Does Your Soul Have A Cold? by director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) is a quiet and thoughtful documentary about the effects of the anti-depressant industry on Japan since 2000. He follows the lives of several young people who have all been taking anti-depressants for a long time. It’s interesting to watch how people’s lives play out while they are on medication. Most of them are simply going through the motions of life, not living with any sense of expectation or anticipation and a lot of them don’t feel any better than they had before they were on the medication. The idea of depression as a disease is very real for them, and calling it a disease seems to make it more manageable. They all talk about it as though they have been told they have cancer and yet no one seemed to know about it before the Pharmaceutical companies came to Japan around 2000.
My reactions to this film have been mixed. I thought their stories were interesting, but the whole time I was waiting for some bit of information to be revealed that would explain why they became depressed. Some people’s issues were more apparent than others, because of abuse or disappointment. Other people had really great lives and families, but they still became depressed. I come from a family with a severe history of depression. In fact almost everyone has been on anti-depressants at one point or another, except for myself. I don’t know how to explain that. Is it a disease? Are some people more predisposed to it by personality?
Maybe, technically speaking, everyone on the planet is clinically depressed to the extent that they have attempted to cope with reality. Part of me thinks that depression is the ultimate realization that things are as bad as you think and there really isn’t any logical way that things will work out. When you find yourself there, it’s as if you have to choose whether or not you are okay with that, and to keep moving forward in spite of it. A lot of people, especially ones with a strong sense of justice, have a hard time coming to grips with it. I am very much like this. We want to control the chaos, and when we can’t, we become ambivalent losing hope that there is any…hope. But others, who are probably more apt to let things roll off their back, tend to accept the dichotomy and move forward anyway. Regardless, at some point, no matter how positive you are or how good your life is, you will have to face the reality of being human and choose your response.
There is a good possibility that I have over simplified here. But I guess this is how I have chosen to view things. I could dig in deeper to ideas of hope and despair, but then we would be treading in the territories of faith and disbelief and I don’t think we have the time to go there. But, all that aside, Does Your Soul Have A Cold? Is a great documentary that will stimulate a lot of conversation on the subject of depression and also bring into question the role of the drug companies in perpetuating a problem that they are promising to cure. It was featured on IFC in October. For more information about the film, visit
www.IFC.com.