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.
Trigger warning, which should be on the other pieces about depression too: Discussion of suicide and depression following. The comments to my pieces on depression have been beautiful, heartfelt, and eloquent. I am so grateful to everyone who has been bold enough to share their own struggles. It helps to know you are not alone. Let’s keep the comments section that way. Thanks.
Martha Manning is a clinical psychologist and has written many books (both memoir-type books as well as guides for patients under treatment). She received the Presidential Award for Patient Advocacy in 1996, and she regularly writes columns on brain disorders, mood disorders, and treatment issues for every big national newspaper in the land. You probably recognize her name.
Depression has a genetic component, obviously, although researchers are still working it out. You can’t see it on an X -ray. Martha Manning grew up in a family “haunted by depression”, as she writes in her first paragraph. Her family is filled with solitary gloomy characters, alcoholics (a common “tell” for those who are self-medicating for other psychological issues), and her amazing essay begins with a portrait of her grandmother, who was clearly a depressed woman. The affliction seemed to skip a generation: Martha’s mother was capable, practical, and spiky, and Martha now sees that as a reaction to growing up with a mother who can’t get out of bed for days on end. Martha lived in fear of being her grandmother, and this fear blossomed in her young. She loved her grandmother. Her grandmother was sympathetic, and had a beautiful spirit, despite her (undiagnosed) illness. She wasn’t as strict as her mother. But then those bad days, those days when her grandmother surrendered to the blackness, were frightening, and she didn’t want to be around her grandmother then. Not just because it was scary to see someone you love sad for no reason, but because there was some spark of identification in Martha, even as a young child: it was like looking in a dark mirror: That could be you.
Depression announced itself early in Martha’s life. She had a hard time with everything. For no reason. Life itself just seemed difficult. Having a good and caring family can make a difference in the depressive’s destiny: If you grow up in a chaotic loveless environment, the chances of you turning to alcohol, drugs, whatever, are extremely high. Nature AND nurture are highly important. It’s not ALL genetic. Environment is key. Martha grew up with caring strict parents, went to school, did well, got married in her 20s. She wanted to be a therapist. She did her post-doctoral fellowship at McLean Hospital (the famous one). It is interesting how she was drawn to the very field she would become intimately acquainted with as a patient. Manning’s essay really talks about the imprint left by a family “haunted by depression”: Manning had first-hand experience of her grandmother, and she had remembered her great-grandmother, who was still alive when she was a child. Her great-grandmother was a hard-hearted critical woman, and Manning’s grandmother would wilt, almost visibly, when in her mother’s presence. You ache for Manning’s grandmother. She had experienced no help, no love, no care for her illness, although her whole family sort of organized itself around her intermittent incapacitations. But it had to be very lonely. She was never treated.
Martha Manning herself was struck by depression seriously in her 20s, although she had always had the propensity for it. When she was in her teens, a cousin committed suicide. You see, it is a family illness. This terrified Manning, and she got into therapy. Then began the familiar story: searching for treatment that would work. Searching for a therapist she clicked with. Meanwhile, she has a husband and daughter. In a way, that provided a good structure, but in another way, it was horrible, because her depressions were not a solitary experience. No man is an island and all that. Her young daughter, who was a child, learned young not to rely on her mother. Martha Manning is very honest about all of that, which is what makes the essay so painful, so cathartic.
No matter what drug she was put on, the depression remained to some degree. And nothing could erase the fear that she would turn into her grandmother. Manning’s fear about that borders on the obsessive, which is another quality of depression (and, certainly, bipolar: the depression takes on a ruminative, obsessive quality, going over the same horrible thoughts again and again and again kind of thing. You trap yourself. You are in a loop.) Certain drugs really helped, although Manning always resented them and thought she should be able to “do it” by herself (a common complaint). Nothing “got rid” of it for Manning. But of course, there are levels. There is a baseline of low energy or depression that can be endured. When things shift, and things get dangerous, it is usually obvious in retrospect, although not so much at the time. What distinguishes a normal level of depression and serious suicidal thinking? It’s not as clear as you might think.
