The Books: Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey; ‘On Living Behind Bars’, by Nancy Mairs

On the essays shelf:

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey.

Another essay from Unholy Ghost, a collection with different writers writing about their experience with depression.

It is difficult to describe the harrowing experience of reading Nancy Mairs’ essay. It’s epic. Interestingly, it’s placed back to back with Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s essay on black women and depression, in which Danquah, a black woman, jokes (in a wary way) about all of the depression memoirs that seem to originate from white women in the Boston area. Mairs is a white woman in Massachusetts. Her depression showed up early in her life. She was committed to an asylum for half a year in 1967. Chillingly, she says that she now knows that she was not “crazy”, but that the asylum made her crazy, a common thing that happens. Treat someone as sick, they will act sick (to paraphrase Frances Farmer, another noted “madwoman”). Nancy Mairs had a husband, a daughter, and a lifetime of feeling inadequate and anxious to the point of panic. School filled her with dread, and not being good at something (quadratic equations, for example) was a horrifying experience. She could not manage it. She kept diaries, which she quotes from extensively throughout this monster essay. She eventually became an essayist, and she says that she sees how early that drive to create a narrative for her own life showed up.

She was given shock therapy in the asylum, something she had fought against, refusing to sign the forms that would allow it. Her refusal, or any sign of independence, was always interpreted as part of her illness. Any autonomy of self was suspect. It’s terrifying to read. (Another example, which made me love her: while in the hospital, she would sit in the common room with her transistor radio, and listen to Red Sox games with a little earpiece. When the Red Sox would score, she would cheer out loud, a common and valid response from any sports fan. But in the context of the hospital, it was seen as evidence of her Cray-Cray.) This is not to say she did not have a serious illness. Her panic and depression were so overwhelming they engulfed her. And, following that, the shame in not being capable, or able to “cope”, drowned her further. It’s a devastating self-confirming loop.

Her husband stuck by her. She writes, awfully, about how everything ceased feeling real, even her own daughter. That was right before her hospitalization. The way she writes it, the staff of the hospital were not trained to deal with the whole person, and many of them were “getting their experience” at this hospital before moving on to more prestigious hospitals like McLean. So there were lots of newbies, basically. She was admitted in the middle of the night, a huge mistake, which gave her the feeling of being in a state of emergency. She was catatonic with despair, and the doctor in charge of admitting her, who barely spoke English, kept saying to her, “Why are you here? Why are you here?”

Incompetent.

She writes so well about it that you long to bust her out of there. She was a child in the 1950s, and a young adult in the 1960s, and psychiatric medicine was still relatively new, and many of the “cures” were brutal. The shock therapy obliterated her short-term memory, although it did help her get her appetite back (she had slipped down to 93 pounds while in the hospital). One can only imagine how frightening that must have been, and how scared her husband and daughter must have been. She writes, honestly, about how she could tell that her daughter, very young, sort of discounted her mother as a valid influence in her life. Her daughter was All About Dad, which makes sense. Many bridges needed to be repaired.

The question remains: why did so many white women, so privileged and fortunate, all that, have such an issue with depression? Mairs writes (and I loved this line):

The wider my horizons, the more space in my world for disaster …

So why is that? We could be dismissive of these “privileged” women who can’t cope, who are so weak as to fall apart, the whole “first world problems” thing, but all of that is highly toxic to me, and I stay away from people who hold such views. When fighting for your mental health, you must do what you can to be with people who are positive, who love you, who can call you on your shit, but do so from a loving place. Contempt is forbidden. Life is hard enough. But Mairs is aware enough of her position to really speak about it. It’s fascinating.

I recently read Joan Acocella’s Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, a book on the “hysteria” phenomenon, particular to the Victorian era, as well as the “multiple personality disorder” phenomenon (very similar in nature), which exploded in the 80s and 90s, fading pretty quickly (although it still has some influence in psych literature). So here is where things get political, and here is where people start to tune you out, because of “feminist fatigue” or whatever the hell their problem is. There is also a dovetail with Elvis, as there usually is. If, on an unconscious level, you do not like the formula set out for you by the culture, if you fear you cannot live up to it, cannot fit into it, or have no desire to join that culture … often splits in the psyche can occur. (We have seen this come about in a tragic form with the recent epidemic of suicides of LGBT teens. A classic example.) The entire culture shouts at you at almost every moment, “Here is what you should want.” I’m a middle-aged unmarried woman with no children, so you’re going to just have to take my word for it, how intrusive and oppressive the messages can be when you don’t fit into the demographic at ALL. I am not feeling sorry for myself. In many ways, my life suits me. I love that I am free and unfettered, and I can go to Memphis by myself for a week and have a blast by myself. Regardless, this is my life, I only have one of them, and so I do not want to walk around with my head down, shamefaced about how I don’t have any of the things my peers have. HOWEVER: if you are a sensitive person, as most depressives are, then you will feel these things deeply. You will have to monitor your boundaries like a Soviet prison camp guard. You will have to pick and choose what you let into your head. It can be exhausting. The overall social construct is there, it’s set in stone. I am an outlaw, in many ways. I don’t mean to sound grandiose. I have many friends in similar positions. And all of my friends are accepting, and don’t give it a second thought, that my life doesn’t look like theirs. That’s not why we’re friends.

