What not to say to a depressed person

A few days ago I posted on "epistemic humility," or the idea that we can't really know what it is like to go through many of the things, especially the difficult things, that other people experience. That post was motivated by, and was primarily a longish quotation from the blog Crooked Timber.

Today there was a very sad follow-up by Crooked Timber poster Maria, consisting only of a long list of things that get said to people who are trying without success to have children. As you might imagine, the things that people say in this context tend to cluster on the negative end of the spectrum, from the merely useless to the outright hurtful. Random examples:

You know, a friend of mine tried for ten years and then they gave up. And then it just happened like that. And they’ve had two more since.

You know, I have a good feeling that it’ll work out for you. I just know it.

If you could just relax a little, you know? Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

These are all prima facie evidence that the speaker has no idea what sort of suffering is experienced by those who want badly to conceive but have not been able to do so.  And, to bring up again the theme of epistemic humility, these are also evidence that the person uttering such things is unaware that he or she does not know the depth of the suffering, or even of that suffering's existence. That person does not know, and does not know that he or she does not know.

In the comments someone with the tag Widmerpool brings up depression:

Same thing for depression — think how lucky you are, this will pass, have you tried working out, I was really sad once, do something for other people, lots of famous people were depressed.

Yes, this is the same dynamic, which is exactly why I linked to the original Epistemic Humility post to begin with. People who say those sorts of things don't know what depression is like, and they haven't the slightest idea that they don't know. These people are not necessarily bad people, nor evil people, though of course some of them are. In many cases they just don't know what it is like. They have never had to deal with childlessness or depression or (insert your personal hell here). Nor have they ever had cause to think about it. This, of course suggests that many of them lack empathy, and I would not be too eager to draw too stark and thick a line between the unempathetic and the evil. But I have known very warm, emotionally generous and generally empathetic people to say things like "You've got so much going for you" in response to my depression. Or the time after a breakup when I was probably more mopey than was strictly necessary (I was a teenager, after all) and was told, "There are other fish in the sea." There may be more useless things to say to someone who is mourning the end of a relationship, but nothing comes immediately to mind.

So in the spirit of Maria's post at Crooked Timber, here are a few links to places that have listed Things Not To Say To a Depressed Person

Here is a list of 10 as a good place to start. 
And 10 more.
This list of 100 things is pretty comprehensive.

And, How Not To Be A Dick To A Person With Depression.

I'm not sure which of these Things Not To Say annoys me the most. For now I think I will go with the inevitable jerk who showed up in the comments to Maria's Crooked Timber post with the following, which perhaps deserves some sort of asshole award for hitting the main themes with such clueless heartlessness: 

ezra abrams 11.14.13 at 12:31 am

When I was young (<10) and used to complain, my dad told me of a snippet from CBS news:
On camera, they interview an old lady on thestreets of Tel Aviv, and ask her, isn't inflation awful, the price of butter has gone through the roof ?!
And she says, I was in Auschwitz, this isn't so bad…..
so stop whining: you could have been born in Biafra; life sucks; pick yourself up and do soemthing

Because nothing cheers up a depressed person/cancer patient/childless couple quite as much as knowing that children somewhere are starving or maybe shitting themselves to death with cholera while their mothers look on helplessly. (MPA Victoria responds appropriately to ezra abrams)

That is probably enough for now on What Not To Say. Which  leaves us with the little problem of what TO say.  But Maria has this one covered. There is one short, sweet, and safe response, and it covers a multitude of situations:

"I'm so sorry."

We should use it more often.

Armistice Day

Here in the US we have called it Veterans Day (officially it should have no possessive apostrophe) since 1954, but I am not on board with the name change. Armistice Day was meant to be a day to mark the end of the The Great War and to pause to consider the fates of the millions who died in that eruption of violent European tribalism. In the US we have subtly shifted the emphasis to the soldiers, which takes us away from the horrors visited on civilians and closer to a glorification of the soldier and of war, the sort of glorification that Mark Twain depicted well in his War Prayer. The ceremonies we conduct on this day, usually in military cemeteries, are all about honoring the soldiers, and there is little talk anymore about the utter futility in which they died in that war, since the conventional wisdom that has settled across the land has it that to discuss the futility, idiocy, or infamy of any of our wars is to dishonor the soldiers. Nor is there any talk of the huge cost to civilian populations; and in a war with 7 million  civilian dead alongside the 10 million million  military dead, this seems a major and shortsighted lapse. The sort of lapse that I have to think will lead to more war and more dead.

