If you live in the world, you have to deal with other people. Some of those people are going to be awkward. Fear not! Lifehacker has given us:  The Awkward Human Survival Guide , which has tips for coping with people who don’t know what to say/don’t know when to stop saying things/only know how to say the wrong things.

From the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum  FB page:

The Poe Murders is a graphic retelling of many of Edgar Allan Poe’s mystery and horror stories meshed into a single tale. The stories included in this graphic-novel are: The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death, The Purloined Letter, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Raven, as well as others. The graphic-novel will be told in the style of a mystery, in which the characters are searching for the mysterious source causing rational men and women to commit these horrific murders.

They have a limited time to raise the funds necessary; if you’d like to contribute for swell prizes go to their  Indiegogo page .

TEDx is the body that licenses people to have TED-style talks in various parts of the world. When it came to the attention of the TED folks that some pseudoscience was making its way into these talks, they issued this  letter, which is an excellent introduction to critical thinking. Hat tip to Lifehacker’s article:  How to Avoid Bad Science in TED Talks

The Most Common Grammar Gaffes Writers Make and How to Avoid Them . Nothing particularly new on this list, though these are rules that bear repeating. The thing that most WTFd my face was the first line of the article, which was, ‘In 2011, the publisher of my book  Enchantment  could not fill an order for 500 e-book copies.’ How… ? I mean… Nope, ‘How…?’ is all I have

Speaking of writers, here  are some beautiful posters of quotes from famous authors. All of them are elegant, but this is one of my favourites:

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron
001. For the thing which/I greatly feared is come upon me,/and that which I was afraid of/Is come unto me./I was not in safety, neither/had I rest, neither was I quiet;/you trouble came. –Job
002. Only days before I had concluded that I was suffering from a serious depressive illness, and was floundering helplessly in my efforts to deal with it. I wasn’t cheered by the festive occasion that had brought me to France. Of the many dreadful manifestations of the disease, both psychical and psychological, a sense of self-hatred—or, put less categorically, a failure of self-esteem—is one of the most universally experienced symptoms, and I suffered more and more from a general feeling of worthlessness as the malady had progressed.
003. Aided by the minor tranquilizer Halcion, I had managed to defeat my insomnia and get a few hours’ sleep. Thus I was in fair spirits. But such wan cheer was an habitual pretense which I knew meant very little, for I was certain to feel ghastly before nightfall. I had come to a point where I was carefully monitoring each phase of my deteriorating condition.
004. …I was close to a total ignoramus about depression, which can be as serious a medical affair as diabetes or cancer.
005. At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts, which, however, I could not put to practical use. The most honest authorities face up squarely to the fact that serious depression is not readily treatable. Unlike, let us say, diabetes, where immediate measure taken to rearrange the body’s adaptation to glucose can dramatically reverse a dangerous process and bring it under control, depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases. Except in those maladies strictly designated as malignant or degenerative, we expect some kind of treatment and eventual amelioration, by pills or physical therapy or diet or surgery, with a logical progression for the initial relief of symptoms to final cure. Frighteningly, the layman-sufferer from major depression, taking a peek into some of the many books currently on the market, will find much in the way of theory and symptomatology and very little that legitimately suggests the possibility of quick rescue. Those that do claim an easy way out are glib and most likely fraudulent. There are decent popular works which intelligently point the way toward treatment and cure, demonstrating how certain therapies—psychotherapy or pharmacology, or a combination of these—can indeed restore people to health in all but the most persistent and devastating cases…
006. The intense and sometimes comically strident factionalism that exists in present-day psychiatry—the schism between the believers in psychotherapy and the adherents of pharmacology—resembles the medical quarrels of the eighteenth century (to bleed or not to bleed) and almost defines in itself the inexplicable nature of depression and the difficulty of its treatment. As a clinician in the field told me honestly and, I think, with a striking deftness of analogy: “If you compare our knowledge with Columbus’s discovery of America, America is yet unknown; we are still down on that little island in Bahamas.”
007. In my reading I had learned, for example, that in at least one interesting respect my own case was atypical. Most people who begin to suffer from the illness are laid low in the morning, with such malefic effect that they are unable to get out of bed. The feel better only as the day wears on.
008. …if these states of excruciating near-paralysis are similar, as they probably are, the question of timing would seem to be academic.
009. But my behaviour was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory. At a later stage my entire mind would be dominated by anarchic disconnections; as I have said, there was now something that resembled bifurcation of mood: lucidity of sorts in the early hours of the day, gathering murk in the afternoon and evening.
010. …it was past four o’clock and my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world. … I was feeling inn my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain. … That the word ‘indescribably’ should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience. For myself, the pain is most closely connected to drowning or suffocation—but even these images are off the mark. William James, who battled depression for many years, gave up the search for an adequate portrayal, implying its near-impossibility when he wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience: ‘It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.’
011. The pain persisted during my museum tour and reached a crescendo in the next few hours when, back at the hotel, I fell into the bed and lay gazing at the ceiling, nearly immobilized and in a trance of supreme discomfort. Rational thought was usually absent from my mind at such times, hence trance. I can think of no more apposite word for this state of being, a condition of helpless stupor in which cognition was replaced by that ‘positive and active anguish.’ And one of the most unendurable aspects of such an interlude was the inability to sleep. It had been my custom of a near-lifetime, like that of vast numbers of people, to settle myself into a soothing nap in the late afternoon, but the disruption of normal sleep patterns is a notoriously devastating feature of depression; to the injurious sleeplessness with which I had been afflicted each night was added the insult of this afternoon insomnia, diminutive by comparison but all the more horrendous because it struck during the hours of the most intense misery. It has become clear that I would never be granted even a few minutes’ relief from my full-time exhaustion.
012. …self-loathing (depression’s premier badge)…
013. …my failure to have an appetite for the grand plateau de fruits de mer placed before me, failure of even forced laughter and, at last, virtually total failure of speech. At this point the ferocious inwardness of the pain produced an immense distraction that prevented my articulating words beyond a hoarse murmur; I sensed myself turning wall-eyed, monosyllabic, and also I sensed my French friends becoming uneasily aware of my predicament.
014. [regarding parties and celebrations] I would respond like the zombie I had become. The weather of depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.

