problem.
Drinking made me more social, people liked me because I was more easygoing and fun, and society was telling me that I was doing life right. Drinking is being advertised as an essential part of a full, vibrant life, and while I was missing many other important parts (confidence, self-worth, belonging, a close relationship with my parents), at least I had that one down.
Obviously, drowning my sorrows instead of dealing with them backfired, and not only was my depression getting worse, my bestie alcohol was turning on me. It now gave me anxiety, severe shame, sleeplessness, and such an intense self-loathing that I sometimes wanted to die. To add insult to injury, the same alcohol-pushing society who had promised me that booze was harmless and fun now told me that if I was developing a drinking problem it was my fault, not theirs. Didn’t I read the fine print that advised me to “drink responsibly”? If I was too undisciplined to follow that simple guidline, well, that was on me, not them. Never mind that alcohol is a highly addictive substance and the alcohol industry does everything in their power to get people hooked.
The patriarchy benefits from drinking, medicated, preoccupied women. If we hate our bodies, if we numb our senses and spend all our considerable energy and talents on trying to make our bodies smaller, our skin smoother, and getting rid of made-up “flaws” we dont have anything left to challenge the status quo. Drinking is particularly insidious, because it initially makes you feel smarter, sharper, and better about yourself. It’s only over time that the magic wears off and alcohol’s true face shows itself, and by then we think we can’t live without its numbing, softening-the-sharp-edges-of-reality qualities.
This essay has been an attempt to answer the question of what causes depression. Of course, it’s an incomplete, deeply personal answer that will look differently for someone else.
These days I’m less focused on the cause than I am on how I can best deal with it. Putting down the booze was a tremendous help; getting therapy was even more impactful. Both acts have helped me to wake up, to recognize my denial for what it was (a desperate and unsuccessful attempt at escape), and to put some of the blame where it belongs: onto the patriarchy.
I don’t blame my parents – at least, not anymore. They have their own, unresolved trauma, and I do believe that they did the best they could with the tools they had at the time.
But I do blame the toxic society we live in. Both capitalism and the patriarchy benefit from the free labour women provide in the household, as caregivers, and as human givers to their communities. “Helping out” is much more expected from women than from men, and society is usually very understanding when men are “too busy” to help but labels women as “selfish” and “uncaring” if they do the same.
We are being harshly judged for everything: how we look, how we dress, how we age, for having no children, for raising the children we have wrong, for not being in a relationship, for how we treat our partner in a relationship, for being too emotional, for not caring too much, for being too sensitive, for being not sensitive enough, for staying home to raise our children, for being too focused on our careers if we are working mothers, for being too demanding or too meek, too emotional or too cold, too much of a pushover or too bitchy, whores or frigid prudes.
Ladies, it’s time to get angry. No more of that playing nice bullshit. It’s time to make noise, take up space, and demand the respect that has been withheld from us for millenia.
I can tell you one thing: it’s been doing wonders for my depression and self esteem. The angrier I get, the less depressed I am.
I’ll leave you with this iconic speech I’m sure you have seen before:
❤️ Miriam