Published Elsewhere - Quoted in Entirety

Art of Darkness by Zach Gartenberg

A writer for the New York Times Magazine (Sept. 16, 2007), in reflecting on Owen Wilson's recent suicide attempt, wrote about her own experience with depression: "each time it occurs, I am struck by how paralyzing and isolating the experience is; it remains essentially impenetrable to people who can't (or don't care to) distinguish it from a random bad day." Later in the article, she remarks: "people who want to end it all have lost the necessary illusions that make their life bearable." Depression is an illness that affects many creative people. Those who have the keenness and verbal acuity to describe the experience often lend it an aesthetic meaning by virtue its profound and inscrutable painfulness. But there are serious disadvantages to making an artistic object out of a mental illness; literary treatments of this kind, it should be recognized, often ignore the practical and distort the difference between sickness and health.

Depression — to bring matters close to home — subverts the attempts of many students to have normal college careers. A student begins the semester at point A, and point B is not the end of the semester, but a premature departure for home — or the hospital. It is very difficult to halt the trajectory from A to B, and the reason for that has been suggested by writers on depression from William James to William Styron. The ubiquitous view of these writers is that their condition is too subjective and complex to be accurately described. If normal people can't recognize it, and depressed people can't communicate it, how can it be addressed effectively and in time? Yet the picture of depression as inaccessible to normal people merely reveals this difficulty without offering a positive solution to it.

Depression, while a mood disorder, ultimately affects and is expressed through one's behavior. And this fact does suggest ways to understand and deal with it. There are objective ways to tell that your friend is depressed – I mean clinically depressed – without reading his mind. (One indicator is that he seems to have withdrawn from the general sphere of human activity.) Most important, it is ultimately through regulating one's behavior that serious depression can be dealt with. By that I mean doing a few very practical things, impossible for a depressive person in the midst of an episode, absolutely essential for that person while not in one: taking medications as directed, exercising, eating healthily, talking to people, seeing a therapist. It is therefore unproductive to dwell, as many writers do, on the inscrutability of the experience of depression, when its symptoms are visible to sensitive observers and preventable by the very people who are at risk.

One can, I believe, only mitigate the effects of depression in concrete ways. Intellectualizing the experience, rendering it poetic, and exploring its enigma can be nothing more than challenging literary exercises. There is nothing wrong with taking up such exercises. But, while reading works like Styron's "Darkness Visible," one should bear in mind two things: (1) that meaningful accounts of depression can extend beyond the phenomenology of the illness; (2) that it is often by refusing to give depression's internal pain the time of day that the afflicted learn to cope with it.

What is misleading and perhaps harmful in writing on depression, however, is the notion that depression is what happens when one no longer has any illusions to prop him up. The message of the writer for the Times is that we must distort reality in order to tolerate it. Depressed people, she seems to say, see it like it is, and it does not look good. But that would seem to relieve them of combating their condition and all of the untrue thoughts that come with it. A sense of barren disillusionment is surely a feature of the experience of depression, but, in fact, the experience itself rests on illusions – that one is worthless, that things are hopeless, and so on. The idea that a healthy person is in some deep way deceived about the world is itself an illusion, one to which many writers on depression are prone. Writers who depict things this way lose sight of what is most important for those with depression to remember: that it is when one is healthy that one sees clearly.