“The Real Depression Story” by Peter D. Kramer 8 January, 2010
001. …it is well-established that antidepressants work for dysthymia chronic or frequently recurring minor depression…
002. …some overviews have found Paxil to be among the least effective of the antidepressants.
003. …antidepressants do little to end isolated episodes of mild depression…
004. While Paxil did moderate depression, the drug’s greater effect was in changing personality. The principal outcome for subjects who responded to Paxil was a decrease in “neuroticism”–essentially, emotional vulnerability in the face of adversity. The patients with less neuroticism seemed to be protected from future bouts of depression. They also became more extraverted. In other words, Paxil was less good at ending episodes of depresson than at making patients resilient via personality change. A second intervention tested, a form of psychotherapy, showed the reverse. It had more effect on depression and less on personality.
005. If we look only at the two recent studies, we might draw puzzling conclusions about antidepressants. They help with acute severe depression. They help with chronic minor depression. And yet they do little for acute, isolated bouts of minor mood disorders.
006. The American Psychiatric Association is updating its diagnostic manual. Very likely it will make a move toward “dimensional” modes of illness, in which a large number of factors will be taken into account in the course of making a diagnosis. For depression, the factors may include social anxiety and emotional fragility, so that personality traits linked to mood may enter in out concept of the disorder.
007. …are patients with minor (but not chronic) depression prescribed antidepressants? Older surveys found that they were not. In practice, all depression is undertreated. To me, the real news of the month is another study, from the University of Michigan in the Archives of General Psychiatry . It found that only one in five Americans with depression has received even one adequate course of treatment in the past year. The criteria for adequate treatment are modest: 60 days of antidepressant with four doctor or nurse visits over the year or (for talk therapy) four mental health visits lasting 30 minutes or more.
008. Here are some of the study’s findings. The average person diagnosed with depression had severe depression. Thirty-four percent of the depressed received any medication, with 11 percent receiving adequate medication. The comparable figures for psychotherapy were higher (44 percent any; 19 percent adequate). Only 9 percent of patients got the gold standard, adequate drug treatment with adequate psychotherapy. If you look at minority groups, like blacks and non-Puerto Rican Hispanics, the numbers are cut in half, almost no one gets good care.
009. To me, that’s the story that matters. Most depressed people don’t get evaluated; most who are evaluated don’t get treated; and most who are treated are treated poorly. As for whether medication helps with minor depression, that question may be less important than another one. If we were to treat all patients well–if with the mildly or moderately depressed we were to start with psychotherapy and then, if that doesn’t do enough, weigh other options–in that situation, ought we to consider antidepressants?

