Read and discuss paper

Understanding Depression

The question that is addressed in this paper is ‘what is the experience of depression?’ and also ‘what is the experience of trying to understand the experience of depression?’ Perhaps also ‘what is the experience of having a depressed friend?’ The key phrase for me that captures what the paper is trying to do is: ‘perhaps it is in this striving to find the words that come closest to revealing the actual lived experience’. It is a hard journey to find words to grasp the experience, especially when undertaken in the knowledge that the whole will always evade or be more than the sum of the parts or the words.

The journey takes a number of turns, each one adding another layer or aspect of the landscape of the experience and giving more texture to it - from dictionary definitions, newspaper articles, lists of medical symptoms to etymology – revealing the paucity of ‘knowing about’ depression through under-statements like ‘sadness’ as opposed to ‘understanding’ it. The writer shuns ‘why’ questions in favour of dwelling with depression: bearing witness to it by adopting a visceral tone directed to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect.

I liked the language and style used. Where there is descriptive language, it is potent and evocative – the ‘pale, emaciated woman with stringy unwashed hair and dark sunken eyes’ and a ‘slow and arduous gait’. There is something fugitive about the encounter between the two friends – they meet in a ‘quiet coffee shop’ – the friend sneaks ‘glances’ at the depressed friend. But most of the time, the writer approaches the experience of depression through metaphor. Depression is like ‘walking under water’ says one person. It is like a weight exerted on the depressed person - ‘a sunken place’, ‘pressed down’, ‘heaviness’, ‘sinking lower and lower into the mattress’, she is ‘dragging the weight of the world behind her’. It is like the loss of light – a ‘light bulb went off inside of me’. There are powerful elisions, for example, around ‘forgetting’ - depression breeds confusion and forgetfulness and at a deeper level, the ‘depressed body’ seems to have forgotten itself and its purpose in the world.

The experience of being with a depressed friend is presented through a series of contrasts – the lively, full, happy relationship of the past with the emptiness of the present.  There is a powerful contrast between light and dark, absence and presence – the absence of light, the depressed friend who is ‘just barely there’, almost absent, only just present, lost. Contrasts highlight feelings of confusion and mixed emotion e.g. ‘my best friend’ and ‘I don’t know this person’ – wanting to stay and wanting to run away.

All existential dimensions are disrupted by depression. Space changes – there is a distance between the two friends; the depressed friend is characterised as far away, almost beyond reach. The body changes: the body the friend sees in the coffee shop is not the same as the friend she knew. Depression is inscribed on her body – her hair, her eyes (cast down, not seeing), her gait, her lethargy. It is not something she can conceal. Time stands still for the depressed person and for the friendship. We have no idea how long the coffee shop encounter lasted for. The writer slips between the past and the present because the present seems to have been evacuated by the depression.

I also liked the way that depression is performed in this piece. It is active. The writer gives the ‘disorder’ and the experience of it an identity and physicality. Depression is an intruder, a very unwelcome guest, a thief. It is something that enters from the outside turning off all light and physically blocking the person from the world, it ‘sits in front of her, making her seem faded in comparison – ‘I have to look through it to see her’. When ‘it’ enters and takes up its possessive place, it assumes ontological power – it takes over ‘the depressed person's entire being’ so that ‘his or her entire world is depressed’. It is referred to as changing the world - ‘to be depressed is to live in a different world’. This ontological intruder is overwhelming, arbitrary, uninvited and ‘unevictable’. It is ‘entire’ - an all-encompassing web from which it is impossible to escape: depression is like a ‘terrible trick [...] making one believe that these horrible feelings have always been and will never end.’

The paper made me wonder about the term 'anecdote' as it seemed too weak a concept to capture some of the powerful moves made in this paper.