#I WANT TO RETURN THESE TRAUMATIC MEMORIES AND IMAGES FOR STORE CREDIT

[shebrakesforrainbows]

I swear on my mama bro if I unearth one more repressed memory

[tunesscribbles]

Sanji x Male!Reader

AN: This is a collection of not quite chronological snippets | I listened to ‘Lost On You’ by LP and ‘Riptide’ by Vance Joy a lot while writing this

Penny For Your Thoughts?

"I've heard a saying that a some men can live for 2 months on a good compliment alone.", you heard Robin say as you both watched Sanji leave the library after he had brought her some tea. You let out a dry chuckle, remembering how the cook had happily twirled around upon hearing a simple "thank you" from the archaeologist. "I feel like Sanji could survive for half a year on less than that as long as it comes from a woman.", you said in return. Robin took a sip from her tea before smiling softly. "I'm afraid you don't give yourself enough credit on this matter.", with that she resumed reading and you were left to wonder about her words. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"You know", you pronounced your thoughts out loud, "I think if Sanji was less pushy a lot of girls would be into him." After all he was a good guy if you got to know him and certainly far from bad looking. Your observation was met with silence. Which wasn't surprising, considering you were sitting alone in the crows nest on night shift. You nodded to yourself. Night shift was so boring when nothing happened. You threw another glance out the window. Still nothing but a calm ocean and a starry night. With not much else to do, these were the kinds of thoughts that popped into your brain at this ungodly hour in the morning. Of course they weren't all exclusively about the cook, that would be concerning. Though you had to admit he's been on your mind more often recently. Huh. Nah, it's nothing serious. However you still made it a point to think about something else. Finally the sun came out and your shift was over. It was still very early in the morning, maybe around five. You climbed back down from the lookout. You turned around just in time to see Sanji emerge from the guys dorm, hair slightly wavy, wearing casual clothes and stifling a yawn while fumbling with a cigarette and a lighter. The early sun rays casted soft shadows on his form. All in all he still looked a bit sleepy. "Oof", you said breathlessly in place of a stronger word. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Everything alright, Sanji? You seem a bit traumatized." The two of you were running errands when suddenly the blond stopped walking in front of some clothing boutique. He looked like he was having a flashback, but not the nice kind. More like he was remembering something disturbing. "Sanji?", you tried again and poked his shoulder this time. "It's nothing!", he said in the exact voice someone uses when it's definitely not nothing and started to walk away from the store. "You sure?" A wave of pink lipstick terror swept through his mind again. He lit up a new cigarette. "A hundred percent." You decided to drop the subject. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You were in and out of consciousness. You had tried getting up a couple of times but that hadn't worked out. So you decided to wait for one of your crew members to pick you up or until you could feel your limbs properly. One moment you were looking at the sky, the next your vision faded to black. The next memory you had was of you coughing up some more blood. Things got mushy in between but at some point you heard a voice calling out your name. You managed to open your eyes. "Sanji?", your voice sounded croaky and the inside of your mouth tasted metallic. You saw the cook walk over to you. "Man, that bastard got you good, huh?" You tried shrugging, bad idea. "Nah, 'm just taking a nap. You should see the other guy." "Oh, I saw.", he said with a slight grin. "Can you get up?" Your vision blurred again and turned Sanji into a vague black, blond and crimson shape. "Uh..I might need some assistance." He helped you get back to your feet but you had to lean on him for support or else you and the ground would reunite. As you began walking back to the ship he told you how the others were. You tried to focus on his voice but didn't quite succeed. It became harder to open your eyes again after blinking. "Hey, don't pass out [Name]." He sounded concerned. You should get a grip on yourself! " 'm not gonna pass out!", you said, before losing consciousness. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Man you know you're really starved for affection when someone gives you a friendly pat on the back and your knees get all wobbly, you thought as you tried to keep your composure when you met Sanji again after two years. Followed by an intrusive thought of the second worst kind: What if we hugged? No, no, no, stop! The chances of you being able to let go in case of a hug were fairly slim, besides... You looked over to find the cook sort of levitating behind a group of women. "You've got to be kidding me!", you muttered while burying your face in your hand. You decided to abandon this entire situation to return to the Sunny then and there. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The strawhats were celebrating something. What exactly you were celebrating had however currently slipped from your mind. Maybe that was because you were more than a bit drunk. "What are you doing up here?" You turned around to see Sanji exiting the kitchen. "I'm getting a good view on my favourite people. You gotta get down there though, so the picture's complete!", you replied and pointed towards the main deck where the crew had gathered for the festivities, whatever they were. His lips quirked in amusement and a hint of fondness. "Alright.", he said and did as he was told. You grinned widely as you framed the scene with your hands. Your crew, the people you love the most, all together, safe and happy. You wanted this image to burn itself into your mind, so you would always remember it. A sort of bubbly feeling of happiness soared in your chest. It made you want to giggle with glee. "Oi, [Name] get down here!", you heard Usopp call. "Watch out!", you shouted before jumping off the railing onto the deck. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "How's [Name]?", Sanji asked the doctor. Chopper finished bandaging your leg. "There is some internal bleeding, but he's strong. He will be fine.", Chopper assured the cook. "And I've got the best doctor to take care of me." You slowly cracked your eyes open and smiled a bit when you saw the reindeers flustered dancing. "If you just acted like you were unconscious to get me to carry you back to the Sunny, I will kick you across the ship!" Sanji feigned exasperation but sounded somewhat relieved. "THERE'S NO KICKING THE PATIENTS!", Chopper yelled and tried to shield you with his tiny body, bless his soul. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sanji doesn't quite remember when but at some point the feeling in his chest blossomed into something he could no longer deny. If he didn't talk about it soon, it would probably tear his body apart. Yet every time he tried to it got crushed between his teeth and his pride or the nicotine in his lungs and the fear in his throat. So he couldn't do much more than sneak a few glances over to where you sat next to Usopp, who was telling you and Chopper about his superior fishing techniques. It was funny how the same emotion could feel so violent at times and so gentle in other moments. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You absentmindedly watched the ocean waves from the swing on the main deck. Today was a bit of a slow day. You know, those days where everything feels heavy and sluggish. Even the vibrant life aboard the Sunny seemed dull. Maybe you were a little bit homesick, or a lot. But that's alright, your bad mood would pass sooner or later. Suddenly a plate with your favourite food from your home island appeared in your field of vision. "You looked like you could need something to cheer you up a bit.", Sanji said nonchalantly while handing you the plate. Your eyes immediately lit up. "Thank you!", you smiled brightly at him and started eating. You didn't notice how his cigarette smoke took on the shape of hearts for a moment. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was one of the rare quiet moments that Sanji relished. You two were cuddling together on the upper deck. He watched as you played with his hands. He heard the voices of some of his crewmembers from the main deck, they seemed to be mildly arguing. If he focused on it he could hear the faint clanking of metal, which meant either Franky or Usopp were tinkering in their workshop. Sanji heaved a content sigh and nuzzled his face into the bend between your neck and shoulder. As you let out a quiet giggle because of his beard tickling you he felt close to swooning. Sometimes he feared one day all the love he felt for you would become too big for his body. He could already feel it trickling through the seams. Something behind his ribs ached. It was a good kind of ache, but an ache nonetheless. He squeezed you a bit tighter in an effort to pull himself together. "You okay?", you asked him curiously. He hummed in response and then added: "Can you say it again?" He could practically hear you smile. You shifted around a bit so you could look at him. "Ready?" He nodded. You leaned in and whispered the desired words so quietly only he could hear, because they were meant for him alone: "I love you." If he hadn't kissed you that instant he would have burst at the seams.