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
-0001- From the blurbs: Naomi Wolf says women are the more likely gender to experience lasting depression, whose grief is so often trivialized, (The Noonday Demon) will be a valued sourcebook, even a lifeline.
-0002- The melancholic, Freud observed, has ‘a keener eye for truth than others,’ — from (The New Yorker) review.
-0003- Everything passes away–suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the star? Why? –Mikhail Bulgakov, (The White Guard)
-0004- In a book one of the aims of which is to remove the burden of stigma from mental illness, it is important not to play to that stigma by hiding the identities of depressed people.
-0005- The members of Mood Disorders Support Groups (MDSG) …
-0006- Graham Greene once said, “I sometimes wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.” I think he vastly underestimated the number of people who do write in one way or another to alleviate melancholia and panic fear.
-0007- It is frighteningly easy to accumulate material about depression. I felt in the end that what was missing in the field of depression studies was synthesis. Science, philosophy, law, psychology, literature, art, history, and many other disciplines have independently taken up the cause of depression. So many interesting things are happening to so many interesting people and so many interesting things are being said and being published—and there is chaos in the kingdom.
-0008- My finding, in general, is that statistics in this field are inconsistent and that many authors select statistics to make an attractive ensemble in support of preexisting theories. I found one major study, for example, that showed that depressed people who abuse substances nearly always choose stimulants; and another, equally convincing one that demonstrated that depressed people who abuse substances invariably use opiates. Many authors derive a rather nauseous are of invincibility from statistics, as though showing that something occurs 82.37 percent of the time is more palpable and true than showing that something occurs about three out of four times. It is my experience that the hard numbers are the ones that lie. The matters that they describe cannot be defined so clearly. The most accurate statement that can be made on the frequency of depression is that it occurs often and, directly or indirectly, affects the lives of everyone.
-0009- I was frequently asked, as I wrote this book, whether the writing was cathartic. It was not. My experience conforms to that of others who have written in this field. Writing on depression is painful, sad, lonely, and stressful. Nonetheless, the idea that I was doing something that might be useful to others was uplifting; and my increased knowledge has been useful to me. I hope it will become clear that the primary pleasure of this book is a literary pleasure of communication rather than the therapeutic release of self-expression.
-0010- Depression, under various names and in various guises, is and has always been ubiquitous for biochemical and social reasons. This book strives to capture the extent of depression’s temporal and geographical reach. If it sometimes seems that depression is the private affliction of the modern Western middle classes, that is because it is in this community that we are suddenly acquiring new sophistication to recognize depression, to name it, to treat it, and to accept it—and not because we have any special rights to the complaint itself. No book can span the reach of human suffering, but I hope that by indicating that reach, I will help to liberate some men and women who suffer from depression. We can never eliminate all unhappiness, and alleviating depression does not ensure happiness, but I hope the knowledge contained in this book will help to eliminate some pain for some people.
-0011- Life is fraught with sorrows: no matter what we do, we will in the end die; we are, each of us, held in the solitude of an autonomous body; time passes, and what has been will never be again. Pain is the first experience of world-helplessness, and it never leaves us.
-0012- But despite the enthusiastic claims of pharmaceutical science, depression cannot be wiped out so long as we are creatures conscious of our own selves. It can at best be contained—and containing is all current treatments for depression aim to do.
-0013- Highly politicized rhetoric has blurred the distinction between depression and its consequences—the distinction between how you feel and how you act in response. This is in part a social and medical phenomenon, but it is also the result of linguistic vagary attached to emotional vagary. Perhaps depression is not just a lot of pain; but too much pain can compost itself into depression. Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory. Saint Anthony in the desert, asked how he could differentiate between angels who came to him humble and devils who came in rich disguise, said you could tell by how you felt after they had departed. When an angel left you, you felt strengthened by his presence; when a devil left, you felt horror. Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.
-0014- Depression has been roughly divided into small (mild or disthymic) and large (major) depression. Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge.
-0015- Virginia Woolf has written about this state with an eerie clarity: “Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction—it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.” In the same book, Jacob’s Room, she describes how “There rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction. Yet, heaven knows, Julia was no fool.” It is this acute awareness of transience and limitation that constitutes mild depression. Mild depression, for many years simply accommodated, is increasingly subject to treatment as doctors scrabble to address its diversity.
-0016- Large depression is the stuff of breakdowns. If one imagines a soul of iron that weathers with grief and rusts with mild depression, then major depression is the startling collapse of a whole structure. There are two models for depression: the dimensional and the categorical. The dimensional posits that depression sits on a continuum with sadness and represents an extreme version of something everyone has felt and known. The categorical describes depression as an illness totally separate from other emotions, much as a stomach virus is totally different from acid indigestion. Both are true. You go along the gradual path of the sudden trigger of emotion and they you get to a place that is genuinely different. It takes time for a rusting iron-framed building to collapse, but the rust is ceaselessly powdering the solid, thinning it, eviscerating it. The collapse, no matter how abrupt it may feel, is the cumulative consequence of decay. It is nonetheless a highly dramatic and visibly different event. It is a long time from the first rain to the point when rust has eaten through an iron girder. Sometimes the rusting is at such key points that the collapse seems total, but more often it is partial: this section collapses, knocks that section, shifts the balances in a dramatic way.
-0017- It is not pleasant to experience decay, to find yourself exposed to the ravages of an almost daily rain, and to know that you are turning into something feeble, that more and more of you will blow off with the first strong wind, making you less and less. Some people accumulate more emotional rust than others. Depression starts out insipid, fogs the days into a dull color, weakens ordinary actions until their clear shapes are obscured by the effort they require, leaves you tired and bored and self-obsessed—but you can get through all of that. Not happily, perhaps, but you can get through. No one has ever been able to define the collapse point that marks major depression, but when you get there, there’s not much mistaking it.
-0018- Major depression is a birth and a death: it both the new presence of something and the total disappearance of something.
-0019- Depression exists in time. A patient may say that he has spent certain months suffering major depression, but this is a way of imposing a measurement on the immeasurable. All that one can really say for certain is that one has known major depression, and that one does not happen to be experiencing it at any given present moment.
-0020- Fresh from a major depression in which I had hardly been able to take on board the idea of other people’s problems, I empathized with that tree. My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me ugly and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. At that worst stage of major depression, I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on that tree’s high branches belonged to the vine. When I tried to think clearly about this, I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldn’t expand in any direction. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but little of its light reached me. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I; first I could not use my ankles, and then I could not control my knees, and then my waist began to break under the strain, and then my shoulders turned in, and in the end I was compacted and fetal, depleted by this thing that was crushing me without holding me. Its tendrils threatened to pulverized my mind and my courage and my stomach, and crack my bones and dessicate my body. It went on glutting itself on me when there seemed nothing left to feed it.
-0021- Maybe what is present usurps what becomes absent, and maybe the absence of obfuscatory things reveal what is present. Either way, you are less than yourself and in the clutches of something alien.
-0022- Psychiatry’s bible—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV)–ineptly defines depression as the presence of five or more on a list of nine symptoms. The problem with the definition is that it’s entirely arbitrary. There’s no particular reason to qualify five systems as constituting depression; four symptoms are more or less depression; and five symptoms are less severe as than six. Even one symptom is unpleasant. Having slight version of all the symptoms may be less of a problem than having severe versions of two symptoms. After enduring diagnosis, most people seek causation, despite the facy that knowing why you are sick has no immediate bearing on treating the sickness.
