“There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance. We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accommodations to the pain’s demands – to accept it, whether pluckily or whimpering and complaining, according to our personal degree of stoicism, but in any case to accept it… In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come – not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves… moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience – one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devastation would be lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems… However, the sufferer of depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must… even smile.” (pp. 61-63)
“A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self – a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggle against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it…” (p. 64)
“I’m convinced I should have been in the hospital weeks before. For, in fact, the hospital was my salvation, and it is something of a paradox that in this austere place… I found the repose, the assuagement of the tempest in my brain, that I was unable to find in my quiet farmhouse. This is partly the result of sequestration, of safety, of being removed to a world in which the urge to pick up a knife and plunge it into one’s own breast disappears… But the hospital also offers the mild, oddly gratifying trauma of sudden stabilization – a transfer out of the too familiar surroundings of home, where all is anxiety and discord, into an orderly and benign detention where one’s only duty is to try to get well. For me the real healers were seclusion and time.” (pp. 68-69)
“… In the hospital I partook what may be depression’s only grudging favour – its ultimate capitulation. Even those for whom any kind of therapy is a futile exercise can look forward to the eventual passing of the storm. If they survive the storm itself, its fury almost always fades and then disappears. Mysterious in its coming, mysterious in its going, the affliction runs its course, and one finds peace.” (p. 73)
“… There is a Sisyphean torment in the fact that a great number – as many as half – of those who are devastated once will be struck again; depression has the habit of recurrence. But most victims live through even these relapses, often coping better because they have become psychologically tuned by past experience to deal with the ogre. It is of great importance that those who are suffering a siege, perhaps for the first time, be told – be convinced, rather – that the illness will run its course and that they will pull through… [It] has been shown over and over again that if the encouragement is dogged enough – and the support equally committed and passionate – the endangered one can nearly always saved. Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness… It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life’s worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense of their worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides.” (pp. 75-76)
Styron cites a Dante;
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.
And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.
*
I have my own wraithlike observer who hovers over me all the time…I have been trying to explain my condition sincerely to people who I BELIEVE are willing to listen. But I’m increasingly feeling that was a mistake. Because of what this illness WRONGLY implies to laymen about the personality of sufferers and my fear towards their lack of understanding and prejudice, and also because of my own embarrassment, my behaviour may be giving them an impression that depression is something they can safely joke about. Again, out of embarrassment, I timidly accept hurtful jokes with a forced laugh. It may be one of those rare times when the violent nature of depressives turns outwards.
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