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.



As I was wasting away in the depths of my recent major depressive episode I came across an essay by Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. The essay, available here, recounts Solomon's friendship with a scholar named Terry Kirk.

Kirk seemed to have pretty much everything a person could ask for in life. He lived in Rome, where he taught, studied, and wrote about Italian art and architecture. He apparently had a supportive and generally fabulous partner. But one day he went out to a hill outside the city and killed himself.

When someone takes his own life, the socially accepted response is, "Oh my god, why?? Why would somebody do that??"   That question is, I suspect, the natural response for anyone who has not suffered clinical depression, who has not considered that death might be the only way to alleviate unrelenting psychic pain.

I did not ask that question, nor would it have occurred to me to ask that question. I already knew the answer. I understood immediately why Kirk did what he did. And that immediate understanding frightened me horribly.

That fear was, I suppose, a sign that I was harboring a few emotional resources yet, stretched and threadbare though they might have been. It did, at least, serve as a warning that it was time to come to terms with my condition: if being in Rome with a great partner and a fabulous job wasn't enough to save Kirk, what hope do the rest of us have?? (I know; that is the wrong question to ask, because circumstances don't necessarily matter!) But reading of his suicide made me feel my own hold on life was dangerously fragile, as was demonstrated too well by how readily I could see in Kirk, (whom I did not know) the clear, inescapable sense that extinction might in fact be a better alternative. Which is to say that though the prospect of self-imposed extinction is unsettling, it was not nearly as unsettling to me as immediately understanding why someone in Kirk's circumstances might conclude that killing himself was the only acceptable option.

This easy, almost collegial familiarity with a drive to death is common among depressed people and for us it offers, at times, the only note of relief from the prospect of a life of endless agony. Joel Smith, once president of Stanford, discusses this in a short article he wrote for The American Scholar:

What happens, as I have experienced it, is that profound depression  spontaneously turns upside-down, as it were, so that it suddenly seems perfectly clear that I should die. This is not tragic. It's the opposite.  This is a good feeling, not euphoric but authentic and consoling. The relief is uncommonly welcome. Thus, suicide is terribly pernicious. My ultimate guardian—namely myself—has not just gone off duty but, so much more dangerously, has become the agent of destruction.

("Darker than darkness" in The American Scholar, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Autumn 1997), pp. 495-499. I will send the PDF to anyone who contacts me by email and asks nicely!)


It was that consolation at the prospect of death that forced me to resolve that one of us (me or the depression) had to go. It seemed to make sense to first try and convince the depression to leave before scheduling my own ascension to eternal oblivion.  That sounds melodramatic, and I understand that eternal oblivion is a choice that sounds extreme or irrational to those who do not know what it is like to be driven to it.  And it is the sort of thing that is impossible to even mention without people thinking you are being overly dramatic or fishing for sympathy or  "crying out for help," as the pyschobabble has it.

But for  me, this was really quite simple and not at all melodramatic: throughout all this, throughout my depression, the central issue has always been, and always will be: can I stave off the cognitive fog in which my mind has been enveloped since that first northern winter starting grinding away at my mind, tearing slowly at my soul?   There is a set of well known cognitive dysfunctions associated with depression: difficulty concentrating, memory problems, slow mental processes, etc.  And in some ways, it was this set of cognitive impairments that I found most debilitating, even more so than the emotional pain and emptiness. Emptiness I maybe could live with (I told myself, perhaps a bit too often), but I could never be fully alive or myself without my full mental capacities. If I could only keep the cognitive fog at bay, I still mostly believe, things could turn out to be OK for me.  But—and here is the part I found most horrible to contemplate— but if I can't find my way out of the fog, then for all practical purposes I already no longer exist.  Obviously Descartes would disagree, but then identity issues weren't exactly his main concern, were they? And of course I would exist, even in the worst cognitive fog, but I would not exist in any form that I find desirable or even recognizable.  Without my ability to read, to absorb ideas, to turn them over, examine them, develop them into new ideas—without the ability to do the things we over-educated types are supposed to do—then I've lost the only part of me that has ever really mattered. The part of me on which my entire sense of "me" depends. Without that I'm already gone, and anything "drastic" or "melodramatic" I might do would be, under those conditions, just a formality, a legal nicety to make official my de facto brain death by depression. If the brain is dead, why keep the body alive, other than as an exercise in pointless masochism???