My point is, though, that that pressure is real. That pressure exists. And sometimes it does engulf the landscape. Shaming comments about being “self-indulgent”, or being “selfish” , are hurtful, ignorant, and insensitive.

But on a political level, especially in Mairs’ generation: you have the white picket fence dream, and you are supposed to fit into that. It is a VERY specific dream. It’s not just about finding someone you love and going off and being happy. It’s domestically-based, it involves specific products and outward aspects, and it’s the be-all end-all if you are a woman. There is a vast amount of research, both anecdotal and actual, showing that this attitude can actually CAUSE craziness.

Women were all going insane in Victorian-era with something called “hysteria”. Doctors would masturbate these women to orgasm, basically to calm them down. And with all the research, nobody seems to have said, “Women are freaking out because they lack political power and agency.” I am not an expert, so maybe some people were saying that! But in general, it was seen as a medical malady, rather than a political one.

And here we have again, a white woman, who is fortunate, educated, and privileged, being unable to deal with life as it is supposed to be. Her reaction to the culture was to basically opt out of it, by getting sick. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is all about that. I missed the political implications of her book when I first read it as a teenager, her dread of the conformity of the 1950s. Now that’s pretty much all I see. Again: Elvis is relevant: much of the mayhem he brought about seems to have been a reaction to the conformity of what was expected of girls at that time. As Lester Bangs observed in his famous obituary for Elvis:

Elvis Presley was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America (and thereby to the nation itself, since putting “popular arts” and “America” in the same sentence seems almost redundant). It has been said that he was the first white to sing like a black person, which is untrue in terms of hard facts but totally true in terms of cultural impact. But what’s more crucial is that when Elvis started wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.

I mean, don’t tell me about Lenny Bruce, man – Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s fuck.” The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates.

This is political in nature.

Also, it is important to keep in mind how oppressive the pressure is for girls to be “pleasing” and please others. There can be a certain relief in submerging into depression, saying, “You know what? I don’t give a shit anymore.” It’s all related, and is quite a tangle. Untangling it has been the work of Mairs’ life.

Mairs essay, like I said, is enormous and there are many different elements to it, all of them fascinating (she’s a hell of a writer). But here’s a section I particularly liked.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey: ‘On Living Behind Bars’, by Nancy Mairs

I finally found out what was “wrong” with me years and years later in a conversation with my present therapist. I had been bemoaning – still – my inability to make friends when Ken asked me how I had liked to spend my time when I was young. After I described, with considerable enthusiasm, the long walks I took in all weathers through the woods behind my house, he said, “There’s a term for people like you.” “What?” I perked up, always eager to pick up a new bit of psychological jargon. “It’s called being introverted,” he said. Introverted, for God’s sake. Some new jargon. Yet, familiar though the word was, I’d never applied it to myself. And suddenly, trying it on, I understood that my loneliness was not an aberration but an existential choice. “I think I ought to want friends,” I jotted in my journal after our conversation. “But by and large people don’t exist for me unless they’re present or built into my interior landscape. And I certainly don’t want to spend time with them.”

Introversion is no illness. It’s simply a habit of mind. Why then did I view it as the doom of my happiness and fulfillment? I could have done so only by believing that the one avenue to that happiness and fulfillment was laid not with my own insights and actions but with my relationships to others. And there, of course, is the paving stone of a womanly existence: to create and elaborate the social bonds that sustain community. Church fairs. Choir picnics. PTA. Summer playground programs. Covered-dish suppers. Christmas pageants. The men may leave the community regularly – in a village the size of the one I grew up in, all but a handful had to work elsewhere – but they leave their women behind with their telephones and their morning coffees and their bridge luncheons and their afternoon teas, all talking a mile a minute, their words like needles and patches and thread, their lives one long quilting bee of human bonding. Gossip is not idle. It is an exercise in design, the picking out of patterns in the social fabric. The fingers of every woman strengthen and embellish the whole.

A woman clumsy with a needle can thus be a serious liability, as can one who shirks the task. I kept meandering off, both literally, on those long solitary wooded ambles, and figuratively, plunging into inward thickets because I had “too much to think about.” My mother moderated and socialized my behavior as best she could. She frowned at, though she did not forbid, my jaunts. She paid for, though she could ill afford, ballroom-dancing lessons, summer camp, Fellowship retreats. She discouraged those too-passionate single attachments I formed desperately time and again, those fascinations with one other which disrupt the warp and woof of social intercourse. Instead she approved of group activities, and these I plowed into compulsively, taking on more and more responsibility, until the race from stage to printer to pulpit to meeting hall left me more than half dead with exhaustion.

None of this gave me any less to think about, only less time in which to do the thinking. Why then did I do it? I was a genuinely good child, a typical first-child/girl, who liked to please others. My mother conveyed to me, for the most part tacitly, that my natural way of being – solemn, solitary, reflective – was neither wholesome nor attractive; and my experience certainly bore her out. I was in a hopeless bind: to do as I would – to please others – I could not be as I was. And the greed for thinking: What does that signify? Simply, I think now, that I was a writer, which is not so dreadful a fate when you think about some of its alternatives. I could, for example, have been a certified public accountant. But from this distance I can see that, for that girl in that small town in the late 1950s, it set up some insoluble conflicts that turned it into quite a dreadful fate indeed.