I like totally have meds now and stuff, you know. just mentioning it. with real live anti-psychotics, too. (mmm, tranquillizing). my doctor hasn't wanted to involuntarily commit me for like...um...three months now! ha ha. I talked her out of it. no, actually, she said if I weren't a nursing mom she would have sent me right from her office to the nuthatch. there's really nothing to say to that except, god, remind me never to tell you how I'm actually feeling ever again. I was no more crazy then than I've ever been, I was just having an honest moment. that was my brother's advice, too. just lie and shit. fucking psychiatrists, what do they know about crazy people? also, doesn't it just make you think of some '50's New Yorker cartoon where people are coming after you with the big butterfly nets? I'll tell you about when my brother was in St. Elizabeth's ward 5 one time; it was actually pretty awesome. there was one huge black guy with the strenght of ten men and everything who was crazy but gentle and insightful (with intermittent violent rages). no, for real. he liked to say "can you fly?"
I realize that responding to a post on depression with "go do some work' is wildly insensitive, but you should really work on that novel. This is some good writing. Florid, but I like florid.
(And, um, keep taking your meds. Anything that keeps you from feeling like that is a good thing.)
yeah, I totally should finish my novel, just like husband x is always saying. I can't help but feel the crippling mental illness is hloding me back, somehow. but thanks!
A friend of mine worked on some of Todd Solondz's films, which of course are all very bleak--in the manner described by See--and I always thought they suffered artistically as a result. (We argue about this all the time, my friend and I.) I say that the problem in life is not that it is unfailingly bleak, or that it is impossible to make connections with people, but that the connections you do make are incomplete. As far as you go to meet someone else, you never quite get there, and you are mocked by the distance that remains.
See botches it, but I can understand what she's trying to say. Not all depression is suicidal depression, and one sympton of non-suicidal depression is to believe that only you and your fellow depressives see the world for how it is: full of lying and scheming, with no real love or care, and enjoyed only by those too blind to see the true nature of reality. (By the way, that "I can say with perfect certainty" is a joke, because depressives are certain, and she's perfectly certain....) But See says they think "the world" is terrible, and that's too broad, and misleading insofar as people can take "world" to mean trees, and bees, and leaves, and not other people. The "world" is just fine, but other people are intolerable, and stupid, and there's no chance for the depressive to enjoy what could otherwise be enjoyed.
Anyway, don't get committed Alameida, we love you. We love you even if your writing sucks, which it most surely does not.
What many people don't know about depression is that it is much different than being depressed. Being depressed is usually a sign that you are upset or unhappy because of certain events in your life. If your dog died, you get depressed. If you have three dogs who love you and you are miserable, you either have allergies or depression. I have found that depression happens regardless of the events. Everything could be going perfectly well, there's an ability to latch onto the smallest thing that isn't going well and have it cancel out the rest of the world.
As for the optimist, depressives (who are not the same as pessimists) cannot understand them. Or rather, they understand them all too well, and idolize them. If only I could do as well as X, have it as together as Y, I'd be ok; but I can't. There's no fucking way life will ever be that good for me.
Victims of depression aren't jealous zealots. They are jealous, yes, but miserably so.
Depression is not the same as pessimism.
For a great story on the subject of psychoses, see this post by tweedlegirl.
Does anyone else remember that terribly disturbing study from a few years ago, where they observed social interactions between depressed people and third parties, and between non-depressed people and third parties, and asked the depressed and the non-depressed people what the people they had interacted with had thought of them? Obviously, the depressed people thought that everyone they interacted with had a low opinion of them, while the non-depressed people thought their interlocutors liked them just fine. The disturbing bit, however, was that when the third-parties were interviewed, it turned out that the depressed people had generally made a much more accurate assessment of what the third-parties thought than the non-depressed people had.
Turns out being mentally healthy means wandering around in a rosy haze, delusionally believing everyone likes you. Creepy, no?
