Depression

But when it came to holding fast
All my heaped days as water went,
Breast-high in swirling dreams I stood,
With vain hands clutched the slipping past
Of straws and faces on the flood.

Robin Hyde, “White Irises” (1-4)

Many casual readers come to these pages by way of an online search for material on depression, dysthymia and the high-functioning depressive.  Since I’ve written a considerable number of entries concerned in whole or in part with these topics, this page provides an index to them, with extracts.  It can be used as a substitute for, or a portal to, the original entries.

“Breathe the Pressure” is an account of my decision to increase the dose of antidepressants I was then taking, and is best read in full.  Most online searches for high-functioning depressive or high-functioning depression will lead you to that post.

I am fortunate, when depression cows others to shells out of which their possibilities simply drain away, that I am what is perhaps euphemistically called a high-functioning depressive. We high functioners are neither more talented nor harder working than those whom this illness grinds to a complete stop. It’s more that our symptoms interact with our personalities in a way that allows us still to get on with life, although at times it is a battle that in itself has the power to bring us to an internal halt.  (20 April 2008)

“The Author on Drugs” (26 October 2008) reflects on my experience of changing anti-depressants after fourteen years on the same drug.  My reasons for changing are described in “I Will Not Let You Down” (4 August 2008).

For the last few years I have experienced my depression seasonally, in early summer and early winter.  Some accounts of this experience are extracted below, with links to their parent entries, which roam over a variety of topics.

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.  (9 May 2009)

I tend to think that depression doesn’t actually manufacture such feelings under its own steam alone: we are all capable when sane of feeling weepy, moody, shouty and grumpy, and there are plenty of ways in which one can feel terrible existential despair without being a nihilist or mentally ill in the course of a day.  What depression does seems to me quite similar to what hormones can do: peel back with a breathtaking rapidity the self’s outer claddings of functional optimism and equilibrium.  All those feelings that need to stay buried in order for us to go about our day–the fear, the horror–get called upon abundantly and unnecessarily.  Depressives spend time in the shadowlands that the mentally well need only enter in generally dark hours.  It’s ridiculous and infuriating, but there it is.  (21 December 2008)

I’ve often thought, too, that if depression is a malfunctioning of the mind’s grief mechanism, then texts in which genuine grief is explored are particularly attractive to depressives: this is what pain feels like when it’s purposeful pain, pain for a reason.  The historical events that inspire sad music also confine it: we know that the performer’s pain will not ride high like this forever, whereas that possibility is the dark threat of depression, to grieve forever about nothing.  (29 November 2008)

Of course, I didn’t know any better then that this need not be my lot in life, but I do now, and I resent the symptoms. At the same time however, if I’m honest, my deep and dysfunctional Protestant animus takes perverse pride in my misery: that I’m working so hard it’s making me sick converts, in this model, to the notion I am merely working hard enough. Look at me, paternal Scots ancestors! I’m contributing to our shared goal of universal higher education, and it’s really hard work! John Knox frowns slightly less and says that, for the moment at least, I’m not quite such a recidivist whore.  (29 April 2007)

… depression, as a function of an illness, is like a roadblock falling between me and these things, making it as if I see them across a barrier, or from a distance.  (16 December 2005)

Anger and soul-sucking gloom don’t make for accomplished work, even in something as loose as a on-line journal. But it’s to find some sort of utility in the writing process that I’m recording these feelings, for better or for worse, in the hope of pushing through this rage, this despair. In my grandmother’s last months, she would rouse briefly from stroke-incapacitated muteness and say, I’ve got to get better. I can feel myself sinking down, thinking something like the same. Get better, do better, be better. Puppy teeth bared to the world.  (3 December 2005)

In “Gin Trap” (13 April 2006) I consider the relationship between working in a stressful environment and my mental illness:

the second rung of my depression is realising that there’s never not going to be a time at work when I’m excused the duty of being assertive.

