Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) (11 page)

It helped, sometimes. Not always. It wasn’t foolproof. I wasn’t Zeus. There were no magic thunderbolts at my disposal. But it is nice to build up, over the years, things that you know do – on occasion – work. Weapons for the war that subsides but that can always ignite again. And so writing, reading, talking, travelling, yoga, meditation and running were some of mine.

The brain is the body – part two

I BELIEVE THAT
the term ‘mental illness’ is misleading, as it implies all the problems that happen, happen above the neck. With depression, and with anxiety in particular, a lot of the problems may be generated by the mind, and aggravate the mind, but have physical effects.

For instance, the NHS website lists these as the psychological symptoms of generalised anxiety disorder:

restlessness
a sense of dread
feeling constantly ‘on edge’
difficulty concentrating
irritability
impatience
being easily distracted

But interestingly the NHS gives a much longer list for the physical symptoms:

dizziness
drowsiness and tiredness
pins and needles
irregular heartbeat (palpitations)
muscle aches and tension
dry mouth
excessive sweating
shortness of breath
stomach ache
nausea
diarrhoea
headache
excessive thirst
frequent urinating
painful or missed periods
difficulty falling or staying asleep (insomnia)

One symptom missing from the NHS list, but found on others, is both physical and mental.
Derealisation.
It is a very real symptom that makes you feel, well,
not real.
You
don’t feel fully inside yourself. You feel like you are controlling your body from somewhere else. It is like the distance between a writer and their fictional, semi-autobiographical narrator. The centre that is you has gone. It is a feeling of the mind and the body, once again proving to the sufferer that to separate the two as crudely as we do is wrong, and simplistic. And maybe even part of the problem.

Famous people

DEPRESSION MAKES YOU
feel alone. That’s one of its main symptoms. So it helps to know you are not alone. Given the nature of our society, and a confessional celebrity culture, it is often famous people that we hear about having troubles. But it doesn’t matter. The more we hear, the better. Well, not always. Being a writer, I don’t particularly like thinking about Ernest Hemingway and what he did with his gun, or Sylvia Plath’s head in her oven. I didn’t even like contemplating too deeply non-writer Vincent Van Gogh and his ear. And when I heard about a contemporary writer I admired, David Foster Wallace, hanging himself on 12 September 2008 it actually sparked in me my worst bout of depression since the really Bad Times. And it doesn’t have to be writers. I was one of millions of people not just saddened by Robin Williams’ death, but scared of it, as if it somehow made it more likely for us to end up the same way.

But then, most people with depression – even most famous people with depression – don’t end up committing suicide. Mark Twain suffered depression and died of a heart attack. Tennessee Williams died from accidentally choking on the cap of a bottle of eye drops that he frequently used.

Sometimes just looking at names of people who have suffered depression – or are still suffering depression – but who clearly have (or had) other things that are great going on in their lives, gives a kind of comfort. So here is my list:

Buzz Aldrin

Halle Berry

Zach Braff

Russell Brand

Frank Bruno

Alastair Campbell

Jim Carrey

Winston Churchill

Richard Dreyfuss

Carrie Fisher

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Stephen Fry

Judy Garland

Jon Hamm

Anne Hathaway

Billy Joel

Angelina Jolie

Stephen King

Abraham Lincoln

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Isaac Newton

Al Pacino

Gwyneth Paltrow

Dolly Parton

Princess Diana

Christina Ricci

Teddy Roosevelt

Winona Ryder

Brooke Shields

Charles Shulz

Ben Stiller

William Styron

Emma Thompson

Uma Thurman

Marcus Trescothick

Ruby Wax

Robbie Williams

Tennessee Williams

Catherine Zeta-Jones

And what does this teach us? That depression can happen to prime ministers and presidents and cricketers and playwrights and boxers and the stars of hit Hollywood comedies. Well, we knew that. What else? That fame and money do not immunise you from mental health problems. We kind of knew that too. Maybe it is not about teaching us anything except that knowing about Jim Carrey’s time on Prozac or Princess Leia’s bipolar disorder helps us because, while we know it can happen to anyone, we can never be told too many times that
it can actually happen to anyone
.

I remember sitting in a dentist’s reading an interview with Halle Berry in which she was talking openly about the time she sat in her car, in a garage, and tried to kill herself via carbon monoxide poisoning. She told the interviewer that the only thing that stopped her was the thought of her mother finding her.

It helped me, seeing her smiling and looking strong in that magazine. It may have been a Photoshopped illusion, but whatever, she was alive and seemingly happy, and a member of the same species as me. So yes, we like stories of recovery. We love the narrative structure of rise-fall-rise-again. Celebrity magazines run these stories endlessly.

There is a lot of cynicism about depressed celebrities, as if after a certain amount of success and money a human being becomes immune to mental illnesses. It is only mental illnesses that people seem to say this about. They don’t say it about the flu, for instance. Unlike a book or a film depression doesn’t have to be
about
something.

Also, one of the things depression often does is make you feel guilt. Depression says ‘Look at you, with your nice life, with your nice boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/ wife/kids/dog/sofa/Twitter followers, with your good job, with your lack of physical health problems, with your holiday in Rome to look forward to, with your mortgage nearly paid off, with your non-divorced parents, with your whatever,’ on and on and on.

Actually, depression can be exacerbated by things being all right externally, because the gulf between what you are
feeling and what you are
expected
to feel becomes larger. If you feel the same amount of depression as someone would naturally feel in a prisoner of war camp, but you are not in a prisoner of war camp, and are instead in a nice semi-detached house in the free world, then you think ‘Crap, this is everything I ever wanted, why aren’t I happy?’