-0023- Illness of the mind is real illness. It can have severe effects on the body, People who show up at the offices of their doctors complaining about stomach cramps are frequently told, “Why, there’s nothing wrong with you except that you’re depressed!” Depression, if it is sufficiently severe to cause stomach cramps, is actually a really bad thing to have wrong with you, and it requires treatment. If you show up complaining that your breathing is troubled, no one says to you, “Why, there’s nothing wrong with you except that you have emphysema!” To the person who is experiencing them, psychosomatic complaints are as real as the stomach cramps of someone with food poisoning. They exist in the unconscious brain, and often enough the brain is sending inappropriate messages to the stomach, so they exist there as well. The diagnosis—whether something is rotten in your stomach or your appendix or your brain—matters determining treatment and is not trivial. As organs go, the brain is quite an important one, and its malfunctions should be addressed accordingly.
-0024- Chemistry is often called on to heal the rift between body and soul. The relied people express when a doctor says their depression is “chemical” is predicated on a belief that there is an integral self that exists across time, and on a fictional divide between the fully occasional sorrow and the utterly random one. The word chemical seems to assuage the feelings of response people have for the stressed out discontent of not liking their jobs, worrying about getting old, failing at love, hating their families. There is a pleasant freedom from guilt that has been attached to chemical. If your brain is predisposed to depression, you need not blame yourself for it. Well, blame yourself or evolution, but remember that blame itself can be understood as a chemical process, and that happiness too, is chemical. Chemistry and biology are not matters that impinge on the “real” self; depression cannot be separated from the person it affects. Treatment does not alleviate a disruption of identity, bringing you back to some kind of normality; it readjusts a multifarious identity, changing in some small way depress who you are.
-0025- Everything that happens in the brain has chemical manifestations and sources. If you close your eyes and thing hard about polar bears, that has a chemical effect on your brain. If you stick to a policy of opposing tax breaks for capital gains, that has a chemical effect on your brain. When you remember some episode from your past, you do so through the complex chemistry of memory. Childhood trauma and subsequent difficulty can alter brain chemistry.
-0026- If time lets you cycle out of a depression and feel better, the chemical changes are no less particular and complex than the ones that are brought about by taking antidepressants. The external determines the internal as much as the internal invents the external. What is so unattractive is the idea that in addition to all other lines being blurred, the boundaries of what makes us ourselves are blurry. There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry.
-0027- The cumulative results of the brain’s chemical effects are not well understood. In the 1989 edition of the standard Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, for example, one finds this helpful formula: a depression score is equivalent to the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxphenylglycol (a compound found in the urine of all people and not apparently affected by depression): minus the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid: plus the level of norepinephrine; minus the level of normatanephrine plus the level of metanepherine, the sum of those divided by the level of 2-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus an specified conversion variable; or, as CTP puts it: “D-type score = C [1] (MHPG) – C [2] (VMA) + C [3] (NE) – C [4] (NMN + MN)/VMA + C [0] .” The score should come out between one for unipolar and zero for bipolar patients, so if you come up with something else–you’re doing it wrong.
-0028- To what extent specific experience has conduced to a particular depression is hard to determine; nor can we explain through what chemistry a person comes to respond to external circumstance with depression; nor can we work out what makes someone essentially depressive.
-0029- Depression is *not* the consquence of a reduced level of anything we can now measure. Raising levels of serotonin in the brain triggers a process that eventually helps many depressed people to feel better, but that is *not* because they have abnormally low levels of serotonin. Furthermore, serotonin does *not* have immediately salutary effects. You could pump a gallon of serotonin into the brain of a depressed person and it would not in the instant make him feel one iota better, though a long-term sustained raise in serotonin level has some effects that ameliorate depressive symptoms. “I’m depressed but it’s just chemical” is a sentence equivalent to “I’m murderous but it’s just chemical.” Everything about a person is just chemical if one wants to think in those terms.
-0030- Internal and external reality exist on a continuum. What happens and how you understand it to have happened and how you respond to its happening are usually linked, but no one is predictive of the others. If reality itself is often a relative thing, and the self is in a state of permanent flux, the passage from slight mood to extreme mood is a glissando. Illness, then, is extreme state of emotion, and one might reasonably describe emotion as a mild form of illness. If we all felt up and great (bit not delusionally manic) all the time, we could get more done and might have a happier time on earth, but that idea is creepy and terrifying (though, of course, if we felt up and great all the time we might forget all about creepiness and terror).
-0031- Influenza is straightforward: one day you do not have the responsible virus in your system, and another day you do. HIV passes from one person to another in a definable isolated split second. Depression? It’s like trying to come up with clinical parameters for hunger, which affects us all several times a day, but which in its extreme version is a tragedy that kills its victims. Some people need more food than others; some can function under circumstances of dire malnutrition; some grow weak rapidly and collapse in the streets. Similarly, depression hits different people in different ways: some are predisposed to resist or battle through it, while others are helpless in its grip. Willfullness and pride may allow one person to get through in a depression that would fell another whose personality is more gentle and acquiescent.
-0032- Often, the fight takes the form of seeking out the treatments that will be most effective in the battle. It involves making the most of the life you have between your most severe episodes. Some horrendously symptom-ridden people are able to achieve real success in life; and some people are utterly destroyed by the mildest forms of the illness.
-0033- Everyone has on occasion felt disproportionate emotion over a small matter or has felt emotions whose origin is obscure of that may have no origin at all. Sometimes the chemistry kicks in for no apparent external reason at all. Most people have had moments of inexplicable despair, ofthen in the middle of the night or in the early morning before the alarm clock sounds. If such feeling last ten minutes, they;re a strange, quick mood. If they last ten hours, they’re a disturbing febrility, and if they last ten years, they’re a crippling illness.
-0034- It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass. Even if you accept that moods change, that whatever you feel today will be different tomorrow, you cannot relax into happiness as you can into sadness. For me, sadness always has been and still is a more powerful feeling; and if that is not a universal experience, perhaps it is the base from which depression grows. I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul. When I am happy, I feel slightly distracted by happiness, as though it fails to use some part of my mind and brain that wants the exercise. Depression is something to do. My grasp tightens and becomes acute in moments of loss: I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand toward the floor. “We find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we had anticipated,” Schopenhauer wrote. “We require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, to keep on a straight course.”
-0035- There is a Russian expression: if you wake up feeling no pain, you know you’re dead. While life is not only about pain, the experience of pain, which is particular in its intensity, is one of the surest signs of the life force. Schopenhauer said, “Imagine that race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one anothet without delay and keep one another without difficulty; in such a place some men would die of boredom or hand themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is…the polar opposite of suffering [is] boredom.” I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated.
-0036- I am persuaded that some of the broadest figures for depression are based inreality. Though it is a mistake to confure numbers with truth, these figures tell an alerming story. According to recent research, about 3 percent of Americans–some 19 million–suffer from chronic depression. More then 2 million of those are children. Manic-depressive illness, often called bipolar illness because the mood of its victims caires from mania to depression, afflicts about 2.3 million and it the second-leadin killer of young women, the third of young men. Depression as described in DSM-IV is the leading cause of disability in the United States and abroad for persons over the age of five. Worldwide, including the developing world, depression accounts for more of the disease burden, as calculated by premature death plus healthy life–years lost to disability, than anything else but heart disease. Depression claims more years than war, cancer, and AIDS put together. Other illnesses, from alcoholiism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, deoression may be the biggest killer on earth.
