The other night I watched Birdman followed by updates about the plane crash in the French Alps. I read the analysis of the incidence of suicide among veterans. Despite mass media, continuous connection via hand held devices, and information at our fingertips, I concluded: We need to talk about depression. How many people walk around with depression as their constant companion? How many control it? How many are controlled by it? Is any disease more insidious than depression? It seems to sneak by, undervalued, untended, yet with the potential for crippling the person who suffers from it.
Years ago I read William Stryon’s Darkness Visible, a most personal journey. Then there was The Noonday Demon, detailing the complexity of depression in a more objective voice. To understand the power of the disease, the individual experiences of depression need to be shared. It morphs, shape-shifts and lives in such a way that even the people closest to the depressive don’t recognize it. People need a safe, shame-free environment to talk about their private, darkest abyss.
I live with a stranger. It shadows me and usually cowers in my wake. But I am always on high alert, prepared to face-off when, for whatever reason, it gathers strength and threatens to push me into darkness. When it succeeds in conjuring black days, I must force myself to do the things I love because the stranger has stolen their luster, faded their colors, and turned satisfaction into a question of “Why bother?” I am unable to shed one tear over the loss of these pleasures. Apathy and numbness coat me with emotional Kevlar. Pain can’t get in, nor can it get out. Hopelessness percolates within the armor.
For some reason the stranger stays away from me when I work. I think focus on a task or a problem, disempowers it. My work keeps the stranger at bay. Whether I am at my job or writing, the stalking shadow disappears and I free to stay on task, the best therapy. So I understand why, at the thought of losing his sight, a pilot succumbed to his depression. He lost his point of focus.
I have never taken drugs to kill the stranger. I feared clouding my mind and stifling my creativity. I didn’t want to jeopardize my ability to do the very things that kept me going. Do I keep moving, an earth bound fighter jet zig-zagging through the atmosphere to evade the enemy desperate to shoot me down? What happens when I sit still?
There is an upside to the stranger. I am never alone; there is comfort in that. The stranger keeps me piqued for action rather than reaction. Because of it, I experience the world differently. I weep over beautiful words, over paintings with brilliant colors and thick, textured strokes, over a rock formation in New Mexico shaped like a camel. But I also feel the pain when one pass with a wash cloth takes away a patch of skin from a critically ill patient. I choke when a patient chokes on his breathing tube. I feel the ground fall away when I tell someone a patient has died. Experiences in the day burn with a hyperacuity.
The victims of rape have been urged to come forward and speak about their violation as a step in healing and self-affirmation. At a time when both real life and art dissect the complexities of mental illness, it is time to speak openly about depression.
Leave a Reply