I was actually looking for Swimming: Vintage Minis by Roger Deakin because after more than a year in this pandemic, I deeply missed to swim in the wild. Well, for now I tried to be more grateful that I can stay healthy and stay inside my house. When I was surfing online, I stumbled into a secondhand Depression: Vintage Minis. I thought it’s not going to hurt to read it. Especially, it’s one of my favorite topic. And I was looking for some analog (physical book) escape.
Most of the notes in this post will be straight from the book. This Vintage Minis is an unabridged version of his depression memoir, Darkness Visible. The memoir was originally published in 1990. The late William Styron already wrote his own experience with depression eloquently. William Styron was an award winning writer. His best-known work is The Confessions of Nat Turner which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. He died because of pneumonia in 2006.
Styron describe depression as a disorder of mood. He wrote that it is so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self — to the mediating intellect — as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode. He started his story with depression with his depressive experience he felt when he was about receiving an award. He traveled to Paris to receive the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, a prestigious literary award.
He tried to observe several stories related to suicidal moment of other writers. His words about suicide is what I recently feel about people that decided to take their own life. Especially figures that I look up to, such as Anthony Bourdain and Chester Bennington. Suicidal thought is a complex matter.
Randall Jarrell, an American poet, almost certainly killed himself. He did so not because he was a coward, nor out of any moral feebleness, but because he was afflicted with a depression that was so devastating that he could no longer endure the pain of it. The pain of depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
I feel that he was not trying to justify suicide. He just wanted to raise awareness that depression is complex. Bear in mind that he wrote this memoir around 1980 to 1989 when the awareness to mental health is not as high as today.
I will never learned what “caused” my depression, as no one will ever learn about their own, as no one will ever learn about their own. To be able to do so will likely forever prove to be an impossibility, so complex are the intermingled factors of abnormal chemistry, behavior and genetics. Plainly, multiple components are involved — perhaps three or four, most probably more, in fathomless permutations. That is why the greatest fallacy about suicide lies in the belief that there is single immediate answer — or perhaps combined answer — as to why the deed was done.
I really like this paragraph. This really feels like what I observed in the past two years with myself and my loved ones.
The madness of depression is the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis. psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
And then the two paragraphs that explain how hard it is to function socially with depression inside your head.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary, more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to wherever it goes. And this results in a striking experience — one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devastation would be lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained.
However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown, and God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.
Styron also notes the importance of committed and passionate support from our surrounding to help us face depression. This one paragraph reminds me about one artwork by Natalya Lobanova. And also a self reminder that toxic positivity is true.
A tough job, this; calling “Chin up!” from the safety of the shore to a drowning person is a tantamount to insult, but it has been shown over and over again that if the encouragement is dogged enough — and the support equally committed and passionate — the endangered one can nearly always be saved. Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality. It may require on the part of friends, lover, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life’s worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense their own worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides.
He also wrote about his experience when he decided to be hospitalized. He admitted his privilege to afford the care he needed as well. In his case, treatment in hospital is one important factor to recover.
On his recovery process, he discovered one possibility of his source of depression. He learned about incomplete-mourning theory by historian Howard I. Kushner. He tried to reflect back to the death of his mother when he was 14 years old.
Much obviously remains to be learned (and a great deal will doubtless continue to be a mystery, owing to the disease’s idiophatic nature, its constant interchangeability of factors), but certainly one psychological element has been established beyond reasonable doubt, and that is the concept of loss. Loss in all of its manifestation is the touchstone of depression — in the progress of the disease, and most likely, in its origin.
I would gradually be persuaded that devastating loss in childhood figured as a probable genesis of my own disorder, meanwhile, as I monitored my retrograde condition, I felt loss at every hand. The loss of self-esteem is a celebrated symptom, and my own sense of self had all but disappeared, along with any self-reliance. This loss quickly degenerate into dependence, and from dependence into infantile dread. One dreads the loss of all things, all people close and dear. There is an acute fear of abandonment. Being alone in the house, event for a moment, caused me exquisite panic and trepidation.
This book is a good starter to understand more about depression from the person suffered by it. At least, if we haven’t felt it, we need to understand that the feeling is, most of the time, beyond description.
I’d like to emphasize again that depression is a complex matter. Personally, I try to avoid self-diagnose. Whenever you can, it’s better to seek professional help. However, I know it’s not always affordable for most people to afford a treatment that can match their situation. I know, it’s not easy. For now, I choose to understand more of what I feel. To feel and build more empathy of what my closed-ones feel.
Maybe, I just need to befriend with the depression.
I hope you can find your own ways to cope, and stay healthy.
