Tears of Blood and Sorrow: Depression and Women in Traditional China
1Some years ago, I was reading a great deal of women's poetry and literature. All poetry is very emotional to write and read, but the works from traditional China really affected me. Specifically, reading the poems of Chinese women, I sensed that many were very depressed and sad. Their lives were filled with tragedy which they related through their poems. My views were based on past readings and my own experience with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) years ago. What struck me the most were the women poets' expressions, experiences and symptoms which were remarkably similar to the ones in connection with MDD. I began to think of these connections and the emotional experiences these women poets would have shared. As well, I wondered about the experiences of these women with depression. Was there help available for them? What did their societies think of these women and what did the poets think of their own depression? This article presents an effort to answer these questions.
2I felt compelled then to study the connection between women and depression in traditional China. The first step was to select from the translations in the women's poetry anthology The Red Brush and other sources that seemed to demonstrate the writer's extreme sadness and disordered depression. This sample of poets stretched over a long period of time, with the poems dating from the 1100s to the 1800s, covering the Song through the Qing dynasties. In these poems, the writers used words that were as complex as the emotions they describe, which is indicative of all poetry. While these poems do not directly talk about medicine or medical approaches, they do discuss their personal experiences with sadness, melancholy and depression. They informed me that these women saw depression not as one word or idea, but many concepts that were used to communicate their feelings. I then read their biographies, in which it was apparent that the tragedies of their lives definitely influenced the tone and mood of their poems. Tales of dead children, lost love and lost homeland were related in their poems. However, my own emotional response was not enough. I had to create a way to identify and justify my initial response that these women were depressed. Building on modern, western ideas of disordered depression, I developed five criteria to detect the levels of emotions being expressed. Each poem could be placed on a spectrum with simple sadness on one end and disordered depression on the other, based on the number of criteria exhibited. A large majority of the poems did fulfill four of the criteria and these works could be viewed as manifestations of the poet's disordered depression. This also meant that these qualities present in the poems spoke to a larger connection between the poems. Despite the almost eight hundred years between some poets, they used similar images and ideas when expressing their depression. The women poets also revealed how they felt about their depression. For many of them, it was a lonely state with little or no hope. They also believed that all women were predisposed to depression (creative women even more so) and that it was normal for women to be depressed. These ideas indicated that there was a shared mental construct of what depression was to women in traditional China.
3Surprising to me, depression as a normal emotional state for women seemed to be the link throughout the material so far. It was apparent that I needed to delve further into the medical thinking about depression during this time period, as the evidence so far was anecdotal only. The medical beliefs reflected in medical treatises and case studies during the traditional era about depression would place the poets under a sharper historical light. Early Chinese medical ideas, as seen in works like The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, stated that women and men were emotionally the same. This changed greatly, however, by the time these women poets were alive. Male physicians in traditional China seemed to believe that due to their physical makeup, all women were unable to control their emotions, and were susceptible to outside influences that damaged their emotions resulting in physical and/or mental illness. Although the poets were not necessarily aware of it, it seems that the poets and the fictional literature agree with the medical view that women were helpless in the face of their depression.
4 This did not mean, however, that there was not help for women with depression. The women poets did not discuss treatments in their works, but information was also gleaned from real cases written by healers and physicians. Women could be helped at home, or could see a female healer. When the depression and its physical symptoms were too severe, women or their families would seek a male physician. However, it appears that treatments focused solely on the body and not the mind of the patient. Depression was seen as an expected state for women, as they were predisposed to it. As well, male physicians seem to know more about the female body than the mind, and gravitated towards curing what they knew. The outcome is that because women's disordered depression was viewed as a "normal" emotional state, women were rarely treated for this mental disorder in traditional China.
Personal Accounts of Depression
5Women's poetry in traditional China can give some insight into their possible mental state, why they were depressed, and what these women thought about their "depression." However, I first needed some guidelines as to how to read the poems and discern whether or not any of the women could be suffering from depression. Using the word "depression" in itself was problematic, as it is laden with western origins and notions. The general modern consensus is that depression is a common mental disorder identified mostly by its symptomology. The World Health Organization states that depression is characterized by a
depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, and poor concentration. These problems can become chronic or recurrent and lead to substantial impairments in an individual's ability to take care of his or her everyday responsibilities (WHO, website)
In Chinese, "depression" could be translated into various words, such as youyu or yumen. In the case of the poems from the Red Brush, however, the translators have stayed away from using the word "depression". What the translators have chosen to use is the word "sorrow," which in Chinese can be translated from chou and used interchangeably with sadness (bei). This may be because depression is loaded with its own western connotations, or because the original documents do not use the word "depression." For example, the poem "To the Melody of 'Reduplications, Extended,'" written by China's best known Song Dynasty woman poet, Li Qingzhao (1084-1151), has the word "sorrow":
All by myself, I wish it would turn dark!
The wutong tree, and that drizzling rain,
That- into dusk-
Drip drops, drip-drops!
How can all of this
Be disposed of by
The one word "sorrow"? (226 and Li Complete 109)
In this selection she is writing about how one word cannot sum up all the complex emotions she feels. The word she uses, sorrow, is not good enough. What is important, then, are the overall feelings being expressed, rather than using one word to indicate depression in a whole poem. This example demonstrates that one word in Chinese cannot be directly translated to mean depression, but a whole host of factors affecting the reading and context could indicate depression. One factor is the nature of the medium of poetry. It is an artistic effort which does not use exact terminology but employs diverse images, allusions, metaphors, and etcetera that are culturally significant to the writer and the reader. The poets knew this, as evident in Miss Li's words above.