You may find yourself, as in the Talking Heads song, in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, wondering how you got there. Watching the days. Wondering how things get on top. Wondering what is missing. Wondering if every thing we have wanted in our lives has been the wrong thing. Wondering if the smartphones and nice bathrooms and state-of-the-art TVs we thought were part of the solution are part of the problem. Wondering if, in the board game of life, everything we thought was a ladder was in fact a snake, sliding us right down to the bottom. As any Buddhist would tell you, an over-attachment to material things will lead only to more suffering.

It is said that insanity is a logical response to an insane world. Maybe depression is in part simply a response to a life we don’t really understand. Of course, no one understands their life completely if they think about it. An
annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us. Just ask Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln and the fearful gift

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, WHEN
he was thirty-two, declared: ‘I am now the most miserable man living.’ He had, by that age, experienced two massive depressive breakdowns.

‘If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better.’

Yet, of course, while Lincoln openly declared he had no fear of suicide, he did not kill himself. He chose to live.

There is a great article on ‘Lincoln’s Great Depression’ in
The Atlantic
by Joshua Wolf Shenk. In it, Shenk writes of how depression forced Lincoln into a deeper understanding of life:

He insisted on acknowledging his fears. Through his late twenties and early thirties he drove deeper and deeper into them, hovering over what, according to Albert Camus, is the only serious question human beings have to deal with. He asked whether he could live, whether he could face life’s misery. Finally he decided that he must . . . He had an ‘irrepressible desire’ to accomplish something while he lived.

He was evidently a serious person. One of the great serious people of history. He fought mental wars and physical ones. Maybe his knowledge of suffering led to the kind of empathy he showed when seeking to change the law on slavery. (‘Wherever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally,’ he said.)

Lincoln is not the only famous leader to have battled depression. Winston Churchill lived with the ‘black dog’ for much of his life too. Watching a fire, he once remarked to a young researcher he was employing: ‘I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed.’

Indeed he did. He was – in terms of career achievements – one of the most active men who ever lived. Yet he continually felt despondent and full of darkness.

The political philosopher John Gray – one of my favourite non-fiction writers (read
Straw Dogs
to see why)
– believes Churchill didn’t ‘overcome’ depression to become a good war leader, rather that the experience of depression directly enabled him to be one.

Gray argues, in an article for the BBC, that it was Churchill’s ‘exceptional openness’ to intense emotion that explains how he was able to sense dangers that more conventional minds failed to see. ‘For most of the politicians and opinion-makers who wanted to appease Hitler, the Nazis were not much more than a raucous expression of German nationalism,’ writes Gray. It needed an unusual mind to address an unusual threat. ‘He owed his foresight of the horror that was to come to visits of the black dog.’

So, yes, depression is a nightmare. But can it also be a useful one? Can it be one that improves the world in various ways?

Sometimes the links between depression, anxiety and productivity are undeniable. Think of Edvard Munch’s omnipresent painting
The Scream
, for instance. Not only is this a most accurate visual depiction of what a panic attack feels like, but it was also – according to the artist himself – directly inspired by a moment of existential terror. Here is the diary entry:

I was walking down the road when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.

But even without the ‘smoking gun’ of a specific depressive episode inspiring a specific work of genius, it is impossible to ignore the sheer number of greats who have battled depression. Even without focusing on the Plaths and Hemingways and Woolfs who actually killed themselves, the list of known depressives is staggering. And many times there is a link between the illness and the work they produce.

A lot of Freud’s work was based on his analysis of his own depression, and what he believed to be the solution. Cocaine was what worked for him, but then – after dishing it out to other sufferers – he started to realise it could be a tad addictive.

Franz Kafka is another member of the Depression Hall of Fame. He suffered from social anxiety and what people now see as clinical depression all his life. He was also a
hypochondriac living in fear of physical and mental change. But being a hypochondriac doesn’t mean you won’t get ill, and when he was thirty-four Kafka contracted tuberculosis. Interestingly, all the things that were known to help Kafka’s depression – swimming, horse riding, hiking – were physically healthy pursuits.

Surely the claustrophobia and sense of powerlessness in his works – so often interpreted in solely political terms – was also a result of him suffering from an illness that makes you feel claustrophobic?

Kafka’s most famous story is
The Metamorphosis
. A travelling salesman wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect, who has overslept and is late for work. It is a story about the dehumanising effect of capitalism, yes, but it can equally be read as a metaphor for depression, the most Kafkaesque of illnesses. For, like Gregor Samsa, the depressive can sometimes wake up in the room they fell asleep in, and yet feel totally different. An alien to themselves. Trapped in a nightmare.

Likewise, could Emily Dickinson have written her poem ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ without deep mental anguish? Of course, most depressives don’t end up being a Lincoln or a Dickinson or a Churchill or a Munch or a
Freud or a Kafka (or a Mark Twain or a Sylvia Plath or a Georgia O’Keeffe or an Ian Curtis or a Kurt Cobain). But then, nor do most people.

People often use the word ‘despite’ in the context of mental illness. So-and-so did such-and-such
despite
having depression/anxiety/OCD/agoraphobia/whatever. But sometimes that ‘despite’ should be a ‘because’. For instance, I write because of depression. I was not a writer before. The intensity needed – to explore things with relentless curiosity and energy – simply wasn’t there. Fear makes us curious. Sadness makes us philosophise. (‘To be or not to be?’ is a daily question for many depressives.)

Going back to Abraham Lincoln, the key thing to note is that the president always suffered with depression. He never fully overcame it, but he lived alongside it and achieved great things. ‘Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering,’ says Joshua Wolf Shenk in that article I mentioned. ‘Rather, it must be accounted an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering . . . Lincoln didn’t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy; the problem of his melancholy
was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.’