Elsewhere, I’ve tried to think about what it might be like to work with someone like me:

Sometimes I think that, having come out from behind my personal iron curtain of depression in early adulthood, I live my mental life at a faster pace than many people. It’s not exactly time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, more as if it were coming up behind me and I running to keep ahead. Most people don’t live by the same imperative, therefore at least some of my professional and personal friendships are usually in the process of wearing out. It’s hard, but I’d rather know that than not know.  (18 November 2004)

What effect has depression had on my character?  In 2005 I suggested that

I think I’ve always been doubly-directed, both introspective and an observer of others, but depression has sharpened my powers of self-observation to an exceptionally heightened level. That’s not to say I don’t have blindspots, because of course I do. But I hated so much the experience, at seventeen or eighteen, of my symptoms being under constant observation and interpretation by health professionals, that I took the attitude that, if I don’t look after this shit, then no-one else really can.  (3 February 2005)

Earlier, I considered this personal timeline in a different light:

In many ways I feel fortunate, which clearly isn’t the right word, to have had my worst depressive experiences (thus far) at the start of my adult life; I can’t imagine how I would be if I were negotiating now, mood-wise, what I lived through at eighteen. But in other ways I wish I could bring to bear the resources of my adult self on my depression without that adult self having been so thoroughly shaped–indeed, arguably, created–by the experience of that depression. What would it be like to have strutted on to the grown-up stage without the affective [note spelling] equivalent of the mark of Cain on me?  (24 November 2004)

The knowledge that depression will make its return generates a fear of its own, as I explained in spring of 2004:

It’s not the depression itself that’s intolerable when it occurs but rather the secondary fear that this might be the start of something with no perceptible exit, as was my first experience of depression as an adult. If I’m a bore on this subject I don’t (for once) apologise. It’s a marker in my life, a post driven into the ground, from which I slowly grow more and more distant but whose shadow remains visible.  (2 October 2004)

Part of writing online has been reflecting on the role these pages play in how I think about my own depression, and the way in which writing both keeps a record of my experiences and shapes thereby my thinking in the future.

Some of my reticence to write about trouble goes back to the bad old days of ‘92, when I was in an altered state thanks to tri-cyclic antidepressants and a mental health professional who might best be described as old-school: at that time, I simply could not stop talking, and it was all bad. …  Later I found it was the drugs talking as much as the depression, but by then a long enough shadow had been cast to mean that twelve years down the track, I stay in a permanent state of hesitation concerning narrating the blues. The blues look fairly black when they get dark enough.  (23 June 2004)

I won’t deny that this journal has a project-type function in terms of helping me manage my depression, although that was not the purpose in starting it, nor is it really the purpose in writing it. It’s undeniable, however, that converting the few peaks and troughs of my quiet life into best prosaic practice has the effect of containing difficult emotions–and when you’re a depressive, it’s the emotions that are the problem, not the circumstances by which they arise. I still hold tight to a view of writing as craft rather than … therapy, but one could also argue that there is a therapeutic outcome of exercising that craft.  (9 November 2004)

Another observation I make is how tenuous my grip on level affect has seemed at times, and how much I’ve struggled with my mood on a day-to-day basis. …  Without doubt I remain a high-functioning depressive, someone who enjoys long periods of good mental health, but the detailed blocks of quotidian struggle left me feeling that I have fought–and, I guess, continue to fight–significant daily battles in order to occupy this status.  (9 December 2007)

I’ve learned, too, about the seasonal changes by which my depression travels: the hard evidence of the archives tells me that twice a year I will go under, according to the artificial rhythms of the university which echo the seasons themselves.  This knowledge, though not necessarily consoling, is a kind of power.  (23 March 2008)

In the second half of “The Teeth of Te Whiro”, I consider the effect of depression on a friend of mine from student days who died on 29 August 2009.  Depression was an illness she experienced with a severity that outstripped my own experiences:

I think there are some things which cannot be withstood, even by people who are otherwise strong and brave.  Mental illness is one area in which experience can make things worse as easily as it can make it better.  In its severest forms, it erodes exactly that which preserves the will to live: the illogical optimism of the psyche.  (5 September 2009)