-0037- Treatments for depression are proliferating now, but only half of Americans who have had major depression have ever sought help of any kind–even from clergyman or counselor. About 95 percent of that 50 percent go to primary-care physicians, who often don’t know much about psychiatric complaints. An American adult with depression would have illness recognized only about 40 percent of the time. Nonetheless, about 28 million Americans–one in every ten–are now on SSRIs (selective seronotin reuptake inhibitors–the class of drugs to which Prozac belongs), and a substantial number are on other medications. Less than half of those whose illness is recognized will get appropriate treatment. As definitions of depression have broadened to include more and more of the general population, it has become increasingly difficult to calculate an exact mortality figure. The statistic traditionally given is that 15 percent of depressed people will eventually commit suicide; this figure still holds for those with extreme illness. Recent studies that include milder depression show that 2 to 4 percent of depressives die by their own hand as a direct consequence of the illness. This is still a staggering figure. Twenty years ago, about 1.5 percent of the population had depression that required treatment; now it’s 5 percent; and as many as 10 percent of all Americans now living can expect to have a major depressive episode during their life. About 50 percent will experience some symptoms of depression.Clinical problems have increased; treatments have increased vastly more. Diagnosis is on the up, but that does not explain the scale of this problem. Incidents of depression are increasing across the developed world, particularly in children. Depression is occurring in younger people, making its first appearance when its victims are about twenty-six, ten years younger than a generation ago; bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness, sets in even earlier. Things are getting worse.
-0038- There are few conditions at once as undertreated and as overtreated as depression. People who become totally dysfunction are ultimately hospitalized and are likely to receive treatment, though sometimes their depression is confused with the physical ailments through which it is experienced. A world of people, however, are just barely holding on and continue, despite the great revolutions in psychiatric and psychopharmaceutical treatments, to suffer abject misery. More than half of those who do seek help–another 25 percent of the depressed population–receive no treatment. About half of those who do receive treatment–13 percent or so of the depressed population–receive unsuitable treatment, often tranquilizers or immaterial psychotherapies. Of those who are left, half–some 6 percent of the depressed population–receive inadequate dosage for an inadequate length of time. So that leaves about 6 percent of the depressed population who are getting adequate treatment. But many of these ultimately go off their medications, usually because of side effects. “It’s between 1 and 2 percent who get really optimal treatment,” says John Greden, director of the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, “for an illness that can usually be well-controlled with relatively inexpensive medications that have few serious side effects.” Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, people who suppose that bliss is their birthright pop cavalcades of pills in a futile bid to alleviate those mild discomforts that texture every life.
-0039- It has been fairly well established that the advent of the supermodel has damaged women’s images of themselves by setting unrealistic expectations. The psychological supermodel of the twenty-first century is even more dangerous than the physical one. People are constantly examining their own minds and rejecting their own moods. “It’s the Lourdes phenomenon,” say William Potter, who ran the psychopharmacological division of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) through the seventies and eighties, when the new drugs were being developed. “When you expose very large numbers of people to what they perceive and have reason to believe is positive, you get reports of miracles–and also, of course, of tragedy.” Prozac is so easily tolerated that almost anyone can take it, and almost anyone does. It’s been used on people with slight complaints who would not have been game for the discomforts of the older antidepressants, the monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) or tricyclics. Even if you’re not depressed, it might push back the edges of your sadness, and wouldn’t that be nicer than living with pain?
-0040- We pathologize the curable, and what can easily be modified comes to be treated as illness, even if it was previously treated as personality or mood. As soon as we have a drug for violence, violence will be an illness. There are many grey states between full-blown depression and a mild ache unaccompanied by changes of sleep, appetite, energy, or interest; we have begun to class more and more of these as illness because we have found more and more ways to ameliorate them. But the cutoff point remains arbitrary. We have decided that an IQ of 69 constitutes retardation, but someone with an IQ of 72 is not in great shape, and someone with an IQ of 65 can still kind of manage; we have said that cholesterol should be kept under 220, but if your cholesterol is 221, you probably won’t die from it, and if it’s 219, you need to be careful: 69 and 220 are arbitray numbers, and what we call illness is also really quite arbitrary; in the case of depression, it is also in perpetual flux.
-0041- Depressives use the phrase “over the edge” all the time to delineate the passage from pain to madness. This very physical description frequently entails falling “into the abyss.” It’s odd that so many people have such a consistent vocabulary, because the edge is really quite an abstracted metaphor. Few of us have ever fallen off the edge of anything, and certainly not into an abyss. The Grand Canyon? A Norwegian fjord? A South African diamond mine? It’s difficult to even _find_ an abyss to fall into. When asked, people describe the abyss pretty consistently. In the first place, it’s dark. You are falling away from the sunlight toward a place where the shadows are black. Inside it, you cannot see, and the dangers are everywhere (it’s neither soft-bottomed nor soft-sided, the abyss). While you are falling, you don’t know how deep you can go, or whether you can in any way stop yourself. You hit invisible things over and over again until you are shredded, and yet your environment is too unstable for you to catch onto anything.
-0042- I remember going with friends to Victoria Falls, where great heights of rock drop down sheer to the Zambezi River. We were young and were sort of challenging one another by posing for photos as close to the edge as we dared to go. Each of us, upon going too close to the edge, felt sick and paralytic. I think depression is not usually going over the edge itself (which soon makes you die), but drawing too close to the edge, getting to that moment of fear when you have gone so far, when dizziness has deprived you so entirely of your capacity for balance.
-0043- Depression relies heavily on a paralyzing sense of imminence. What you can do at an elevation of six inches you cannot do when the ground drops away to reveal a drop of a thousand feet. Terror of the fall grips you even if that terror is what might make you fall. What is happening to you in depression is horrible, but it seems to be very much wrapped up in what is about to happen to you. Among other things, you feel you are about to die. The dying would not be so bad, but living at the brink of dying, the not-quite-over-the-geographical-edge condition, is horrible. In a major depression, the hands that reach out to you are just out of reach. You cannot make it down onto your hands and knees because you feel that as soon as you lean, every away from the edge, you will lose your balance and plunge down.
-0044- Depression has gone too far when, despite a wide margin of safety, you cannot balance anymore. In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all.
-0045- Depression is a condition that is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not known it.
-0046- It’s not an easy diagnosis because it depends on metaphors, and the metaphors one patient chooses are different from those selected by another patient. Not so much has changed since Antonio in The Merchant of Venice complained:
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.
-0047- Let us make no bones about it: We do not really know what causes depression. We do not really know what constitutes depression. We do not really know why certain treatments may be effective for depression. We do not know how depression made it through the evolutionary process. We do not know why one person gets a depression from circumstances that do not trouble another. We do not know how will operates in this context.
-0048- People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain. No one can do anything but beg for help (if he can do even that) at the lowest depths of a major depression, but once the help is provided, it must also be accepted. We would all like Prozac to do it for us, but it my experience, Prozac doesn’t do it unless we help it along. Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if ever step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason. These fortune-cookie admonitions sound pat, but the surest way out of depression is to dislike it and not to let yourself grow accustomed to it. Block out the terrible thoughts that invade your mind.
-0049- I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. I have turned, with an increasingly find attention, to love. Love is the other way forward.
-0050- It appears that depression has been around as long as man has been capable of self-conscious thought. It may be that depression existed even before that time, that monkeys and rats and perhaps octopi were suffering the disease before those first humanoids found their way into their caves. Certainly the symptomatology of our time is more or less indistinguishable from what was described by Hippocrates some twenty-five hundred years ago.
-0051- Sometimes it seems that the rate of illness and the number of cures are in a sort of competition to see which can outstrip the other.
-0052- We will balance treating illness with changing the circumstances that cause it.
-0053- … the despair psychology of wartime is usually frenzied, while the despair that follows devastation is more numb and all-encompassing. {PN: similar to personal trauma}