But let's get back to my usual subject, which is mental breakdowns. In the case of war we have the well-known example of what we today call Post-traumatic stress disorder. I am far from knowing much about this, but I do know that in this clip comedian George Carlin makes a few essential points on the importance of the names we give to "abnormal" mental conditions.



The effects of war on minds need to be taken as seriously as its effects on bodies. In each case the young, the healthy, the fit are mangled, broken, destroyed, crippled. It is well known today that field and emergency medicine has advanced a great deal since the days of MASH or even Vietnam. Our ability to heal minds lags sadly behind.  And though the economic cost of this destruction can be tabulated, there is no way to tabulate the cost in psychic trauma,  the cost of promising young lives dumped into a maelstrom of psychological dysfunction, and the price paid by parents, spouses, children, siblings. If we were to apply a psychological cost-benefit analysis to our wars we might find most of them to be grievously expensive.

I have no solutions for any of this, nor any comforting words. Someday, I would like to think, we will honor our soldiers by not sending them to die for empire or for lies. And in the meantime, until that day arrives, we might honor them by facing up to the full cost of their service, by honestly addressing their conditions, and by putting as much money into healing their souls as we put into perfecting ways to kill.


Bonus: Armistice day poem

The poppies used across the Commonwealth on Armistice/Remembrance day are taken from the poem "In Flanders Fields" by Canadian Lieutenant John McCrae. It was written in 1915, before the full, grinding horror of the war became apparent. It is, we might say, practically a product of the pre-war era, when one might with no shame raise up war as a noble endeavor. But the war was to produce a new generation of poets and poems, many of whom, like McCrae, would not survive the trenches.  These would depict the war in more realistic, graphic and horrible ways. One of the more potent of these is Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est," the name of which is taken from the poem's last lines, which contain a quote from Horace that translates to "Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country." Horace clearly meant it. Owen, whose poem is based on his own experience on the receiving end of gas attacks (in the poem the gas seems to be mustard or phosgene) places the Horace quote in the title with bitter irony. By 1917, when the poem was written, it was no longer possible to discuss the glories of battle.

Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


Wilfred Owen died one week before the end of the war; news of his death reached his parents on Armistice Day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

"Epistemic humility"

Yes, to this from Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber:

A colleague who lost his teenage son due to a traffic accident 3 years ago, told us about the ‘black halo’ which remains above his head, and which only others who have lost a child are able to see. I do not doubt for a second that this is the case – that people who have not lost a child are, perhaps a very few exceptions aside, not able to truly understand what it means to lose a child, and how it changes the person you are. It reminds me of a friend who lost her father about a year after I lost mine. She had been very supportive when my father was terminally ill and died, but told me after her father died that she had no idea how hard it was until she experienced it herself. Good intentions are simply not enough to understand certain experiences.

I think it’s not just with experiences, but also with varieties of ‘differences’ and with social practices, being ill, and other features of human life. It is not just the death of someone near and dear that we have a hard time to understand if we haven’t experienced it ourselves; or what it means to have autism, or to live with and/or care for someone who has autism (in my experience, most people don’t understand, despite what they believe themselves about their understanding); or what it is to be constantly subjected to racism. I am confident that I have no clue what it means to grow up in abject poverty, or to live through a civil war, or to be the victim of domestic abuse. 

My worry is that this category of experiences, differences, practices, and other features of human life that we cannot understand without first-person experience, is much larger than we generally tend to assume. And that as a consequence, we believe that we know much more than we actually do know. And, as a further consequence, that we too often are wrong in our judgements of aspects of the lives of people significantly different than ourselves.
Somehow it strikes me as wise, and possibly even as a precondition for social justice, if we would rehabilitate epistemic humility at the core of our educational and social practices.

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that we don't fully understand what others have gone through or are going through. We should in many cases also acknowledge that we maybe don't want to know. For example, I don't know what it is like to have cancer, and I am grateful for that. That is knowledge I would prefer to never have.

But I do know what it is like to go to bed every night for months on end wishing to never wake up. I am certainly not grateful for that, but it does, I think, give me an insight into the dynamic Robeyns is discussing here. I know what it feels like to suffer through something that others clearly do not and cannot understand. Recognizing that inability in others, I hope, makes it easier for me to recognize that same inability in myself. And that recognition may be the origin of empathy.

"I wanted so badly not to be me"

The Guardian has an interview with Neko Case, in which she discusses her depression, in particular the depression in which she wrote her latest release "The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You." Her description of depression will be familiar to those who know it, though she can perhaps express it better than most of us can:

But it was the mundanity that struck her more than anything. "Depression, there's no grand excellence to it," she says. "In my experience it was just almost the gulaggy boringness of it that'll kill you. You're just in this murk. And you're with other humans, but you lose all your human skills and it's just like you're in this plastic bag and you can't quite connect with people. You lose your ability to transmit electricity or something, and to receive it. It's just like this 'bzzzuh'." She makes a feeble, disconnected sound. "It isn't sparking."

