Followers of my twitter feed will have noticed already what writer’s duty compels me to admit: my seasonal depression has come early this winter (but then, so has the winter). Despite a happy, productive autumn and my recent adventures in 日本, I lack the powers magical or cognitive to stave off that slow slide underwater. It’s been a week; I’ll probably experience another two or so before my equilibrium rights itself.
Coincidentally, this week a copy of the local student journal appeared in my office, as it sometimes does. In such sites recreational columnists cut their teeth, and this week the pseudonymous incumbent turned a sharpened pen on mental illness. (An idea of the tone can be inferred from a previous column in which she suggested that “if you see some fat fuck ordering chips at the UCSA it is your moral duty to stop them”.) I’ve turned these words over in my mind in the last few days, their mixture of acerbica and disdain. I wonder what it would be like to read something like this as, say, a first-year student with depression, which, of course, I once was.
One question raised by the column is whether the mentally ill should reveal or conceal their illness. I don’t advocate an indiscriminate openness about one’s condition, even as writing about it on the internet might suggest otherwise. My experience has been the most effective line to walk with mental illness is to put others on a need-to-know basis. Employers, family and friends one can tell, and the more business-like the better. This is what I have, this is how it typically affects me, this is what you can do. Not everyone with mental illness has had the luxury of time and consistency to figure this out, of course, and not everyone’s illness is subject to patterns. I’m fortunate, I suspect, in that my professional competency works like insurance with regard to others’ acceptance of my seasonal suffering. At the same time, I’ve tailored my skills and role in my job very carefully over time so that the impact upon it, when I go mental, is small.
And go mental I do, infrequently, bitterly and with something like sardonic fury, dragging my metaphorical feet and troubling my literal dogs with these short-term black moods. It comes back bi-annually like a lover who’s no good for me; all that needs to happen is a tug to the invisible cord about my wrist and I’m done for, for a while. These days I have a working double-hull, from which able in less heavy moments to observe myself going under, to note with some precision the depth and length of my submersion, and compare it with the existing data, stored in memory. This time around, my knowledge that it will likely stop in a while seems a stronger talisman than usual. There’s something to be said for the mind that knows its emotions’ impermanence.
DandyID
Blogger
Flickr
YouTube
Twitter
Vimeo
Twitpic
Tumblr
Linkedin
LiveJournal
Mobypicture
Facebook
Picasa
Google Profiles
Google Reader
Posterous
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Being able to say “here I go again” is a mixed blessing, yes?
Stephen’s last post was Data mining
Yes indeed, and not only because of the risk of an earworm therein.
You’re playing my tune, in more ways than one
Paul Litterick’s last post was Komm in meinen Wigwam
I’d like to offer up another link by way of riposte, but, to be honest, I’ve not listened to much this week except for the comedy album by The Lonely Island (they of “I’m On a Boat” fame).
I appreciate the clarity of your descriptions of what it is like, and your openness. Ignorance is not bliss.
Thank you. It seems a strange thing on which to hone any craft but I tend to think that if I can write clearly about it, I can write clearly about anything!
I have been following your tweets and wanting to offer words of comfort, but everything I came up with sounded trite and cliched.
So at the risk of sounding trite and cliched, know that this too will pass.
And this might help (if only for reasons of Schadenfreude).
http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/
sas’s last post was a few hours of bliss
Thank you; I don’t think your kind words are trite, not least because I think they are true.
Having said that, I suspect one of the harder challenges about chronic illness for vulnerable people (and my vulnerabilities are pretty well-shored-up in this regard, so I don’t include myself among them any more) is the kind of well-meaning but harmful advice that people give. I still remember how it felt when I was first ill as a teenager and an elderly relative said to my mother, “What’s she got to be depressed about? She’s a Christian!”. While I was already on the road to atheism, that reaction sped my passage just a little faster.
Apart from the most obvious consideration – that we could all use the insight – you write beautifully about this, I hope it will go into the digest.
