When Depression Isn't a Disorder, It's a Protest

When I was 18 years old, a judge sentenced me to 67 years to life for murder. In the courtroom, the judge expressed his disgust for me. I couldn’t track much of what he said because all the decisions I’d made that led me to this point, all the opportunities I’d missed to change my course, all my life swirled down a drain in my head. I had become a statistic, one more Black boy sentenced to die in prison. I’d been running from this moment my whole life, but it had finally caught me. In the days that followed, depression enveloped me.

Today, when I talk about my experience in prison and how I experienced profound despair, well-meaning people sometimes talk to me about what they’ve read about depression. They think it begins in my neurobiology with low serotonin or in my head with negative thoughts. I’m confident that my depression began with my unrelentingly hostile prison environment: living in a cell with a stranger who could either become a close friend or someone who might snap and kill me while I slept, prison riots where I could be shot for the color of my skin, the malnutrition, the freezing cold in the winter, repressive heat in summer, the swift and arbitrary changes of prison rules that kept the ground shifting beneath my feet.

The Bureau of Justice estimated 27% of state and 14% of federal prisoners reported being diagnosed with a major depressive disorder. Compare this to the National Institute of Mental Health’s statistics which estimate 8.3 percent of U.S. adults experience major depression. That incarcerated people experience major depression two to three times more than the general population isn’t the full story. Depression is grossly underdiagnosed in prison for good reason. First, incarcerated people tend to avoid clinicians because there’s no doctor-patient confidentiality in prison. What that means is anything an incarcerated person says to a clinician can be used – and has often been used – at parole hearings to keep them in prison. Second, just having a record of mental health problems has been used by parole boards to deny incarcerated people’s release from prison, so many incarcerated people learn to mask their symptoms better than doctors can diagnose them.

I think I suffered from depression, not because something was wrong with my brain chemistry but rather because something was right with my brain chemistry. It adapted, it did its assigned job, to create more safety and stability in a dangerous world I couldn’t escape. What pulled me through my depression time and time again supports my theory: goals that made me feel more in control of my environment and future.

My first goal came when I was 19 years old. My daughter was born, and I couldn’t bear dying in prison. I resolved that I would write my way out – not because that was a reasonable plan but because writing was the only power I knew I had. I’d known it since the 4th grade when a teacher held me after class. I thought I was in trouble per usual. Instead, she gushed over my creative writing submission. 10 years later, desperate for a way out of prison, I remembered the exuberance on that teacher’s face. I honed my writing, and 21 years later I literally wrote my way out of prison.

Looking back on my journey, I see the ways in which I lived in a reality that told me freedom was impossible, but I spent a lot of time curating my life so that it reflected my dream. In other words, if depression was my body’s response to danger I couldn’t escape, then creating a lived experience where I felt like I was moving toward escape mitigated my depression. I taught myself to write, and the more I grew as a writer, the more I felt connected to my dream. I established a deep meditation practice which served as the cornerstone for the hyper-focus necessary to sustain belief in my eventual escape. I became an activist who helped pass laws that made freedom possible for other incarcerated people. I started a nonprofit organization and successfully challenged many of the narratives that keep so many people in prisons. These were my big activities, but I took this curation to the smallest details of life. I didn’t build intimate friendships with people who ridiculed my aspirations; I read and re-read books like Dr. Wayne Dyer’s The Power of Intention because, although it would be fair to critique such books as pop psychology sold at airport gift shops, such books supported the curated delusion that eventually became the real day I walked out of prison.

Now that I have been out of prison for seven years, I look back at my experience with depression and how the skills I developed saved not only my life but my sanity. In the time that I was incarcerated, the mental health community has embraced the idea that depression is a neurochemical imbalance. In prison, if I had accepted the neurochemical theory of depression, I wonder how my life might have played out differently. Perhaps medication would’ve made me feel better, but the status quo of my life would not have changed. I don’t think I would have had the motivation to pass legislation that helped thousands of people, and I don’t think I would’ve gotten out of prison. We’re facing a mental health crisis in the U.S.; that’s a status quo that we need to address. If we view this crisis through the lens of individuals’ neurochemistry, then we risk misallocating our efforts to “fixing” people struggling to remain sane in an insane world rather than addressing the things in our world that need changing.

I don’t know the scientific answer about whether depression primarily comes from our brains or our environments, but I believe the environmental theory better serves our society. In this theory, depression can be a powerful force for change – personal, communal, and even global. My case of how my approach to depression empowered me is my own. I’ve heard enough stories about depression to know that not everyone can find empowerment in tragedy. Depression overwhelms them. But perhaps if we stop saying something is wrong with them, if we instead acknowledge that something is wrong with the world, our acknowledgement can be their bridge to empowerment.