"It isn't sparking"
That is quite perfect. Depression dulls those inter-human connections that we need to maintain our affective equilibrium. It leaves us surrounded, especially in the most social of situations, by people who seem to move around us as through water, slowly and seemingly distantly and with no possibility of communication.  We can watch and observe, but we never feel fully present and we can never connect. We cannot spark.


A chill ran through me
And I grabbed on tight
That was when I left my body for good
And I shook off all the strength I'd earned

I wanted so badly not to be me
I wanted so badly not to be me
I saw my shadow looking lost
Checking its pockets for some lost receipt

Where did I leave that fire?





Bonus: Neko Case performing in the studio on NPR's World Cafe

Sorrow kills sorrow

A few weeks back I was in the car headed to the high school track where I run (because I'm an American, and that is what we do: we jump in our cars and drive to the places where we exercise) hopping from radio station to radio station, and finally settled on Prairie Home Companion as the least annoying thing. My timing, for once, was spot on: as I pulled into the parking lot, the band  Joy Kills Sorrow started into an exceptionally compelling  performance of an old country song.

Later that night I went hunting for their version of the song on the internet, and found a live performance on YouTube. The next day the Prairie Home Companion performance was put online. And since then I've been listening to the two versions quite alot. Over and over, in fact.

And over.


Here is my favorite version from YouTube:

Linkapalooza

All links, no editorializing.
Well, not much editorializing.

The doors of perception

More evidence is in that hallucinogens may have some value in treating some mental disorders, particularly anxiety and depression. This post at the Smithsonian covers the latest research, in this case into the use of psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms) to ease anxiety.

Motivational speakers on happiness kill themselves

No, it's not a headline from The Onion.

But this brief news item is a good place holder while I finish my post on cognitive-behavioral therapy and the cruelty of mandatory positive thinking.

The problem with vascular tumors of unknown etiology

The problem with vascular tumors of unknown etiology that grow aggressively at your skull base and wear away the bone is that you don’t have a lot of control over them.

This does not have anything in particular to do with depression, actually. But it is one of the best things I've read in quite a while, and does address issues of being ensnared in the world of modern medicine. It addresses many other things as well: family and love and courage and strength. It is smart and funny and inspiring.
Go to Chronicles of Mayo, scroll all the way down, and then read your way up.

It is the story of Stephanie Fahs and her journey after being diagnosed with a "benign" tumor. The discord between the normal use of the word "benign" and the way it is used in medical contexts suggests a very dark and twisted sense of humor on somebody's part. As a reminder, here is the definition from Merriam-Webster online:

I want to see the colors, Pt. 2a: Doing Drugs

A brief note about seeing the colors:

One of the several cruel things about dysthymia is that it eventually comes to seem that it has always been with you; it may even seem to be part of you, or perhaps part of some broken interface between you and the world. It eventually becomes just part of the texture of the way things are, and sufferers learn to accept it with resignation; it becomes impossible to imagine anything ever being any different. Somewhere in my chaotic pile of notes relating to depression and dysthymia I have a quote from a woman whose dysthymia lifted when she began taking anti-depressants. She said* that after she went on medications it was like finally being able to see colors after a lifetime of seeing only grays. It was a nice analogy, simple and precise. And how nice that must be, I thought, to see the colors, to look around the world and perceive a depth that was previously unknown, to experience the small joys that most humans feel as a matter of birthright.  That, I thought, is all I really want.

I read about that women's experience after I had tried Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC).  When I started TLC,  I was hoping to avoid drugs, given their low success rates, side effects, and discontinuation issues. My plan all along, really, had been to try the most natural treatment option I knew of—TLC—and THEN, if that failed, to move on to drugs. Unfortunately the TLC delivered limited amelioration, and after a long wait, and with the dark affective claustrophobia of impending winter, I knew my next step had to be drugs. 

So let's talk about drugs.

Drugs, monopolies, gin and tonics, and electric guitars

Yeah, as the title suggests I'm a bit scattered today.  But I want, primarily, to post a quick follow-up to yesterday's post on the DSM  (was it yesterday? time seems unreal sometimes) and its mention of ketamine.

DSM kerfuffle, Part the First

This month the fifth edition of the of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) came out, and the release is generating more press than one might expect from the publication of a thick, dry tome that resides mostly in the offices of psychiatrists, psychologists, and insurance companies. Typically, given the media's weakness for controversy, the coverage tends to focus on the controversies surrounding the new DSM.