LB,
I'd say yes creepy, save for the fact that a depressed person will nearly always come off as depressed and cause someone to form a low opinion of them (I know from experience; people now tell me I'm not the asshole I knew I was). With "normal" people, it's all over the map. Why? Because people tend to ignore those people around them that they have low opinions of, so people really only interact with people who have good opinions of them. Or so I think. I have no training in psychology but for my own sufferings. I can tell you all about NP-completeness though.
Tweedledopey,
Depression is not the same as pessimism.
Exactly right.
Many people with depression know when things are fine but cannot feel it, which adds to the misery.
Feeling like you cannot live your life when you know that people are depending on you and that you should be able to do it is miserable.
Curious about the relationship between depression and work, per nos. 2 and 4 above. There is a theory that artists need the depression, or maybe it's the manic depression, for the art. Like the Annie Hall joke about needing the eggs. So they resist treatment on the idea that it would mess up the art. Anyone with clever insights on this?
That's why a lot of artist take mind altering drugs. But yes, many famous artists have serious psychological disorders. Or something that fucked them up early in their lifetime (Hemingway was dressed as a girl. But I'm sure everyone has heard that before).
I know that Zizek seriously resisted going to analysis (even though psychoanalysis is "his thing") because he was afraid he'd be turned into a normal, boring person. I feel like some of my best "literary" writing has been written in an attempt to gain some control over depression and loneliness, but I haven't done such writing in a long time -- mainly out of a new-found sensitivity to the feelings of the other people involved who might not want the intimate details of their lives more or less transparently revealed in a public forum.
Work can help, but I find that I never do enough work, not really. I've never lived up to my own standards. I'm "objectively" getting a lot of stuff done that wouldn't otherwise get done now that I'm just devoting myself to school full-time, but there are some days when I get to 1 or 2 PM and still haven't read the complete seminars of Jacques Lacan in the original French, and I just hate myself. And then I hate myself for wanting to write things like that, and I hate already knowing what people will write in response, because I know it should do me some good but it won't. It absolutely won't -- in fact, might make it worse. That's the thing -- wanting to be in contact with someone else but knowing it won't come off.
I'm fortunate that these things go away on their own -- but I'm convinced that nothing but a purely contingent, purely gratiutous change in "mood" can get you out of such a spell. If drugs spur the change, then take drugs, I say.
Thanks, td. I wonder about subjective insights, into wrestling with the problem, beliefs about artistic productivity/mental difficulty, etc.
Like what Kotsko (surname only!) said while I was posting. The general feeling that you produce to make yourself feel better, but then what you've produced actually makes yourself feel worse. This becomes an argument against 'self-esteem' -- you only work because you're dissatisfied with yourself -- self-esteem makes you useless. This is also known as the Protestant Work Ethic, or anyway the Puritan work ethic. Is it also mental illness?
Zizek is a normal, boring person. It's not like he has superpowers. People really would be SOL, if say, Batman hopped on the couch. Zizek, not so much.
He is smart to stay the hell out of analysis, though. http://www.geocities.com/seapadre_1999/pascal-diversion.html ">Not paying too much attention to yourself is a good idea. Except, when it isn't.
By "normal, boring person," he meant he worried he'd lose his desire to do philosophy. The analysis that he did submit to led to his loss of x-ray vision and powers of self-propelled flight, which didn't bother him -- the philosophy thing is where he drew the line.
Thanks for the references, td (no. 19). You're a demon with the internets. Neither side really convinces, I guess. On the "there is no link" side, the studies reviewed draw on diverse definitions of both creativity and mental illness. And the concluding hortatory prose -- the three sentences in a row beginning "We may do more harm than good" -- raises the question, who's we, doc? Artists are themselves occasional promoters of this connection.
On the "psychiatry is bad for artists side," well, correlation isn't causation. So Monroe made fewer films after psychiatric treatment than before -- did she make fewer films than she would have made without psychiatric intervention?
And again, the subjective problem: the experience, often cited by artists, that self-loathing leads to productivity -- which then leads to more self-loathing -- is that mental illness?
(no. 20) Technically, Batman does not have superpowers, only obsession (mental illness?) driving him to do what he does. So if we accept the position that therapy would cure him of the desire to strike terror into the cowardly, superstitious criminals of Gotham (and we accept that this terror-striking is a good thing, and not socially destructive vigilantism that undermines legitimate authority), then that's a point for mental illness as an aid to productivity.
