Depression and anger

I was talking to my sister Dorothy last week about our sense that our oldest brother seems uncharacteristically depressed.  He doesn’t telephone any of us anymore, doesn’t return our calls if we phone him, and in general seems to be cutting himself off from his brothers and sisters.

Freud said that depression is anger turned in on oneself.  I’m not convinced that is always true, and am inclined to think there is more than one dynamic involved and depression is not a one-size-fits-all category.  But recently I have been thinking about the relationship between anger and depression.   I think I saw it in my father-in-law, and perhaps it explains Tom who, by his own admission, says he thinks he was born angry.  He certainly has been angry the 68 years I have known him.

Anger so often gives people an adrenalin rush.  I think that turns anger into something quite similar, on the physiological level, to an addiction.  Being angry makes one feel so energized, and at the same time so self-justified, so aggrieved, even morally superior.  If the apparent object of one’s anger is shared by others, it even comes with social approval. 

I remember the day I realized that my father-in-law actually enjoyed throwing a right royal tantrum.  I’d seen the glint in his eyes as he lay on his sick bed when he threw a temper tantrum about something or other often before.  It might have been about the rice pudding I served him, or that I hadn’t turned on the television, or that he’d called for help and not gotten an immediate response or that we had told him he was too ill to drive with us in the car from England to Spain.  But one day I suddenly realized that he actually enjoyed it.  It gave him a sense of power, of being alive as life was slipping away from him. 

My brother has always said he did not inherit Dad’s depressive genes, and I always believed him.  But he has been angry all his life.  Now he is struggling very hard to overcome it, but I’m beginning to suspect that just giving up anger isn’t the solution anymore than giving up drinking is the solution to the alcoholic.  Just as it’s possible to be a dry alcoholic, I think it’s possible to be left with the bio-chemical causes of ones anger even if one isn’t experiencing a temper tantrum.  I think perhaps the arousal of being angry often keeps depression under control.  And if one overcomes the anger without dealing with the depression, one has just swapped one manifestation of the problem for another.

I myself have little patience for people who hug their anger to their hearts, who carry it with them not just for days but for years, even for generations.  My own strength is to stand by depressed people who strive continually against conscious feelings of their own failure and despair, not those who punch out at other people. 

But perhaps the psychodynamics and  bio-chemistry of anger isn’t always as different from those of depression as they have seemed.  Perhaps the angry bully has merely latched onto a different way of dealing with his sense of failure.