-0054- Everyone I met had a different explanation for how the Khmer Rouge could have happened there, but none of these explanations made sense, just as none of the explanations for the Cultural Revolution or for Stalinism or for Nazism makes sense. These things happen to societies, and in retrospect it is possible to understand why a nation was especially vulnerable to them; but where in the human imagination such behaviours originate is unknowable.
-0055- Five days before I left the country, I met with Phaly Nuon, a sometimes candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, who has set up an orphanage and a centre for depressed women in Phnom Penh. She has achieved astonishing success in resuscitating women whose mental afflictions are such that other doctors have left them for dead. Indeed her success has been so enormous that her orphanage is almost entirely staffed by the women she has helped, who have formed a community of generosity around Phaly Nuon. If you save the women, it has been said, they will in turn save the children, and so by tracing a chain of influence one can save the country.
-0056- –Phaly Nuon made a special request to the aid workers and set up her hut in the camp as a sort of psychotherapy center. … She would take her patients to meditate, keeping in her house a Buddhist shrine with flowers in front of it. She would seduce the women into openness. First, she would take about three hours to get each woman to tell her story. Then she would make regular follow-up visits to try to get more of the story, until she finally got the full trust of the depressed woman. “I had to know the stories these women had to tell,” she explained, “because I wanted to understand very specifically what each one had to vanquish.”
–Once this initiation was concluded, she would move on to a formulaic system. “I take it in three steps,” she said. “First, I teach them to forget. We have exercises we do wach day, so that each day they can forget a little more of the things they will never forget entirely. During this time, I try to distract them with music or with embroidery or weaving, with concerts, with an occasionaly hour of television, with whatever seems to work, whatever they tell me they like. Depression is under the skin, all the surface of the body has the depression just below it, and we cannot take it out; but we can try to forget the depression even though it is right there.
–”When their minds are cleared of what they have forgotten, when they have learned forgetfulness well. I teach them to work. Whatever kind of work they want to do, I will find a way to teach it to them…. They must learn to do these things well and to have pride in them.
–”And then when they have mastered work, as last, I teach them to love. I built a sort of lean-to and made it a steam bath, and now in Phnom Penh I have a similar one that I use, a little better built. I take them there so that they become clean, and I teach them how to give one another manicures and pedicures and how to take care of their fingernails, because doing that makes them feel beautiful, and they want so much to feel beautiful. It also puts them in contact with the bodies of other people and makes them give up their bodies to the care of others. It rescues them from physical isolation, which is a usual affliction for them, and that leads to the breakdown of the emotional isolation. While they are together washing and putting on nail polish, they being to talk together, and bit by bit they learn to trust one another, and by the end of it all, they have learned how to make friends, so that they will never have to be so lonely and so alone again. Their stories, which they have told to no one but me–they begin to tell those stories to one another.”
-0057- Grooming is one of the primary forms of socialization among primates, and this return to grooming as a socializing force among human beings struck me as curiously organic. I told her that I thought it was difficult to teach ourselves or others how to forget, how to work, and how to love and be loved, but she said it was not so complicated if you could do those three things yourself.
-0058- “There is a final step,” she said to me after a long pause. “At the end, I teach them the most important thing. I teach them that these three skills–forgetting, working, and loving–are not three separate skills, but part of one enormous whole, and that it is the practice of these things together, each as a part of the others, that makes a difference. It is the hardest thing to convey”–she laughed–”but they all come to understand this, and when they do–why, then they are ready to go into the world again.”
-0059- To treat depression, one must understand the experience of a breakdown, the mode of action of medication, and the most common forms of talking therapy (psychoanalytic, interpersonal, and cognitive).
-0060- Intelligent treatment requires a close examination of specific populations: depression has noteworthy variants particular to children, to the elderly, and to each gender. Substance abusers form a large subcategory of their own. Suicide, in its many forms, is a complication of depression; it is critical to understand how a depression can become fatal.
-0061- These experiential matters lead to the epidemiological. It is fashionable to look at depression as a modern complaint, and this is a gross error, which a review of psychiatric history serves to clarify. It is also fashionable to think of the complaint as somehow middle-class and fairly consistent in its manifestations. This is not true. Looking at depression among the poor, we can see that taboos and prejudices are blocking us from helping a population that is singularly receptive to that help. The problem of depression among the poor leads naturally into specific politics. We legislate ideas of illness and treatment in and out of existence.
-0062- Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, and this is the thing with feathers at the bottom of their box of miseries. There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in the spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all the strong emotions stand together, and that every one of them is contingent on what we commonly think of as its opposite. I have for the moment managed to contain the disablement that depression causes, but the depression itself lives forever in the cipher of my brain. It is part of me. To wage war on depression is to fight against oneself, and it is important to know that in advance of the battles. I believe that depression can be eliminated only by undermining the emotional mechanisms that make us human.
-0063- “Welcome this pain,” Ovid once wrote, “for you will learn from it.” It is possible (though for the time being unlikely) that, through chemical manipulation, we might locate, control, and eliminate the brain’s circuitry of suffering. I hope we will never do it. To take it away would be to flatten out experience, to impinge on a complexity more valuable than any of its component parts are agonizing.
-0064- …pain is not acute depression; one loves and is loved in great pain, and one is alive in the experience of it. It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life…
-0065- I did not experience depression until after I had pretty much solved my problems. … It was when life was finally in order and all the excuses for despair had been used up that depression came slinking in on its little cat feet and spoiled everything, and I felt acutely that there was no excuse for it under the circumstances. To be depressed when you have experienced trauma or when your life is clearly a mess is one thing, but to sit around and be depressed when you are finally at a remove from trauma and your life is not a mess is awfully confusing and destabilizing. Of course you are aware of deep causes: the perennial existential crisis, the forgotten sorrows of a distant childhood, the slight wrongs done to people now dead, the loss of a certain friendships through your own negligence, the truth that you are not Tolstoy, the absence in this world of perfect love, the impulses of greed and uncharity that lie too close to the heart–that sort of thing. But now, as I ran through this inventory, I believed my depression was both a rational state, and an incurable state.
-0066- If my life had been more difficult, I would understand my depression very differently.
-0067- –When you start having major depression, you tend to look back for the roots of it. You wonder where it came from, whether it was always there, just under the surface, or whether it came on you are suddenly as food poisoning. Since the first breakdown, I’ve spent months on end cataloging early difficulties, such as they are. I was a breech birth, and some writers have linked breech birth to early trauma. … When I asked my mother to identify my earliest trauma, she said that walking had not come easily to me, that while my speech seemed to have been no effort at all, my motor control and balance were late and imperfect. I am told that I fell and fell and fell, that only with great encouragement did I even attempt to stand upright.
–… I remember one episode at summer camp when I was six, when I was suddenly and unreasonably overcome with fear. {PN: write about 8/9} … I was overcome with the knowledge that something awful was going to happen to me, now or later, and that, as long as I was alive, I wouldn’t be free. … It seemed to matter very much whether I went left or right or straight on, but I didn’t know which direction would save me, at least for the moment.
–…I think these things are not unusual for small children. Existential angst among adults, painful though it may be, usually has a gaming self-consciousness to it; … I have a poor memory, and after that episode at camp I became afraid of what is lost through time, and i would lie in bed at night trying to remember things from the day so that I could keep them–an incorporeal acquisitiveness.
-0068- If the first part of an emotional biography is precursor experiences, the second part is triggering experiences. Most severe depressions have precursor smaller depressions that have passed largely unnoticed or simply unexplained. Of course many people who never develop depression have experiences that would retrospectively be defined as precursor episodes if they had led to anything, and that get dropped out of memory only because what they might have foreshadowed never materializes.