Slolerner, Batman may not have had special powers, but he had lots of money with which to create things that gave him special powers. Like the suit. And the batplane. And the batmobile. But obsession in his case was not the same as mental illness. However, his obsession with Robin? Might have had MJS.
Also, Batman? not real. Just saying.
Might have had MJS.
Uh ... Mary-Jane Syndrome? Isn't that what Peter Parker had?
Re 21: I can completely believe that the inclination or desire to do philosophy is a mental illness.
There was a fucking yellowjacket in my apartment this morning. What the fuck.
You're going to accept that Batman couldn't have gotten into the Commonwealth Office?
Hey, he disguised himself as a monk today and climbed St. Paul's. And he climbed a roller coaster recently. Batman Rulz.
MJS = Michael Jackson Syndrome. But not the Fathers 4 Justice guys. The real Batman. I mean, he probably had Robin sleep in his room.
After a life spent hanging around depressives, and having struggled with depression myself, I can say with perfect certainty [! --ed]
Yeah.
You sit in your apartment, morosely drinking a 40-ounce of St. Ides as the day ebbs, and your gaze is drawn upward to the corners of the room, where a nameless horror lurks, and all the shining world is paper to be torn through by a demon, and all the flesh under your skin is turned to dry gravel, and when you move you arm to raise the bottle the gravel inside you grinds sickeningly over itself.
That would be depression, yes. (He said, dryly.)
The case that the world is garbage must be proved again and again with Paulian tenacity.
Unfortunately, this is true for some people. There are 'professional' depressives. Which would be more accurately rendered as 'professional martyrs'. And being a Martyr, is um, depressing. The depression is incidental to the metaphorical toting about of the wooden cross and the three long nails. Then, there's the professional martyr industry, which is partly owned by the Catholic church.
In any event, yes, she shoulda STFU and been a touch more careful about what she was saying.
that was my brother's advice, too. just lie and shit.
Unfortunately, I have to second him. You gotta find one you can trust, which is awfully difficult, when yer like having innumerable black days. And there are only like 5 of 'em, worldwide.
ash
['...']
I second (third?) Ash on the lying thing. Like I said, some parts of this story are autobiographicalish. Some parts of that even fit in with this topic.
I've lived with real depression for years now and controlled it with drugs and therapy. I find the WP article repulsively stupid (and Alemeida's response tone-perfect), but not unusual. I find that many people without the experience, if not most people, have a cockeyed understanding of depression. many think it's just being sad about something and, since they've been sad, they understand and sympathise, but not too much. Others think it's some topically driven pessimism (torn apart nicely in these comments), which, depending on the topics, says more about the opinion holders' mental problems than the depressed person's. The most aggravating are people who chalk it up to nothing but laziness. I've had direct dealings with a couple of these types. If I hadn't been so lazily depressed, I'd have beat the crap out of them.
Assuming one has some say in the matter (not yet in police custody) the problem with lying to a shrink is why bother? Lying won't fix you, so just save the money and don't go.
Telling the truth may not fix you, either, but there is a chance it might.
mikez,
Being with a depressed person sucks, so I think a lot of the layman's response can be boiled down to "Oh just STFU."
I know that depressed people are a drag to be around, but that knowledge can just add to the depression and guilt.
Is one more creative when depressed? I think it depends a lot on who one is, and how one defines "creative" and "depressed."
I know an ADHD actor who was convinced that when off his meds he was a better actor and had an 'edge.'
He was wrong. Off his meds he was erratic and nearly out of control. He might have thought his acting was better but a lot of people are convinced their singing is better when they are drunk, too.
tripp: same goes for manic depressives too, but they might actually be more creative when in manic phases...
and less when not...
Another pet peeve is when people start complaining of all the medications people are prescribed as being some sort of descriptor of societies ills, of course some people are misperscribed. But damn, telling a truly depressed person to "get out of your funk" makes me wnat to shiv someone... true depression is so different than being "sad"
thanks 'meda..
