First to consider, I suppose, is the age-old question: the chicken or the egg: which came first? An interesting intellectual exercise, no doubt, but isn’t the energy expended in trying to decipher this dilemma rather futilely spent?

How about if we let folks with more time on their hands tinker around with this particular debate, ok?

Next up: Nick Hornby asks, in his thought-provoking novel High Fidelity, when considering some of his favorite songs (“Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” “When Love Breaks Down,” “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” etc.): “[w]hat came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?” (pp. 24-25)

Again, more of life’s great questions that I think I’ll leave to the pundits and amateur therapists & philosophers out there who focus on our popular culture.

All of this is just a weak lead-in to where I’m really going with this self-reflective, self-indulgent discourse today: my own questions about chronic pain and depression. In a 2003 Stanford University study, not surprisingly, the correlation between chronic pain and depression was found to be quite high: sufferers of one likely needed treatment for both. “The question now is which comes first: the depression or the pain,” they asked. Of course, I think it likely works both ways. For example, just as depression is common among individuals who suffer from lower-back pain, it also appears to be true that depressed individuals can develop lower-back pain.

In my case, I have lived rather my entire life wondering about such issues. After approximately 40 years of chronic physical pain (beginning in my early 20s), the downturns to my physical self are quite typically mirrored in a mood decline. And, then again, when an outside entity or event exerts a change to my emotional well-being, my body almost always follows. The peaks and valleys for my affective state completely parallel my physical ups and downs.

In sum, this serves to remind me that I need to revisit a book I started a little while back, and then subsequently got sidetracked from…Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. It’s a rather large and scary tome, but valuable information is contained therein, nonetheless. I need more of what’s in there, I think.