Manning writes, harrowingly, of a time during her marriage, when her daughter was young, when her depression slipped over the edge into agony so acute that suicide started seeming like a valid option, not only to end her own pain, but to end the pain of her family who had to witness her suffering. (Yes, this doesn’t make sense. But to a suicidal person, it makes total sense.) This section killed me: her daughter would sing in the shower every morning, and Manning would listen to it.
One morning, finally convinced that suicide was an act of love not hate, I leaned for what I thought would be the last time against the door. I tried to memorize that voice, with all of its exuberance and innocence. With a sharp slap, her voice brought me to the realization that ending my life would be the surest way to silence that song.
Excruciatingly honest.
Here is an excerpt:
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
My great-grandmother was either authoritative or controlling, depending on how negatively her behavior was affecting you at the time. When we visited my grandmother in Massachusetts, we knew our visit would include a pilgrimage to her mother, Grammy Hale. As young as six or seven, I knew that there was a whole lot more going on during those visits than I could grasp. My intuitions were confirmed whenever children were dismissed immediately following raised voices. I sensed something big happened during those dismissals. Something bad. Later I found out that these were the times my great-grandmother roundly castigated my grandmother – for my grandmother’s break away from a middle-class Irish Catholic neighborhood to reside on the WASPiest street in the town or for the tone of a brief comment my grandmother had made weeks before. The crime didn’t matter. The punishment was always the same: my great-grandmother’s total and complete disgust.
After each visit, I noticed the way my grandmother deflated and remained silent on the drive back to her house. She was almost impossible to distract from her brooding, even with our most entertaining attempts. When we arrived back at her wonderful beach house and celebrated our freedom from creaking musty houses and strange old women, my grandmother was elusive. She stayed in her room, shades drawn against the sun and the ocean, windows shut tight against the clean salt air. It frustrated me to think that she was making herself oblivious to the most obvious ways to feel better.
When we kids asked what was wrong with Grandmother, grownups always told us the same things. Grandmother was “tired”, she “needed some rest,” she “wasn’t well”. The only thing we could possibly do to make her feel better – “Be quiet” – was nearly impossible. Trays that were delivered to her room earlier in the day were retrieved untouched. She didn’t even want to see me, her “golden girl,” who could usually snap her out of anything. Sometimes I’d sneak into her room and lie next to her when she was sleeping, matching my breathing to hers and stroking her hair and face. She didn’t have a fever, she wasn’t throwing up, and I didn’t see spots anywhere, so she wasn’t sick in any way I knew about. I wondered if misery grew with age and actually made people sick. The reasons each siege of sadness finally ended were no clearer to me than the reasons it began. When I asked about these things, unlike other times when I knew information was intentionally withheld, I almost believed my mother when her smile flickered for a moment and she said she didn’t know.
On her good days my grandmother was magic – extravagant, energetic, and interested. She allowed my cousins and me to tag along with her on her many errands and activities. She let us know that we were all perfectly wonderful children despite our parents’ petty complaints about us. She was fun in a way my mother never was. But, on her bad days, my grandmother wilted before my eyes. There was nowhere to tag along, because she didn’t go anywhere. She never got fully dressed. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t think I was perfect anymore. The air felt heavy around her, very still and hard to breathe. My grandfather, a CPA, seemed always to be working. My grandmother went to bed early (many times before dark). For a woman who spent this much time in bed, I was always puzzled by her daily complaint that she didn’t get enough sleep.
In early adolescence, my relationship with my grandmother changed. I felt some unspoken expectation that with my new maturity I owed her something. Now she wanted me to listen to her complaints of how badly she slept or how my grandfather worked too much or how her children didn’t understand her. Since I couldn’t do anything about her complaints, I left each interaction frustrated and resentful. She scared me in a way I couldn’t and didn’t want to understand. I felt an uneasy resonance with her, a sonar that picked up on cues that predicted a shift in her mood.