I think I got most of my writing about depression out in years past, after many, many years of writing about the topic. (Christ, it was one of my prime topics in my teen-age years, but then also in the next couple of decades.) But mostly I'm (comparatively) better these days, even with a bit of a set-back at present due to recent events. So mostly I feel less like writing about it these days. (For one thing, I tend to find it depressing to write about depression.)
But: yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mostly either people get it or they don't. (And here I was just spontaneously erupting in email to Ogged the other day about my crazy father, whom I didn't specific was severely manic-depressive, what later would be "bipolar," to the point of reaching the technical condition of "completely crazy" at times; at least I've never been bipolar; I just have the history of severe recurring depression, which is much better these days! (mostly; it's a bit more subtle and tricksy, anyway).
Oh, and my father was, of course, a psychologist and psychiatric social worker. My mother was also, for a time, a social worker (later a teacher, eventually becoming the chair of the Reading Program at Erasamus High School in Brooklyn before retiring), and while not remotely as crazy as my father, she was, however, considerably tightly wound, especially for being a mother. Their friends largely all came out of the NY psychologist/psychiatrist/education/social work milieu, and I wasn't much more than 6-7 years old that I observed to myself that most of these people were somewhat crazy to some degree, and evolved my theory about people frequently going into a line of work depending upon what bothered them most when they were young; in the psychology area, it's worrying about yourself, and with cause.
These days I find my most helpful mental drug is Ambien. Although I do self-medicate a bit, from time to time, with other stuff. Naught like my Wild Youth, though, or, for that matter, the somewhat later years in which I generally drank too much and smoked too much dope.
Kotsko, what you're talking about isn't Protestant Work Ethic, but perfectionism, which has some sort of twisted-cousin-type relationship with depression. I've wrestled with that a lot ever since wee childhood, too; nothing is good enough when done by one's self unless it's just fabulous -- if it's not, it's crap, and not worth letting anyone else see; this tends to connect to the self-knowledge of one's general lack of worth and overwhelming number of failings, which either everyone knows about, or, worse and more commonly, they don't, but they'd think so much worse of one if only they knew the Truth.
Gary, I know that it's structurally impossible to make people understand my inner standard of excellence -- the nearest I can come to putting it in ordinary language is, "If it's something I actually did, it must not be a big deal." I suppose that the negative and anti-productive feelings that result from such a self-concept do actually have some relationship with contingent outside events and thus do not indicate "depression properly so called" (i.e., clinical depression), just as the negative feelings one gets when breaking up with one's girlfriend do not constitute "depression properly so called."
Have you ever read The Corrections? One of the characters, who perhaps really is clinically depressed, resists claiming that label because he would never again win an argument -- everything he did would be psychologized. That sounds both accurate and depressing.
This experience suggests that not every depressed person tries to argue, at every opportunity, that the world does too suck.
This is another thing See botches. She makes it sound as if the depressive actively and consciously makes this argument, when, in truth, lots of little voices dismiss, discount, infect, undermine all the things that could make one happy.
Adam's "If it's something I actually did, it must not be a big deal." is a great example. It's not what See describes, but it's exactly the kind of thing she's trying to describe. I have a lot of that too, Adam, and that's a good description. Reading the comments, one begins to wonder if the what really brings the people of unfogged together...
"The most aggravating are people who chalk it up to nothing but laziness. I've had direct dealings with a couple of these types. If I hadn't been so lazily depressed, I'd have beat the crap out of them."
It's always charming to encounter people who think that the appropriate response is to simply say "pull yourself together and snap out of it!" and regard you as solely to blame for not just following that advice.
I'd say that it's particularly charming when that's the stance one's mother took, given her professional background in psychology, but then, this is not disconnected from us not having spoken in over a decade, and not much in decades before that. Uh, from "one not having spoken," that is.
"I've had both colleagues and students who appear perfectly fine and then, in some way or other, reveal that they are a hair's breadth from absolute disintegration."
Yup. It's common for people in real mental trouble to be covering all the time, and often doing a fine job, although they're frequently just on the brink.
