What is a Life After Depression Meant to Look Like?
Psychiatric disorders like clinical depression rob us of our ability to experience the terrible pain and trauma of a life lived well. How deliciously ironic that a lot of people now believe those emotional experiences are themselves the manifestations of mental illness!
This is the final installment of a Wise & Well Special Report: The United States of Depression.
Recently I attended an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at which the author and Princeton academic Yiyun Li was being interviewed about her latest novel, The Book of Goose (2023). The discussion was wide-ranging, but what didn’t come up was that, in 2012, she had a breakdown, attempted suicide twice, was hospitalized, eventually recovered, and shortly after she returned to the land of the living to pick up the pieces of her life, her sixteen-year-old son killed himself.
I found out these aspects of her biography after the event, and I couldn’t square it. How could someone who had endured such terror and torment summon the joy with which she spoke? She was so full of grace, quick to find the humor in the moment, worldly-wise but not at all cynical…