[trendingnewsb]

The Real Causes Of Depression Have Been Discovered, And They’re Not What You Think

Across the Western world today, if you are depressed or anxious and you go to your doctor because you just can’t take it anymore, you will likely be told a story. It happened to me when I was a teenager in the 1990s. You feel this way, my doctor said, because your brain isn’t working right. It isn’t producing the necessary chemicals. You need to take drugs, and they will fix your broken brain.

Image credits: iStock

I tried this strategy with all my heart for more than a decade. I longed for relief. The drugs would give me a brief boost whenever I jacked up my dose, but then, soon after, the pain would always start to bleed back through. In the end, I was taking the maximum dose for more than a decade. I thought there was something wrong with me because I was taking these drugs but still feeling deep pain.

In the end, my need for answers was so great that I spent three years using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to research what really causes depression and anxiety, and how to really solve them. I was startled by many things I learned. The first was that my reaction to the drugs wasn’t freakish ― it was quite normal.

“Many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong”

Depression is often measured by scientists using something called the Hamilton Scale. It runs from 0 (where you are dancing in ecstasy) to 59 (where you are suicidal). Improving your sleep patterns gives you a movement on the Hamilton Scale of around 6 points. Chemical antidepressants give you an improvement, on average, of 1.8 points, according to research by professor Irving Kirsch of Harvard University. It’s a real effect – but it’s modest. Of course, the fact it’s an average means some people get a bigger boost. But for huge numbers of people, like me, it’s not enough to lift us out of depression – so I began to see we need to expand the menu of options for depressed and anxious people. I needed to know how.Image credits: iStock

But more than that – I was startled to discover that many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong. I learned that there are in fact nine major causes of depression and anxiety that are unfolding all around us. Two are biological, and seven are out in here in the world, rather than sealed away inside our skulls in the way my doctor told me. The causes are all quite different, and they play out to different degrees in the lives of depressed and anxious people. I was even more startled to discover this isn’t some fringe position – the World Health Organization has been warning for years that we need to start dealing with the deeper causes of depression in this way.

I want to write here about the hardest of those causes for me, personally, to investigate. The nine causes are all different – but this is one that I left, lingering, trying not to look at, for most of my three years of research. I was finally taught about it in San Diego, California, when I met a remarkable scientist named Dr. Vincent Felitti. I have to tell you right at the start though – I found it really painful to investigate this cause. It forced me to reckon with something I had been running from for most of my life. One of the reasons I clung to the theory that my depression was just the result of something going wrong with my brain was, I see now, so I would not have to think about this.

**

The story of Dr. Felitti’s breakthrough stretches back to the mid-1980s, when it happened almost by accident. At first, it’ll sound like this isn’t a story about depression. But it’s worth following his journey – because it can teach us a lot.

When the patients first came into Felitti’s office, some of them found it hard to fit through the door. They were in the most severe stages of obesity, and they were assigned here, to his clinic, as their last chance. Felitti had been commissioned by the medical provider Kaiser Permanente to figure out how to genuinely solve the company’s exploding obesity costs. Start from scratch, they said. Try anything.

One day, Felitti had a maddening simple idea. He asked: What if these severely overweight people simply stopped eating, and lived off the fat stores they’d built up in their bodies – with monitored nutrition supplements – until they were down to a normal weight? What would happen? Cautiously, they tried it, with a lot of medical supervision – and, startlingly, it worked. The patients were shedding weight, and returning to healthy bodies.

“Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable”

But then something strange happened. In the program, there were some stars ― people who shed incredible amounts of weight, and the medical team ― and all their friends ― expected these people to react with joy, but the people who did best were often thrown into a brutal depression, or panic, or rage. Some of them became suicidal. Without their bulk, they felt unbelievably vulnerable. They often fled the program, gorged on fast food, and put their weight back on very fast.

Felitti was baffled ― until he talked with one 28-year-old woman. In 51 weeks, Felitti had taken her down from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. Then ― quite suddenly, for no reason anyone could see ― she put on 37 pounds in the space of a few weeks. Before long, she was back above 400 pounds. So Felitti asked her gently what had changed when she started to lose weight. It seemed mysterious to both of them. They talked for a long time. There was, she said eventually, one thing. When she was obese, men never hit on her ― but when she got down to a healthy weight, for the first time in a long time, she was propositioned by a man. She fled, and right away began to eat compulsively, and she couldn’t stop.

This was when Felitti thought to ask a question he hadn’t asked before. When did you start to put on weight? She thought about the question. When she was 11 years old, she said. So he asked: Was there anything else that happened in your life when you were 11? Well, she replied ― that was when my grandfather began to rape me.

