This'll cheer me up - eventually

[woolymonkey]

"research suggests that 44 is the age at which we are most vulnerable to depression."

I'm 43 until March.  If I can make it through the year after that, things can only get better.  Right?

Comments

44

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm...Isn't 44 Great Thought's answer to the problem of Life, the Universe and Everything in the Hitchhiker's Guide?

I read the article with considerable scepticism, but I don't want to destroy hope and it is true that peaks for suicide and attempted suicide, although different, and different in men and women, are all earlier in life than 45, especially if one ignores a smaller peak in old age (No need to think of that yet!). Then depression is, fortunately, not quite the same thing.

The author has something in saying that it is a time when many people start to accept that "they are not going to be Napoleon or Montaigne", but there can be either comforting irony or deep gloom in the Ent's little rhyme which you may remember, roughly:

"I am
A thing that moves on a predestined groove
Not a car, not a bus, but a tram"

Jung was very interested in the ones that felt gloomy and dissatisfied,rather than resigned, in other words depressed, at that stage of life. For him it was suggestive of an unfulfilled and unconscious creative potential demanding to be expressed, so there was hope of much developement and thriving in such people after middle age (which is now, I suppose the magic 44. )

Well I am not sure that this is likely to be successful in cheering you up. perhaps the best thing to do would be to try to give you a good birthday at the beginning of such a fateful year. See you tomorrow and think what might give a good start -and don't get stressed if you have no idea, I'll then think up some thing...

Love

Nanamonkey

Re: 44

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

There was a young man who said "damn",
It seems to me that I am,
compelled to move,
in a predestined groove,
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram.