On the essays shelf:
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
Another essay from Unholy Ghost, a collection with different writers writing about their experience with depression.
A major issue with depression (TM) is that it eludes language. This is not an original observation, and really since we’ve had language, human beings have been seeking to find appropriate/accurate language to describe this particularly awful and persistent state of being. The Bible does a good job in parts. Poets are particularly good. Winston Churchill described his own depression as a “black dog”, which really resounds with me. Your mileage may vary. It’s frustrating to not have words (outside of cliches) to describe your own experience.
Speaking of language/poets, the title of this excellent essay, which is about language, comes from Shakespeare, As You Like It, from the classically “melancholy” character Jaques.
I don’t think this matter of language just concerns writers, although they may be more attuned to it, since avoiding cliche and finding accurate terms is part of their stock in trade. But even in the writing trade, those who are depressed (in a clinical sense) have a hard time explaining “what it is like for them”, and it becomes even more difficult when the word “depression” has entered the lexicon so forcibly, in a short-hand way, as a stand-in for all of the complexities of brain/emotional chemistry. Then it’s even more alienating. Because the word itself seems to cut off the experience. I wonder if others have felt the same way (I am sure they have). So the word “Depression” is used by everyone, and in a way the word itself is used to cut off the expression of the depth of the experience. It is used to “sum up”, and nobody wants to hear about how you feel split off from yourself, how you feel like you live in a dark windowless room (I think of what I consider to be Sylvia Plath’s saddest line, in a poem where she imagines what her baby sees when she looks up at her mother: “this ceiling without a star”.) You try to find the right words, and someone sums it up, “Sounds like you’re Depressed.”
Joshua Wolf Shenk (great name, huh?) is a journalist specializing in mental health. He wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln, a famous melancholic person. He has struggled with a nameless sense of dissociation since he was a child, being split off from himself, always observing, in a way that is quite painful, but also has helped him to be a writer (and writing helps him with the feeling). Drugs do not help him. Therapy has helped, a bit, at least in finding ways to express his sensations and experience (sometimes a good therapist or doctor, trained to listen on that other deeper level, can “sum up” your experience with an image that sets you free, at least in terms of giving you a structure to understand). My doctor pointed at an empty chair in his office and said, “We are going to put your illness over there in that chair, and we are going to deal with it from over here. We will separate what is your illness and what is your personality. And so the illness will stay over there.” Sounds so simple, but it was really really helpful. Because you can go into a mind-trip: “I’m crazy.” “I clearly can’t cope with life.” “I am an incapable person.” Etc. But depression (TM) is an illness. You wouldn’t NOT treat yourself for pneumonia if you had it, and you wouldn’t consider it a moral failing or a character flaw if you had to get treatment. So I like the image of my illness sitting over in that chair, in the room with me, but distinguished and separated out so it can be managed. It’s an image, a stand-in, a metaphor that is helpful.
William Styron, in his book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Here is an excerpt.
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
In Seeing Voices, his book on the language of the death, Oliver Sachs notes that philosophers have long dreamed of “a primordial or original human language, in which everything has its true and natural name; a language so concrete, so particular, that it can catch the essence, the ‘itness’ of everything; so spontaneous that it expresses all emotion directly; and so transparent that it is incapable of any evasion or deception. Such a language would be without (and indeed would have no need for) logic, grammar, metaphor, or abstractions – it would be a language not mediated, a symbolic expression of thought and feeling, but, almost magically, an immediate one.”
I hoped for such fluid, full, direct communication in therapy. I tried to express the relentless stream of criticism that I directed at myself and others, the way I felt split in two, the dull and sharp aches that moved around my body as though taunting me. I wished to plug a probe from my brain to the doctor’s so that he could see – without mediation – how I stood outside myself, watching and criticizing, and could never fully participate in a moment. How I felt bewildered, anguished, horrified.
Instead, I often found myself silent. When I spoke, it was with stumble and stammers. Words – unhappy, anxious, lonely – seemed plainly inadequate, as did modifiers: all the time, without relief. Ordinary phrases such as I feel bad or I am unhappy seemed pallid. Evocative metaphors – My soul is like burned skin, aching at my touch; I have the emotional equivalent of a dislocated limb – were garish. Though this language hinted at how bad I felt, it could not express what it felt like to be me.
I suppose the combination of words, body language, and silence did, in some measure, convey the message, because my first therapist was able to offer me a helpful phrase. “Is it,” he asked, “as though you have a soundtrack of negative thoughts in your head – the volume rising or falling, but never going silent?” I pictured an old reel-to-reel tape machine, sitting alone on a table in an empty room. I lingered over the image, comforted, especially by the acknowledgement that it never stopped. And I felt a spark of recognition, a kind of introduction to the meaning of my own experience.
The soundtrack image was an imperfect one, as I do not “hear images” in the sense of hallucination, nor are the bad feelings that echo inside me always in words, nor can I always discern the difference between self-criticism and observation, between a gratuitous self-slap and a guide to truth.
But of several hundred afternoons in that Cincinnati office, this moment stands out – the offer and acceptance of a liberating, idiosyncratic metaphor, one that would need many revisions, but at least got me on the page. By contrast, I have no memory of hearing the word “depressed”, which was how I was described at that time to my parents and to insurance companies.
In his exhaustive survey, Melancholia & Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times, the historian Stanley W. Jackson concludes that “no literal statement” can convey the experience. But he found that, over 2,500 years, two images recur most often: “being in a state of darkness and being weighed down”. If we consider “melancholy” and “depression” as condensations of these images – as more than diagnoses – they retain enormous power. One of my earliest attempts at essay writing dwelled at length on an image of a dark room lit only by the space beneath the closed door. I did not make a habit of spending time in such rooms. The image of darkness imposed itself upon me, as it has for so many, as a symbol of distress.
And my dislike for the word “depression” does not mean that it has no application in my life. I am often “bowed down greatly” (from Psalm 58), feel weighed upon, feel myself on lower than level ground. Compared with others, it seems, I get less pleasure from what’s pleasurable and have a harder time with what’s hard. My sex drive is often muted (even without antidepressant medication, which exacerbates this problem). Work and activity that require some suspension of self-consciousness – like playing team sports – are difficult, bordering on impossible. I’ve tended toward activities in which self-criticism can be an asset, like writing. A tightness, an anxiety, a desperation usually grips me when I wake, relaxes its hold only occasionally through the day, and accompanies me when I lie down.
But, even as metaphors, these words are too thin to contain a life. For example, the times when I do pass from withdrawn to talkative are often quite unpleasant. Darkness aches, but light blinds.