"...manic depressives too, but they might actually be more creative when in manic phases..."
Manics probably are more creative, but too often not in ways that anyone ends up liking.
"If it's something I actually did, it must not be a big deal."
That -- and I say this in no way whatever trying to make it an excuse -- is a crucial part of one mechanism whereby I wind up being far more condescending or insulting to someone than I at all intend -- because I'm expressing amazement they don't know something or did something, or somethinged something, that I've known for a long time or find terribly easy to do, and, since if I can do it, any dimbulb klutz can do it, because I barely know squat, therefore it wasn't anything special. And inside my head, I'm putting myself down, but, of course, what comes out is the reverse. But what's in my head is the terribly limited number of skill sets and knowledge sets I have, and how shallow they are, and how many zillions of other sets so many other people have and in far more depth, with far more insight, and who put them to far better use.
Me, I can make amusing chatter in spurts; that, and apparently $15 might get you a mix tape, but not all the time.
Tweedlegirl, my reference for all things psychological, tells me that part of the definition of manic depression is that in the manic state the patient is more creative. I.e. more interesting word connections, more synonyms, more unusual connections. Scientific American, she tells me, had a really good article on it, but she doesn't remember where. She also said that they are more productive in terms of words (writing, etc.).
lots of little voices dismiss, discount, infect, undermine all the things that could make one happy
I think that's right, ogged, for a lot of people, and I often wonder if much low-grade depression is a function a reasonable belief that you're a fuck-up. Or rather, you have a long run of bad luck, or something worse, and it continues for long enough for you to start making a limbic predictive system on the basis of it. Over time, your investment of energy, etc., into various activities drops because, after all, it never pays off. You get diminishing returns on diminishing investments. The diminishing returns confirm your predictive system on a larger scale (today was, in fact, worse than tomorrow), and you're off to the races. And you can't simply shake it off, because you need a new predictive system, one that is defined as deeply as the negative predictive system. That only happens with experience, which means you've got to be proof against all the inner voices you'll hear as you try to build that new predictive system. And you won't be able to do that by sheer force of will - it's too big a project. I suspect that having a strong support network of some sort is key.
Or else a serious run of good luck -- even the presence or absence of such a support network is basically a matter of dumb luck.
About not winning arguments and getting psychologized - I know that fear well. It seems like it plays a large part in not using the support network I do have, because I don't want to get labeled a certain way.
Alright... so I didn't say exactly what Tweedledopey said, but something very similar. What I meant was that IF the person is already prone to creativity and creation, manic depression (particularly, bipolar affective disorder) can, in a way, facilitate that. The Scientific American article is called "Manic-Depressive Illness and Creativity.
Studying the speech of hypomanic patients has revealed that they tend to rhyme and use other associations, such as alliteration, far more often than do unaffected individuals. They also use idiosyncratic words nearly three times as often as do control subjects.
Moreover, in specific drills, they can list synonyms or form other word associations much more rapidly than is considered normal. It seems, then. that botht the quantity and quality of thoughts build during hypomania.
This speed increase may range from a very mild quickening to a complete psychotic incoherence. It is not yet clear what causes this qualitative change in mental processing.
Nevertheless, this altered cognitive state may well facilitate the formation of unique ideas and associations.
The most striking example, I believe, is their graph of Schuman's production rate by year, labeled by his hyper-manic and severe depression stages on page 48.
Trying the Scientific American article link again.
I can't speak to anyone else's experience but my own, so here goes.
Having spent my ENTIRE ADULT LIFE struggling with depression, the problem isn't that you think the world sucks. Of course the world is beautiful. The problem is that you are utterly unable to enjoy or participate in that beauty. And reminders what you are missing just makes things worse.
The problem isn't that you feel superior to others - it's that you feel utterly INferior to them.
And you can't ask for help because deep-down, you can't dislodge the certainty that there's nothing anyone else can do, and that it's all due to an inner moral failing of your own.
Months, even years of progress towards overcoming that kind of self-hatred can be wiped out by the casually viscious pronouncements of ignorant and lazy-minded people.
May that reviewer rot in hell.