(Temptation to suggest we all pay a friendly visit to the pseudonymous student mag columnist: successfully resisted. )
Giovanni’s last post was The History of Your Blood
Thank you. A trackback flicked out to the site in question before I removed the link, not wanting to start a wordy war of antagonism with a student columnist, although the trackback remains. When playing Social Darwinism for laffs, it’s pretty easy to forget the humanity of the vulnerable whom one’s barbs pick off.
I’ll put the entry in the digest this evening.
I think as long as it doesn’t cost you too much it’s good to be honest. People can’t understand if no one explains. In retrospect I probably did have a bout of depression in my teens. I remember sleeping far more than usual and at one point I just gave up speaking for a few days. In my 20s I lived with my sister when she literally didn’t leave the house for 6 months which I think must have been depression. I wasn’t tremendously sympathetic at the time.
Nowadays I get hormonal days when everything seems totally bleak and pointless and also days of extreme anxiety and sensitivity to all the suffering in the world. I don’t know- but I think all of these things might be what it is like to live with depression and I do sometimes feel like I’m walking on a knife edge with it and I’ll tip over if I don’t keep careful watch or if I’m unlucky, as anyone can be, and something external happens to to tip me over- But when I’m feeling cheery and up and resilient ,which touch wood, so far I’m lucky in that I do quite often- I forget. My demons seem quite easy to keep in the box and if I can do it, it seems like anyone could-which is, of course, a completely stupid view and it is good for me to be reminded of that
I have many among my friends who have said of the past as you do, MTNW, “[i]n retrospect I probably did have a bout of depression …”. I think it can be particularly rough for teens, since society doesn’t hold them in particularly high regard anyway and people expect them to suffer.
It was really only my parents’ determined persistence over two years or more that saw me receive some help at that time, and that help was in itself a mixed blessing. Once I was diagnosed, they were further determined to keep me out of any of the state’s facilities, observing that people who went in with serious but treatable illnesses often got worse, not better. A university friend who lived at Sunnyside for some time in the 1990s told me at one point that the food budget was alleged to be one dollar per person per day.
One of the difficulties I think in diagnosing depression is the way it can mimic the normal ebb and flow of mood, and is often triggered by events that one might expect to feel bad about anyway. (One could analogise it to a hangover that has you vomiting for a week instead of an hour or two). And like other painful experiences, once it’s done, we don’t want to think about it, exactly as you describe. Under the Protestant work ethic and its heritage we have, I think, further anxieties about weakness and laziness that make it difficult to face up to the possibility of a depressive episode, which is compounded by the fact that depression makes you feel both lazy and weak.
Having said all that, I am a firm advocate for drugs and therapy (from a clinical psychologist, not a helpful person from the community) where both have clear goals and aimed-for outcomes. I will be on anti-depressants for the rest of my life but completed some years ago now my therapeutic goals for my current circumstances. I am not a fan of a generalised talking cure.
It’s a tough illness that affects tough people.
HB, you are quite possibly one of the most beautiful people I have never met.
merc’s last post was Leaving.
I appreciate your kind words and should also publicly acknowledge what a difference the loving care of Señor Mojito, who is in this relationship with his eyes open, has made to my experiences this season.
Things pass.
Stephen’s last post was Smiling sourly
This link rode the boundary of too poignant for me but I think it has the worst of the experience fairly well.
Ah, public shaming has begun.
Stephen’s last post was Smiling sourly
It’s interesting that so many of the commenters have accepted the implications of the original assertion: that mental illnesses are all genetic disorders that will be passed down, like it or not. This seems a curiously partial understanding on the commenters’ part (although given the location I shouldn’t really be surprised) of the nature/nurture nexus with regard to mental illness.
Having said all that, I have settled on the same conclusion as your own words on PA System about another pen that writes-to-provoke, concerning the article in question: the author is “a Coulteresque performer whose main goal is arousing the passions”.
Well, on the face of it there would appear to be an element of truth in the genetic hypothesis, although of course it’s hardly a guaranteed outcome. But Justine and I had to think long and hard about that one, and it was by no means an easy decision. That’s what makes the ‘opinion piece’ even more infuriating, to my mind.
Giovanni’s last post was Liveblogging the Apocalypse