As Felitti spoke to the 183 people in the program, he found 55 percent had been sexually abused. One woman said she put on weight after she was raped because “overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.” It turned out many of these women had been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: to protect themselves from the attention of men, who they believed would hurt them. Felitti suddenly realized: “What we had perceived as the problem ― major obesity ― was in fact, very frequently, the solution to problems that the rest of us knew nothing about.”

This insight led Felitti to launch a massive program of research, funded by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. He wanted to discover how all kinds of childhood trauma affect us as adults. He administered a simple questionnaire to 17,000 ordinary patients in San Diego, who were were coming just for general health care – anything from a headache to a broken leg. It asked if any of 10 bad things had happened to you as a kid, like being neglected, or emotionally abused. Then it asked if you had any of 10 psychological problems, like obesity or depression or addiction. He wanted to see what the matchup was.

Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable. Childhood trauma caused the risk of adult depression to explode. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult, and more than 4,000 percent more likely to be an injecting drug user.

**

After I had one of my long, probing conversations with Dr. Felitti about this, I walked to the beach in San Diego shaking, and spat into the ocean. He was forcing me to think about a dimension of my depression I did not want to confront. When I was a kid, my mother was ill and my dad was in another country, and in this chaos, I experienced some extreme acts of violence from an adult: I was strangled with an electrical cord, among other acts. I had tried to seal these memories away, to shutter them in my mind. I had refused to contemplate that they were playing out in my adult life.

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hard-core addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. I have a theory – though I want to stress that this next part is going beyond the scientific evidence discovered by Felitti and the CDC, and I can’t say for sure that it’s true.

“If it’s your fault, it’s — at some strange level — under your control”

When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So, you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless ― that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power ― at least in your own mind. If it’s your fault, then there’s something you can do that might make it different. You aren’t a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You’re the person controlling the machine. You have your hands on the dangerous levers. In this way, just like obesity protected those women from the men they feared would rape them, blaming yourself for your childhood traumas protects you from seeing how vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s ― at some strange level ― under your control.

Image credits: iStock

But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either. This is no way to live. But it’s a misfiring of the thing that made it possible for you to survive at an earlier point in your life.

**

But it was what Dr. Felitti discovered next that most helped me. When ordinary patients, responding to his questionnaire, noted that they had experienced childhood trauma, he got their doctors to do something when the patients next came in for care. He got them to say something like, “I see you went through this bad experience as a child. I am sorry this happened to you. Would you like to talk about it?”

Felitti wanted to see if being able to discuss this trauma with a trusted authority figure, and being told it was not your fault, would help to release people’s shame. What happened next was startling. Just being able to discuss the trauma led to a huge fall in future illnesses ― there was a 35-percent reduction in their need for medical care over the following year. For the people who were referred to more extensive help, there was a fall of more than 50 percent. One elderly woman ― who had described being raped as a child ― wrote a letter later, saying: “Thank you for asking … I feared I would die, and no one would ever know what had happened.”

The act of releasing your shame is – in itself – healing. So I went back to people I trusted, and I began to talk about what had happened to me when I was younger. Far from shaming me, far from thinking it showed I was broken, they showed love, and helped me to grieve for what I had gone through.

“If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed”

As I listened back over the tapes of my long conversations with Felitti, it struck me that if he had just told people what my doctor told me – that their brains were broken, this was why they were so distressed, and the only solution was to be drugged – they may never have been able to understand the deeper causes of their problem, and they would never have been released from them.

Image credits: iStock

The more I investigated depression and anxiety, the more I found that, far from being caused by a spontaneously malfunctioning brain, depression and anxiety are mostly being caused by events in our lives. If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you are lonely and feel that you can’t rely on the people around you to support you, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think life is all about buying things and climbing up the ladder, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think your future will be insecure, you are far more likely to become depressed. I started to find a whole blast of scientific evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused in our skulls, but by the way many of us are being made to live. There are real biological factors, like your genes, that can make you significantly more sensitive to these causes, but they are not the primary drivers.

And that led me to the scientific evidence that we have to try to solve our depression and anxiety crises in a very different way (alongside chemical anti-depressants, which should of course remain on the table).

To do that, we need to stop seeing depression and anxiety as an irrational pathology, or a weird misfiring of brain chemicals. They are terribly painful – but they make sense. Your pain is not an irrational spasm. It is a response to what is happening to you. To deal with depression, you need to deal with its underlying causes. On my long journey, I learned about seven different kinds of anti-depressants – ones that are about stripping out the causes, rather than blunting the symptoms. Releasing your shame is only the start.

**

One day, one of Dr. Felitti’s colleagues, Dr. Robert Anda, told me something I have been thinking about ever since.

When people are behaving in apparently self-destructive ways, “it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,” he said, “and time to start asking what happened to them.”

More info: Johann’s Book

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[nothingman]

Chelsea Manning exerts tremendous energy just to speak and to be heard.

Without access to a computer in prison, she composes tweets by calling friends at home, dictating and hoping they hear her correctly. She doesn't see those tweets before they're sent, and she can't delete them if they're wrong. To write for the Guardian or Medium, she can research topics in the library, but she generally relies on others with internet access to verify the data. Almost nothing that we know of Manning has come directly from her mouth or been typed by her hand.

That may change after Wednesday, when Manning is released after serving about seven years in men's-only detention facilities. For Manning, the already difficult process of re-entry into society will be even further complicated by the harsh light of international attention, an ongoing appeal of her conviction and the reality of living in the outside world as an out transgender woman for the first time.

Manning was convicted in 2013 on charges related to leaking government information to WikiLeaks and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. In January, then-President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.

Re-entry forces a former prisoner to transition from the traumatizing, often-violent reality of prison to the overwhelming outside world, usually without much aid. The difficulty of adjusting after serving time has enough common effects that some mental health providers have come to call a particular cluster of symptoms "post-incarceration syndrome." Common symptoms, according to a 2013 article published in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, include post-traumatic stress disorder, social-sensory disorientation and alienation.

"Being returned to the community doesn't mean you're automatically going to be the person that you were before," Amy Fettig, deputy director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a phone interview. "You're going to have very basic needs that need to be filled before you can think about filling out out a resume and going on a job hunt."

Jason Lydon, founder and national director of LGBTQ prisoner advocacy group Black and Pink, said Manning's mental health and well-being are of the utmost importance, including time to explore her gender identity and transition process.

As a transgender woman in men's prison facilities, Manning was deprived of the space to explore her gender expression. Forced to cut her hair to the designated length for male soldiers, Manning has been unable to grow the long locks that she feels would best suit her, according to Evan Greer, a campaign director for Fight for the Future and a confidante of Manning's.

Those who spoke to Mic said the freedom Manning will soon have can be liberating — but also overwhelming.

"She's building a life from scratch," Chase Strangio, Manning's lawyer at the ACLU, said in a phone interview. Strangio said that Manning will have to relearn small tasks, like cooking for herself and doing laundry, while also facing larger hurdles like building up her credit score and getting identification documents under her new name.

She will also face questions about what to wear and how to present herself for the first time in her adult life. Many people speak about Manning without knowing what she looks like, aside from a grainy black-and-white photo that accompanies most headlines about her.

Greer, who has a weekly call with Manning, said she is still unsure what Manning looks like. That, Greer said, can alter people's perception of the already-misunderstood person at the center of an international scandal.

"Chelsea has been robbed of that right to have any semblance of control over her image," Greer said. "I can say myself, as a trans person, those basic things like how I wear my hair and how I present myself are a huge part of how I define myself."

Likewise, those who know 29-year-old Manning hope she is able to use the time after her release to find out who she is as a person. Manning has spent the better part of her adult life either in the military or in prison.

"She wants to be a young person in the world," Strangio said. "She has every right to experience some of her young adult life and listen to music and eat pizza and make new friends and meet a trans community that she hasn't really had a chance to ever meet in person."

During her time in prison, Strangio said, Manning was only allowed visits from her legal team and people whom she knew prior to her incarceration. Strangio and Greer, who are both transgender, are two of the few trans people Manning has had extensive conversations with.