Last June [2007] I had my first psychotic episode; during which I tried to kill myself. I know that sounds highly dramatic, but that’s what happened, apparently. I say ‘apparently’ because I have no memory of it. I left work two hours early one day and when my husband came home at 5pm I was nearly unconscious and vomiting profusely from alcohol and pills. I had also been cutting myself. What I remember is going home at 3pm and then being in a hospital bed at 11pm. Then there’s another blank space followed by being at home about twelve hours later. Roughly eighteen hours are missing; though it was a very active eighteen hours. I’m amazed at the thought of being physically present for such a momentous occasion as my near-death while remembering nothing of it. It’s like seeing yourself in pictures in a place where you can’t recall being.

The entire episode is something that puzzles me. It’s been a bit over four months and I’m just starting to get my head round it.

What I’ve been thinking about most (besides how badly I feel at scaring K, my husband, so much) is when people say, regarding death, “At least they didn’t suffer.”

Suffering can only be appreciated from the point of surviving said suffering. If I had died that day I would have had no memory of being crazed or whatever was going on and so it wouldn’t’ve made any difference if my last moments were spent shouting at the universe or quietly meditating. Suffering before death is only important to the people who are still alive. Once you’re dead that’s pretty much it. Whatever pain you are in ceases to be once your heart stops beating. I used to be of the mindset that a person not suffering just prior to death was vastly better than being in horrible pain just before. Now I see that doesn’t matter. This is a good thing and this is why…

I’ve known two people who were murdered. One was killed during a robbery at his workplace and the other was killed in his bed while he slept*. I used to think, “Well, at he least was asleep and had no idea what happened,” and, “Christ, how horrible to know you’re going to die–to spend your last moments fighting and pleading for mercy.” But now I see those thoughts are only tormenting/comforting the living.

In Judaism, the funeral service and shiva are for the living–to support those still alive–not really for the soul of the person no longer of this earth like in Christian ceremonies. The deceased has far better things to be getting on with. I’ve always found wakes and Christian-style funerals to be wrenching to no good purpose, though I can see why some people feel compelled to say goodbye to their loved one. I would not begrudge people wishing to say goodbye to me even though I wouldn’t have been in the room for some time.

Unlike the previous post (a quote from a dear friend) I have no great concept of what happens when one dies other than decomposition to the organic matter from which one came. To me, you get your time on Earth, spend it as you will. When you’re gone some people will remember you kindly and others won’t care one way or another. That’s fine with me. Hopefully no one will be actively glad I’m gone, but if that is the case, I won’t give two shits by that point.

The idea of suffering v. not suffering prior to death not being of any consequence was a real eye-opener for me, as I’ve been socialized to think that one’s last moments are best if they are peaceful. It’s better to go quickly rather than painfully. Now I see that’s more about the living. The people who survive you don’t want to see you suffer–they don’t want their last memories of you to be horrid. Your last memories won’t count for anything because you won’t know about them once you’re on the other side.

