Fascinating to examine the findings, though the bad news for me is that I belong to three of the top five depression-riddled professions, coming in 3rd, 4th and 5th in this order: social workers, therapists and writers!
What?! Well, at least I'm not in the top two!
The highest rate of depression? It's among people who work in nursing homes and/or child care facilities. Yep, those primary care-givers come in at number one. In a sense, taking care of old people and little kids is sort of the same thing. Older adults who have not done the self-work necessary to break free of their character structures often revert back to toddlerhood and infancy in the golden years, and of course, any parent who is honest about it will tell you that taking care of children is mostly an exhausting, thankless job. Tots, just like demented seniors, will not remember anything you've done for them!
Not at all surprising, is that the number two spot goes to - waitresses! While 10% of food servers in general reported an episode of major depression in the past year (which is high by itself), almost 15% of women in this field did so. Personally, I imagine that being a waiter is one of the worst jobs in the universe, and certainly even worse if you're a woman. I mean, you get to work for menial wages under triple-A stress conditions for ungrateful patrons who bring all of their unmet oral needs to the table, literally, and expect you to serve them with perfection, the way their own mothers never did. Ugh!
Now, onto my three professions -
Social work? Yeah, pretty depressing. I left the field proper in 1986, though I stayed in part time until 1990. Worse than the low-pay of the profession is the powerlessness. And it's not just because of the incredible bureaucracy and mountains of paperwork that totally bogs down the process of actually trying to help anybody... it's the whole notion of trying to help anybody.
When I left the field of agency social work to become a psychotherapist in private practice full-time, it was because I came to realize that facilitating a process, one person at a time, in which the client/patient could choose to shift their own consciousness was the only true road to self-empowerment and self-actualization. I could no longer participate in an enabling profession that saw it's clients as helpless "victims" of an unjust society. As I came to understand that we create our own reality, I understood that becoming a conscious creator was the solution to all of life's problems, individually and collectively.
With that clear in my mind, as a psychotherapist, I found high levels of gratification, definitely not depression. I believe that so many psychotherapists are depressed, however, because they have "sold out." No one who has ever delved deeply into the inner lives of others can believe that psychotropic medications or behavioral quick fixes is a viable solution to what ails a person's soul. Healing is an in-depth, mutual experience that can only occur in the vehicle of a real relationship. Most therapists have been conditioned not to engage in any kind of real relationship with their patients, and so they are impotent to really offer any effective assistance. Furthermore, to guide someone else into the deeper regions of suppressed primal emotions and forbidden thoughts, the therapist has to have gone there, or be going there, as well. Sad to say, most would rather not. So, they follow the example of the utterly insane psychiatric and medical establishments whose idea of healing is to drug, slash and/or burn patients.
Writing? Depressing?! Ha! It depends. If you don't mind waiting ten years to become an overnight success, then it's not depressing. It's not depressing at all if you are immune to having your life's work rejected because you couldn't cleverly sum up your entire concept in one 4-word catch phrase like "Man discovers he's dead." If you are able to write dialogue that is realistic, but still always smart and witty, without ever repeating yourself; if you can create characters who are complex yet "accessible" and likable, even when evil; if you're adept at developing story lines that have never been used before, but are somehow familiar and make sense to everyone; if you are able to do all of that while working at your full-time day job, taking the kids to school, having a relationship that includes sex and watching Dexter at night, then you wouldn't find writing depressing at all.
I don't. To tell stories, a critical human urge since prehistoric times, to create characters to deliver messages or share life experiences, to touch the oneness that is the nature of All That Is through words and images? It's a glorious career.
Writing, a cause of depression? Quite the contrary. Unless of course, you are absolutely not willing to sleep in your car for a year or two if you have to.