Manning also faces the obstacle of having had massive media attention focused on her for most of a decade. Search "Chelsea Manning" and Google returns millions of results in under a second. Many focus on the doom and gloom of Manning's incarceration: her fight for hormone therapy as part of medical care, her experience in solitary confinement, her suicide attempts.

Strangio called these stories "simplistic" and said they don't reflect Manning's full personhood. Those who spoke about Manning described her as "hilarious," "passionate," "compassionate," "charismatic," "brilliant" — and "misunderstood."

Greer has had regular phone conversations with Manning since around 2014, when she received an email saying Manning would like to speak with her on the phone. The two discuss politics, science fiction and makeup. Greer learned that Manning gathered with other prisoners to play Dungeons and Dragons. She briefly played an instrument in a band. And, of course, she wrote her Guardian columns.

"It puts me to shame as an activist, really, when I see what she's been able to get done under such extreme restrictions on her ability to speak freely," Greer said.

Manning has spent about 11 cumulative months in solitary confinement, a common experience for transgender inmates. According to a 2015 Black and Pink report, 85% of LGBTQ prisoners said they had experienced solitary confinement during their incarceration. Among trans women, 77% said they were placed in solitary for safety reasons, though just 11% said they had only been placed in solitary after specifically requesting to be removed from the general prison population.

"It damages people, and it's torture," Fettig said. "People are released directly to the streets from solitary confinement, having had no real contact with human beings for weeks, months, years, even decades."

Those psychological scars don't automatically heal once a person leaves prison. Lydon warned that potential triggers abound in real life for many newly released prisoners. Being followed too closely in a grocery store can trigger negative memories. The jingle of a keychain may sound like a guard's keys. Nightmares of being incarcerated again are also common.

"We expect people to be ready to jump right in without having the time to still be broken," Lydon said. "I'm hopeful for her that she will be able to take the time that she needs."

Part of the difficulty of re-entry, Strangio said, is that prisoners often don't know what their needs are until they are released. Though Manning has notoriety, she doesn't have the economic benefits of fame. To help give Manning space to heal, Strangio has collected funds through a GoFundMe, and by Tuesday evening it had reached about $144,500 of its $150,000 goal. Strangio also said Manning has a place to stay when she is released.

Some uncertainty looms in Manning's life. Her sentence was commuted, but she has not been pardoned, and the appeal on her conviction is still ongoing. Convicted in an Army court-martial, Manning is now bringing her case to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals. Should Manning lose her appeal, according to her appeals lawyer, Nancy Hollander, she'll be dishonorably discharged and unable to receive free health care through Veterans Affairs. Hollander also said she would be considered a felon, severely impairing her ability to obtain employment.

Despite the looming uncertainties, members of Manning's inner circle are excited at the prospect of Manning being able to make choices for herself.

"She's going to be able to be the agent of her own story," Strangio said. "She gets to be a full human being, and that's going to be very cool and exciting."

via Mic

[trendingnewsb]

The Real Causes Of Depression Have Been Discovered, And They’re Not What You Think

Across the Western world today, if you are depressed or anxious and you go to your doctor because you just can’t take it anymore, you will likely be told a story. It happened to me when I was a teenager in the 1990s. You feel this way, my doctor said, because your brain isn’t working right. It isn’t producing the necessary chemicals. You need to take drugs, and they will fix your broken brain.

Image credits: iStock

I tried this strategy with all my heart for more than a decade. I longed for relief. The drugs would give me a brief boost whenever I jacked up my dose, but then, soon after, the pain would always start to bleed back through. In the end, I was taking the maximum dose for more than a decade. I thought there was something wrong with me because I was taking these drugs but still feeling deep pain.

In the end, my need for answers was so great that I spent three years using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to research what really causes depression and anxiety, and how to really solve them. I was startled by many things I learned. The first was that my reaction to the drugs wasn’t freakish ― it was quite normal.

