Depression and Identity Politics

I was talking with a friend the other night about self-identification, and the way diagnoses can become a huge part of how we view ourselves.  I got to thinking about how I define myself in relationship to my depression, which is an illness.

I do define myself by a number of identity traits that are or are not inherent.

So, for examples, I consider myself a Jewish person.  Jewish first, person second, not because my personhood is necessarily subordinate to my Judaism, but because my Judaism informs such a huge part of my life that it's only reasonable the adjective should come before the noun.

I am a woman, or, following on the prior paragraph, a female person.  For that matter, I'm a cisgendered female person.  Again, the vast majority of my outlook on life, the decisions I make, are based from a cisgendered female perspective.

To make certain I'm not leaving those parts of myself that are privileged unmarked, I am a white person.  At the same time, I am a person of Russian and Polish descent.  And here we see where the "person" comes first.  My whiteness defines me because it inherently defines my experience in relation to others.  My heritage does not.  It is a part of me, it does not encompass me.

I am a writer, because I am driven to write, because I write in my head, because writing is something I could not live without.  I am a person who plays bridge, a person who swing dances, because I do those things, but the world would go on turning for me were they to disappear from my life.

Which begs the question: am I a depressive, or am I person with depression?  I like to think it's the latter.  I like to think that the illness does not control so much of me that it comes before my rational, even normative--to a degree--thought process.

People with cancer are not cancerous, or "cancer people."  People with asthma generally do not define themselves as asthmatic in terms of personality, in terms of what drives them as people.  Obviously, these are not direct parallels, since, outside of brain cancer, neither of these illnesses affects the mind, and how our mind works is so often how we define ourselves as human beings.  Still, the fact remains, it is not considered healthy to define ourselves by our physical maladies, and yet it seems to be no surprise to people when persons with mental illnesses see that as a driving force for our personalities.

I argue that they are certainly part of us.  Perhaps even a significant part.  But I also argue that we, like people with MS or Lupus or Crohns, are doing our best to get along despite the presence of the disease.  It informs our personalities, it should not define them.

To wit: we are not mentally ill persons; we are people suffering from mental illnesses.