Passages from Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression

From “A Delicious Placebo” by Virginia Hefferman

I would say I was sick- sick with any ailment I could think of except “depression,” which no one, no matter what the brochures with grainy girls’ pictures and the word “reputable” say, will ever believe it is a real illness.

Overnight, it seemed, I’d gone from a twenty-eight-year old optimist, the type advertisers and politicians take into account, who might find a career and start a family, to a person who is unreliable and preoccupied, a person other people find themselves trying to avoid.

As I brooded over how dingy everything seemed, I wondered if I had thrown myself into depression in order to avoid having a career. It seemed like a possibility, particularly since this theory implied that I was both melodramatic and lazy.

Unless you are rich, and can convalesce in a sanatorium estate (where visitors come down a tiered, Oceanside lawn to find you at your easel), you have to keep going when you’re depressed. That means phone calls, appointments, errands, holidays, family, friends and colleagues.

From “Noontime” by Lauren Slater

When Benjamin and I decided to get pregnant, I visited four perinatal specialists to find out what the risks to the fetus would be if I stayed on my medication regime. The doctors, given the seriousness of my struggles with depression and anxiety, said “stay on.” They used words like “risk benefit analysis” and “statistical significance” and those words made no difference to me.

I have been told I need these pills to survive, same as a diabetic needs insulin, how ridiculously simplistic, but I’ll tell you it’s true. These pills, more than any egg or sperm, have brought me to the point in my life where pregnancy is possible. They threaten the embryo in the same time that they have ushered it from nothingness.

I know these symptoms, I do not have emphysema, or a bad heart, I am slipping- without my medication I always slip. I must go back on.

From “An Unwelcome Career” by David Karp

I thought for sure that my depression was rooted in these situational demands and that once I got tenure it would go away. In 1977, I was promoted and found the depression actually deepened. This suggested a wholly new and more frightening interpretation of depression’s locus. I had to confront the possibility that my sickness might not have arisen from social situation, but somehow from my self.

From “On Living Behind Bars” by Nancy Mairs

Never mind the successes I’d had in the past… they were quirks of fate. I achieved each one with the last reserves of my energy and abilities. “I’m afraid, to in a vague, uneasy way. Afraid of what I can do…I am afraid to grow. I am afraid that when the time comes that I am grown, I will not be able to face life for fear it will not be as beautiful as it is in my private existence.”

From “A Melancholy of Mine Own” by Joshua Wolf Shenk

Perhaps depression is simply hard to convey- even as Styron says “indescribable.” But I’d like to suggest another possibility, that what we call “depression,” like the mythical black bile, is a chimera. That it is cobbled together of so many different parts, causes, experiences, and affects as to render the word ineffectual and perhaps even noxious to a full, true narrative.

I felt as I had felt for as long as I could remember. I did not go to therapy to understand, or to get through, an episode. I needed to understand and get through my life.

In High School, I wrote in a poem that I wished “to be a slug, to have an exterior that exposed what I felt.’

I hoped for such fluid, full, direct communication in therapy, I tried to express the relentless streams of criticism that I directed at myself and others, the way I felt split in two, the dull and sharp aches that moved around my body as though taunting me. I wished to plug in a probe from my brain to the doctor’s so that he could see- without mediation how I stood outside myself, watching and criticizing and could never full participate in a moment.

From “The Legacy” Martha Manning

When I was depressed…he tried to get me to articulate what was wrong. Anyone who is seriously depressed knows that that task is as daunting as asking a lame man to tap-dance.

The medicine helped quickly and dramatically. It lifted a lifelong weight off my back and made me wonder, “Is this how regular people feel?” But like many people who take psychotropic medications for significant periods of time, I struggled with questions like, “Why can’t I do this on my own?” or, looking at tiny pills, “Is this all that stands between hell and me?”

Save