“Many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong”

Depression is often measured by scientists using something called the Hamilton Scale. It runs from 0 (where you are dancing in ecstasy) to 59 (where you are suicidal). Improving your sleep patterns gives you a movement on the Hamilton Scale of around 6 points. Chemical antidepressants give you an improvement, on average, of 1.8 points, according to research by professor Irving Kirsch of Harvard University. It’s a real effect – but it’s modest. Of course, the fact it’s an average means some people get a bigger boost. But for huge numbers of people, like me, it’s not enough to lift us out of depression – so I began to see we need to expand the menu of options for depressed and anxious people. I needed to know how.Image credits: iStock

But more than that – I was startled to discover that many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong. I learned that there are in fact nine major causes of depression and anxiety that are unfolding all around us. Two are biological, and seven are out in here in the world, rather than sealed away inside our skulls in the way my doctor told me. The causes are all quite different, and they play out to different degrees in the lives of depressed and anxious people. I was even more startled to discover this isn’t some fringe position – the World Health Organization has been warning for years that we need to start dealing with the deeper causes of depression in this way.

I want to write here about the hardest of those causes for me, personally, to investigate. The nine causes are all different – but this is one that I left, lingering, trying not to look at, for most of my three years of research. I was finally taught about it in San Diego, California, when I met a remarkable scientist named Dr. Vincent Felitti. I have to tell you right at the start though – I found it really painful to investigate this cause. It forced me to reckon with something I had been running from for most of my life. One of the reasons I clung to the theory that my depression was just the result of something going wrong with my brain was, I see now, so I would not have to think about this.

**

The story of Dr. Felitti’s breakthrough stretches back to the mid-1980s, when it happened almost by accident. At first, it’ll sound like this isn’t a story about depression. But it’s worth following his journey – because it can teach us a lot.

When the patients first came into Felitti’s office, some of them found it hard to fit through the door. They were in the most severe stages of obesity, and they were assigned here, to his clinic, as their last chance. Felitti had been commissioned by the medical provider Kaiser Permanente to figure out how to genuinely solve the company’s exploding obesity costs. Start from scratch, they said. Try anything.

One day, Felitti had a maddening simple idea. He asked: What if these severely overweight people simply stopped eating, and lived off the fat stores they’d built up in their bodies – with monitored nutrition supplements – until they were down to a normal weight? What would happen? Cautiously, they tried it, with a lot of medical supervision – and, startlingly, it worked. The patients were shedding weight, and returning to healthy bodies.

“Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable”

But then something strange happened. In the program, there were some stars ― people who shed incredible amounts of weight, and the medical team ― and all their friends ― expected these people to react with joy, but the people who did best were often thrown into a brutal depression, or panic, or rage. Some of them became suicidal. Without their bulk, they felt unbelievably vulnerable. They often fled the program, gorged on fast food, and put their weight back on very fast.

Felitti was baffled ― until he talked with one 28-year-old woman. In 51 weeks, Felitti had taken her down from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. Then ― quite suddenly, for no reason anyone could see ― she put on 37 pounds in the space of a few weeks. Before long, she was back above 400 pounds. So Felitti asked her gently what had changed when she started to lose weight. It seemed mysterious to both of them. They talked for a long time. There was, she said eventually, one thing. When she was obese, men never hit on her ― but when she got down to a healthy weight, for the first time in a long time, she was propositioned by a man. She fled, and right away began to eat compulsively, and she couldn’t stop.

This was when Felitti thought to ask a question he hadn’t asked before. When did you start to put on weight? She thought about the question. When she was 11 years old, she said. So he asked: Was there anything else that happened in your life when you were 11? Well, she replied ― that was when my grandfather began to rape me.

As Felitti spoke to the 183 people in the program, he found 55 percent had been sexually abused. One woman said she put on weight after she was raped because “overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.” It turned out many of these women had been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: to protect themselves from the attention of men, who they believed would hurt them. Felitti suddenly realized: “What we had perceived as the problem ― major obesity ― was in fact, very frequently, the solution to problems that the rest of us knew nothing about.”

This insight led Felitti to launch a massive program of research, funded by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. He wanted to discover how all kinds of childhood trauma affect us as adults. He administered a simple questionnaire to 17,000 ordinary patients in San Diego, who were were coming just for general health care – anything from a headache to a broken leg. It asked if any of 10 bad things had happened to you as a kid, like being neglected, or emotionally abused. Then it asked if you had any of 10 psychological problems, like obesity or depression or addiction. He wanted to see what the matchup was.

Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable. Childhood trauma caused the risk of adult depression to explode. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult, and more than 4,000 percent more likely to be an injecting drug user.

**

After I had one of my long, probing conversations with Dr. Felitti about this, I walked to the beach in San Diego shaking, and spat into the ocean. He was forcing me to think about a dimension of my depression I did not want to confront. When I was a kid, my mother was ill and my dad was in another country, and in this chaos, I experienced some extreme acts of violence from an adult: I was strangled with an electrical cord, among other acts. I had tried to seal these memories away, to shutter them in my mind. I had refused to contemplate that they were playing out in my adult life.

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hard-core addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. I have a theory – though I want to stress that this next part is going beyond the scientific evidence discovered by Felitti and the CDC, and I can’t say for sure that it’s true.

“If it’s your fault, it’s — at some strange level — under your control”

When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So, you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless ― that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power ― at least in your own mind. If it’s your fault, then there’s something you can do that might make it different. You aren’t a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You’re the person controlling the machine. You have your hands on the dangerous levers. In this way, just like obesity protected those women from the men they feared would rape them, blaming yourself for your childhood traumas protects you from seeing how vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s ― at some strange level ― under your control.

Image credits: iStock

But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either. This is no way to live. But it’s a misfiring of the thing that made it possible for you to survive at an earlier point in your life.

**

But it was what Dr. Felitti discovered next that most helped me. When ordinary patients, responding to his questionnaire, noted that they had experienced childhood trauma, he got their doctors to do something when the patients next came in for care. He got them to say something like, “I see you went through this bad experience as a child. I am sorry this happened to you. Would you like to talk about it?”

Felitti wanted to see if being able to discuss this trauma with a trusted authority figure, and being told it was not your fault, would help to release people’s shame. What happened next was startling. Just being able to discuss the trauma led to a huge fall in future illnesses ― there was a 35-percent reduction in their need for medical care over the following year. For the people who were referred to more extensive help, there was a fall of more than 50 percent. One elderly woman ― who had described being raped as a child ― wrote a letter later, saying: “Thank you for asking … I feared I would die, and no one would ever know what had happened.”

The act of releasing your shame is – in itself – healing. So I went back to people I trusted, and I began to talk about what had happened to me when I was younger. Far from shaming me, far from thinking it showed I was broken, they showed love, and helped me to grieve for what I had gone through.

“If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed”

As I listened back over the tapes of my long conversations with Felitti, it struck me that if he had just told people what my doctor told me – that their brains were broken, this was why they were so distressed, and the only solution was to be drugged – they may never have been able to understand the deeper causes of their problem, and they would never have been released from them.

Image credits: iStock

The more I investigated depression and anxiety, the more I found that, far from being caused by a spontaneously malfunctioning brain, depression and anxiety are mostly being caused by events in our lives. If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you are lonely and feel that you can’t rely on the people around you to support you, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think life is all about buying things and climbing up the ladder, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think your future will be insecure, you are far more likely to become depressed. I started to find a whole blast of scientific evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused in our skulls, but by the way many of us are being made to live. There are real biological factors, like your genes, that can make you significantly more sensitive to these causes, but they are not the primary drivers.

And that led me to the scientific evidence that we have to try to solve our depression and anxiety crises in a very different way (alongside chemical anti-depressants, which should of course remain on the table).

To do that, we need to stop seeing depression and anxiety as an irrational pathology, or a weird misfiring of brain chemicals. They are terribly painful – but they make sense. Your pain is not an irrational spasm. It is a response to what is happening to you. To deal with depression, you need to deal with its underlying causes. On my long journey, I learned about seven different kinds of anti-depressants – ones that are about stripping out the causes, rather than blunting the symptoms. Releasing your shame is only the start.

**

One day, one of Dr. Felitti’s colleagues, Dr. Robert Anda, told me something I have been thinking about ever since.

When people are behaving in apparently self-destructive ways, “it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,” he said, “and time to start asking what happened to them.”

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