Metablog

Welcome to part two of this three part series on depression. (Index to other parts.) This would be part of part 1 except that Wordpress decided it wanted to cut off my post after it was halfway through.

Solomon, of course, faces severe apathy at the worst of his depression. I think the extent of this is best illustrated by a quote from the book:

There has been relatively little written about the fact that breakdowns are preposterous; seeking dignity, and seeking to dignify the sufferings of others, one can easily overlook this fact. It is, however, real and true, and obvious when you are depressed. Depression minutes are like dog years, based on some artificial notion of time. I can remember lying frozen in bed, crying because I was too frightened to take a shower, and at the same time knowing that showers are not scary. I kept running through the individual steps in my mind: you turn and put your feet on the floor; you stand; you walk from here to the bathroom; you open the bathroom door; you walk to the edge of the tub; you turn on the water; you step under the water; you rub yourself with soap; you rinse; you step out; you dry yourself; you walk back to the bed. Twelve steps, which sounded to me then as onerous as a tour through the stations of the cross. But I know, logically, that showers were easy, that for years I had taken a shower every day and that I had done it so quickly and so matter-of-factly that it had not even warranted comment. I knew that those twelve steps were really quite manageable. I knew that I could even get someone else to help me with some of them. I would have a few seconds of relief contemplating that thought. Someone else could open the bathroom door. I knew I could probably manage two or three steps, so with all the force in my body I would sit up; I would turn and put my feet on the floor; and then I would feel so incapacitated and so frightened that I would roll over and lie facedown, my feet still on the floor. I would sometimes start to cry again, weeping not only because of what I could not do, but because the fact that I could not do it seemed so idiotic to me. All over the world people were taking showers. Why, oh why, could I not be one of them? And then I would reflect that those people also had families and jobs and bank accounts and passports and dinner plans and problems, real problems, cancer and hunger and the death of their children and isolating loneliness and failure; and I had so few problems by comparison, except that I couldn’t turn over again, until a few hours later, when my father or a friend would come in and help to hoist my feet back up onto the bed. By then, the idea of a shower would have come to seem foolish and unrealistic, and I would be relieved to have been able to get my feet back up, and I would lie in the safety of the bed and feel ridiculous. And sometimes in some quiet part of me there was a little bit of laughter at that ridiculousness, and my ability to see that, is, I think, what got me through. Always at the back of my mind there was a voice, calm and clear, that said, don’t be so maudlin; don’t do anything melodramatic. Take off your clothes, put on your pajamas, go to bed; in themorning, get up, get dressed, and do whatever it is you’re supposed to do. I heard that voice all the time, that voice like my mother’s. There was a sadness and a terrible loneliness as I contemplated what was lost. “Did anyone—not just the red-hot cultural center, but anyone, even my dentist—care that I had withdrawn from the fray?” Daphne Merkin wrote in a confessional essay on her own depression. “Would people mourn me if I never returned, never took up my place again?”

I was surprised, reading that description, that breakdowns that severe actually happen. I had never read a description of just how bad it can get. I had heard of suicidal people, but that’s an entirely different state of mind. Sucidality usually comes after the worst period of depression. At the bottom, you don’t really have the ability to even contemplate suicide, let alone plan and commit it.

I wonder exactly how prevelant episodes of that severity are. Solomon relates the statistics of those affected with depression early in the book: 3% of Americans suffer from chronic depression. 2-4% of these will eventually commit suicide due to their depression. (Among those with more extreme forms of depression, this rises to 15%.) But I didn’t catch any statistics about the prevelance of acute episodes, which I imagine is quite a bit higher than the suicide rate.

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