Being Depressed
The cover of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine in jangled hand-printing reads “I have sat in shrinks’ offices going on four decades now and talked about my wish to die the way other people might talk about their wish to find a lover.” These words surround a small dark snapshot of a woman’s face looking at the camera in utter despair.
I know that face, just as I know something about the feeling those words describe. A quarter of a century ago, the writer, Daphne Merkin, fresh out of college, worked for me at McCalls, a gifted young woman, more serious than most but glowing with ambition for the literary career that stretched ahead of her.
Now, in painful detail, she tells of a life since then in a black cloud of chronic depression punctuated by constant psychotherapy and mounds of medication, ending in a hospital stay anguishing over whether or not to submit to ECT, electro-shock therapy.
Her thousands of words evoke the extreme of a condition I have lived with since childhood, suffered with in loved ones and anguished over with friends and colleagues. Her account will resonate with the afflicted and baffle those lucky enough to find it exotic, perhaps even self-indulgent.
Yet it is at the heart of modern life, as painful, debilitating and destructive as cancer.
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3 Responses to “Being Depressed”
[...] Robert Stein at The Moderate Voice [...]
Robert, thank you for this. Every word resonated for me.
thanks Robert… I'd just say this, that having practiced clinicallly for near 40 years, depressive issues, that is, the chemistry that underlies it, is one of the LEAST studied of all body veerings that affect mood. The studies of trauma and shock are absurdly absent from public discussion and from monies spent to discover and treat the many kinds of mood variances that interfere with people's lives, making them have to push in an almost super-human way to just move from place to place whilst feeling weighted with immanent doom sensations, and more
The fact that 'experts' are still arguing about post-trauma sysdrome, says we are still in the dark ages. Kay Redfield Jamison and your friend who writes about mood destabilizations, and the thought processes that go with them, having likely done MORE than most to bring the issues above ground and keep them there.
Brava to your friend, and it may be time now, with NIH and other grants, that we will see some progress in research. My clinical experience is that depression that is debilitating is not one 'disorder'…. that like other illnesses that interfere with a person's health, there are many kinds of depression and not just endogenous and exogenous, but many many kinds.
As with cancer (although that is not an equal analogy) the treatments for each kind of cancer have gone from, there is no treatment, to specific treatments that work well for specific kinds of cancer.
Too, I sense that how long a person has carried a deep depression, or a continuously 'dragging dead body around' one, also must have specific tendering of treatment; the person who's carried a chemicological imbalance that has in some ways inhibited them and often dearly hurt them for decades, being different than the person who's carried such for a year. I believe the brain synapses make adaptive pathways that deepen, or entrench doom-thought or dread-thoughts and/or deep anxiety thoughts. All the more reason to heavily invest in research that is science based, and independently funded, and not necessarily first pharmaceutically funded.
I will glory the day when we can name the many different kinds of chemicological depression and treat it quickly and adequately to restore the body and brain chemicals to a mean that supports the personality without altering its talents or sexual responsiveness or other 'side affects.'
“Side effects” be darned. If we can count strands of DNA and go to the freaking moon,I know we can and WILL have effective cures for the ganglia of symptoms that define debilitating and dogged depression.
I just have a feeling too about NIMH (National Institue of Mental Health) that under a new administration that is looking inside the hallowed halls of so many orgs and 'cleaning house,' ….along with the FDA housecleaning and the egregious lack of care and inspection given to our foods and drug releases over the last decade… that it is a new day for funding and research and real development of an accurate map of brain chemical veerings that make life hell for so many. I believe the medicines fine tuned are coming. And soon.
Thanks for your mercy on others Robert by saying your piece and telling us about your own journey. Just my two cents' worth: Depression is not a characterlogical weakness, nor a mental illness. It is a brain chemical imbalance, far more akin to sky high blood sugar or MS or other attacks on the body. It is a physiological disorder first and foremost
dr.e