You may say: You’d feel different if you’d actually died, but I have. I was clinically dead (drowned) when I was five years old. I remember the drowning, but there was no white light or whathaveyou. That experience was similar. I was swimming, swimming, swimming and then nothing and then I was on the beach, awake and surrounded by people. No breathing or heart-beat for several minutes. Death is a nothingness that happens when it happens. In many ways I find this comforting…

Anyway, just some thoughts I wanted to put out there/down for my future self.

*For those who care–the people who murdered my brother-in-law and my friend have been put in prison.
[This post is from a previous blog. Original post date: 18 October 2007]

From The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon

Depressives use the phrase “over the edge” all the time to delineate the passage from pain to madness. This very physical description frequently entails falling “into the abyss.” It’s odd that so many people have such a consistent vocabulary, because the edge is really quite an abstracted metaphor. Few of us have ever fallen off the edge of anything, and certainly not into an abyss. The Grand Canyon? A Norwegian fjord? A South African diamond mine? It’s difficult to even _find_ an abyss to fall into. When asked, people describe the abyss pretty consistently. In the first place, it’s dark. You are falling away from the sunlight toward a place where the shadows are black. Inside it, you cannot see, and the dangers are everywhere (it’s neither soft-bottomed nor soft-sided, the abyss). While you are falling, you don’t know how deep you can go, or whether you can in any way stop yourself. You hit invisible things over and over again until you are shredded, and yet your environment is too unstable for you to catch onto anything.

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s fictionalized autobiography about descending into madness (depression). The first time I read it, though I’d dealt with depression a few times already, I still didn’t ‘get’ it. This time around I absolutely got it, for better or worse. The quotes I’m putting up are the ones that most accurately capture the experience of depression, from my point of view.

Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more.

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

For me it was eight.

I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.

Andrew Solomon talks about this in Noonday Demon–about how one begins to feel crushed by all the things one cannot do–even things one doesn’t want to do, but will never be able to.

One of the books in the series on depression I’m reading is William Styron’s Darkness Visible , which is his account of his own battle with depression. This bit describes some of the phenomena caused by depression:

But my behaviour was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory. At a later stage my entire mind would be dominated by anarchic disconnections; as I have said, there was now something that resembled bifurcation of mood: lucidity of sorts in the early hours of the day, gathering murk in the afternoon and evening.

Styron’s experience of the gathering murk is dissimilar to the typical horrible-morning-fine-evening experience of most depressives.

What I like about this excerpt are the bits and bobs that come along with depression–memory loss, loss of voice, general confusion. It’s not as though depression messes up your life by making you think: Iamdepressed, Iamdepressed, Iamdepressed ad infinitum, therefore rendering all other thought impossible–it’s more of a dense fog, where no matter which way you turn you can’t find your way out. Then, whilst trying to find your way home, someone asks you questions and expects you to engage. I’m sorry, but this fog–as amorphous as it is–requires all my attention.

From Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression :

[Maggie Robbins] “You don’t think in depression that you’ve put on a grey veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you’re seeing truly. You try to pin the truth down and take it apart, and you think that truth is a fixed thing, but the truth is alive and it runs around. You can exorcise the demons of schizophrenics who perceive that there’ something foreign inside them. But it’s much harder with depressed people because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies.”

But the truth doesn’t lie–people that are clinically depressed have a clearer view of reality. They did a study (I believe at Harvard, but it may have been another university) where they had ‘normal’ people and depressed people play a game where you kill zombies. At the end, they asked everyone how many they had killed and the depressed people were more accurate than the non-depressed people, who wildly over-estimated their zombie-killing effectiveness. This suggests that the normal folks are the deluded ones.

There’s a bumper sticker that says, ‘If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention.’ Perhaps it should say, ‘If you’re not depressed you’re living an illusion.’

People need hope in order to get out of bed in the morning. That makes sense, really. But when you’re depressed everyone else appears to be toddlers–oblivious to reality. You want to kill their inanity and show them the truth because you’re seen it. Welcome to the Church of Low Serotonin. Witness our truth and drain the colour from your world.

Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the best books I’ve read. Every page has quote-worthy material. And it’s not all about melancholy–it’s about everything, all at once. I know it’s too literary for some, but I would like everyone to give it a shot.

Anyway, here is a sampling of lines that most spoke to me and I think would speak to other autodidacts and bibliophiles.

I am not poor, I am not rich; _nihil est, nihil deest_, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva’s tower. [Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom so her tower would be of the ivory sort.]

it is a kind of policy in these days, to prefix a fantastical title to a book which is to be sold; for, as larks come down to a day-net, many vain readers will tarry and stand gazing like silly passengers at an antic picture in a painter’s shop, that will not look at a judicious piece.

I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, _mihi et musis_ [for myself and my studies]

I had a great desire (not able to attain to a superficial skill in any) to have some smattering in all, to be _aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis_, [a somebody in general knowledge, a nobody in any one subject] which Plato commends, out of him Lipsius approves and furthers, “as fit to be imprinted in all curious wits, not to be a slave of one science, or dwell altogether in one subject, as most do, but to rove abroad, _centum puer artium_, [one who can turn his hand to anything] to have an oar in every man’s boat, to taste of every dish, and sip of every cup,” which, saith Montaigne, was well performed by Aristotle, and his learned countryman Adrian Turnebus. This roving humour (though not with like success) I have ever had, and like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly, _qui ubique est, nusquam est_, [he who is everywhere is nowhere] which Gesner did in modesty, that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment. I never travelled but in map or card, in which mine unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated, as having ever been especially delighted with the study of Cosmography.

[from the Introduction by William Gass]

Of all the habits that were hard to break, being bookish was perhaps the most difficult. Now, in addition to the scriptures, there would be all the classical authors you had the opportunity to cite–the honour of the first quote in Burton’s address to the reader goes to Seneca–thereby showing generosity in the ‘loan’ of the resources of your library and by your readiness to ‘spread the word,’ just as you also took good care to gather books and manuscripts, diligently copying passages from the cvolumes which her to pass through, rather than remain in, your hands. Guided by a genius, the pages of a commonplace book could be transformed into an original and continuously argued text as Ben Jonson did with Discoveries –a form which Burton’s Anatomy sometimes resembles though it never mimics.