This piece at The Guardian covers some of the issues, in particular the objections of the British psychological establishment to the latest DSM. In anticipation of the publication of the new DSM the Division of Clinical Psychology (DCP),  part of the British Psychological Society, released a statement detailing the members' objections to the new DSM. I want to talk today about those objections. Tomorrow, time willing, I will address the concerns from within the psychiatric community, and discuss a maddening and ill-reasoned screed from a psychiatrist who worked on the previous edition of the DSM. For now, let's deal with the psychologists.

Neurobiology of Depression

Psychologists in England recently declared war on psychiatry and the "bio-medical model" of mental illness. I'll have more to say soon on this, as well as on the controversies around the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  For now, however, I will just say the the psychologists are fighting a rear-guard retreat, though they don't yet seem aware that this is the case. The accumulating evidence that depression, in particular is indeed a medical—that is, a physiological—condition  is becoming overwhelming.

A recent development on this front: the work of Eric J. Nestler, MD, Ph, who is working on developing a model for human depression in mice.  A short video, in which he discusses his work:

"Months oozed by"

Several years ago one of my favorite things on the internet was the blog Hyperbole and a Half, by the wonderful Allie Brosh.  It was primarily the sensibility that attracted me: dark humor edging toward twisted, unflinching honesty, and all this wrapped around a generous core. By generous I mean: the most generous humor is often at one's own expense rather than at the expense of others. It was one of the most delightful things on the internet.

I lost track of Hyperbole as I descended deeper into my own depression. As it turns out,  Allie Brosh also lost track of Hyperbole as she descended into her own depression. She is back now, after a very long absence, and her latest and long-awaited post may be one of the better descriptions of depression we will ever see.

The post has too many important things to say, and I won't quote extensively. But she is quite good on the difficulty of dealing with people who don't understand your depression:

But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they'll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you're having this weird argument where you're trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they'll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself.

And the part that rings truest for me, given my own complicated relationship with the possibility/promise of death:

No, see,  I don't necessarily want to KILL myself. . . I just want to become dead somehow.

That is the thought I went to bed with every night for a year and half. I didn't want to kill  myself; I just wanted to never wake up again. Assuming I could get to sleep. . . .

I'm in a position now to appreciate some of the wonderful things in the world, and Hyperbole and a Half is certainly among them. Head on over and look around; her Best Of listing on the right should keep you out of trouble for a few hours. If you like velociraptors, pirates, sharks and boats, you will like what you find.

Depression: as real as diabetes

This is a very good (but perhaps longish--52 minutes) video with Robert Sapolsky addressing our current understanding of depression and the way various risk factors interact. He gives, a well, as quick summary of the origins of the "chemical imbalance" theory that was once so influential.

In brief, depression is the result of genes + stress; these two interact via brain chemistry.   What I especially appreciate is his understanding that admonishing us to "pull ourselves out of it" is useless. We don't need pep talks. We need treatment for a condition that is, as he says, as real as diabetes.  I would even go so far as to say that telling a depressed person to "pull yourself out of it" is needlessly cruel, despite there being at least one entire  book devoted to that sort of brow-beating and victim-blaming.

Sapolsky is an interesting scholar, having carved out a niche for himself between neurobiology and primatology! He is, in particular, an expert on stress, which plays a huge role in major depression.

Plus ça change??

If I were gay I think I would try to convince this guy to leave his wife for me:

Dear Prudence,
I’m a man in his mid-40s who has been happily married for 10 years. I particularly enjoy my wife’s dry, some would say sarcastic, sense of humor. Her wit not only attracted me to her as a partner, but it was one of the things that got me through a difficult time in my career, enabling me to see the humor in absurd and uncomfortable situations. About 18 months ago my wife’s mother passed away suddenly and my wife began seeing a counselor. After a few appointments, the counselor prescribed an antidepressant medication, Paxil, and my wife’s has been taking it ever since. As a result, my wife's personality has changed. Not dramatically, but enough so that she has become a glass-half-full, constantly cheerful type of person. I have no idea if this is common or perhaps if she was always depressed and her dark humor existed for her to deal with it. I'm glad she's happy now but I thought we were happy before and frankly, I miss my old wife! The new rainbows-and-sunshine person I'm living with gives me a headache and I find myself less attracted to her. I feel like a jerk and don't know what to do. Help!

—Dark Side

Comfort in, dump out

How not to say the wrong thing to someone in a crisis:

Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. . . . Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. . . .  Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. . . .

Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, "Life is unfair" and "Why me?" That's the one payoff for being in the center ring.

Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.

When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you're going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn't, don't say it. Don't, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don't need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, "I'm sorry" or "This must really be hard for you" or "Can I bring you a pot roast?" Don't say, "You should hear what happened to me" or "Here's what I would do if I were you." And don't say, "This is really bringing me down."

If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that's fine. It's a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.
Comfort IN, dump OUT.

Read through to the last line.

From the LA Times

Comments issue

Just wanted to take a moment to thank the folks who left the two (!) comments here so far. Unfortunately I have not had any luck responding/replying to comments due to internet issues beyond my ken. I'll see if I can get this sorted out in the next few days. Since my readership is not exactly massive, I will place this issue in the bucket of things that do not require immediate attention!

I want to see the colors, Part I

As I mentioned recently, last month I called the local community mental health center to give the world of pharmaceutical psychiatry a crack at my condition. In the next few posts I want to cover some of the history that led me here. In order to keep the navel-gazing to a minimum, I will try to focus on insights that might be of use to others and to keep the discussion centered, whenever possible, on our current understandings of depression and dysthymia. But this is, in fact, all about me, so I apologize in advance! These posts will involve going back a bit in time, to a long major depressive episode. Back to the revelation, for me at least, that depression is not, and need not be, the normal reaction to setbacks in life, even major setbacks. And, as a way of finding focus, it goes back to the suicide of a man who seemed to have the perfect life.

The music of depression

in the New York Times

That is all.

Depression kills (Outsourced to Aaron Swartz)

I imagine most people have not been following the internet conversation centered on the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz. Briefly, he was a coder and an activist and a proponent of open information. One might summarize the circumstances that led to his death like this: he was hounded to death by the Obama administration's Department of Justice. Here is civil libertarian Glen Greenwald on the background, for those interested.

When I heard that Swartz killed himself I wondered if there were underlying affective issues at work, in addition to the disproportionate penalties he was facing.  And, sure enough, Swartz had long battled depression. Here he is addressing that issue in his blog in 2007 (linked to in the Greenwald piece) (emphasis mine):

Surely there have been times when you’ve been sad. Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak — the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.

At best, you tell yourself that your thinking is irrational, that it is simply a mood disorder, that you should get on with your life. But sometimes that is worse. You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms. As George Scialabba put it, “acute depression does not feel like falling ill, it feels like being tortured … the pain is not localized; it runs along every nerve, an unconsuming fire. … Even though one knows better, one cannot believe that it will ever end, or that anyone else has ever felt anything like it.”

The economist Richard Layard, after advocating that the goal of public policy should be to maximize happiness, set out to learn what the greatest impediment to happiness was today. His conclusion: depression. Depression causes nearly half of all disability, it affects one in six, and explains more current unhappiness than poverty. And (important for public policy) Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a short-term success rate of 50%. Sadly, depression (like other mental illnesses, especially addiction) is not seen as “real” enough to deserve the investment and awareness of conditions like breast cancer (1 in 8) or AIDS (1 in 150). And there is, of course, the shame.

Yes, there is of course the shame. We can look to cancer, for example, as an issue around which there is much less shame than there used to be, and hope that the shame of depression might one day be a relic of a less tolerant past.

But one thing that jumps out at me here, in addition to the excellent characterizations of depression from Swartz and Scialabba, is Swartz's statement that the bleakness takes no account of one's own accomplishments. By the time he wrote that, Swartz was already a highly accomplished coder and entrepreneur: he had helped create RSS and was a founder of Reddit (NY Times obit). He had accomplished much and promised much more. Yet none of that could keep depression at bay. Depression does not care who you are or what you have done. It does not care what you might accomplish; it is indifferent to your promise, to your intelligence, to every good quality you might possess. Like the black death, bringing down prince and peasant, it is an equal opportunity scourge.

By all accounts Swartz was a kind and generous person who tried, with much success, to make the world a more decent place. His own suffering would be tragedy enough. But the tragedy here extends beyond the personal, and we will surely never know the full social cost of one life cut short by demons.

For more on Swartz, I recommend:

A nice piece at Gawker, including a lovely passage from a former partner.

Crooked Timber (the good folks at CT have a series of posts up on Swartz)

Lawrence Lessig on the overzealous prosecution.

Thoughts on comfort and joy

Those who are depressed or dysthymic will recognize the holiday season as an especially poignant time. The demands to feel joy, and in particular to find joy in one's networks of family and friends, are particularly acute.  We often refer to those networks with the shorthand term "home." "Home" of course carries a massive and unruly load of meanings and associations, many of them real, certainly, but many of them manufactured, especially  in the context of the holidays.