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Plumbing the Depths Of Depression
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Depression: the Jersey dump fire of the mind, being stuck in the urinal of a Charles Bukowski drinking binge, a wet January locked in a closet with Edgar Allan Poe (whose original tombstone read, "Here, at last, he is happy").
It has been documented in various guises -- mania, melancholy, schizophrenia, fatalism, despair, suicide -- since man first took twig to papyrus. It has been regarded as a moral weakness, a sin, evidence of a flawed mind or the required companion to artistic genius. It uses the normal if unhappy thought patterns of sadness, grief, regret, fear and anxiety to scorch the psyche. It has been found in all cultures in all centuries. You think it is alienation, a postmodern creation of the European industrial age, and then you find out that rural Sri Lanka has the world's highest rate of suicide.
The World Health Organization estimates that 121 million people on the planet currently meet the criteria for clinical depression. These are long-lasting loss of energy, patterns of negative thoughts, inability to concentrate, suicidal ideation, insomnia and so on. There is no test, as there is for diabetes or a brain tumor. There is no clear marker separating, say, natural grief and the medical condition.
It's more of a feeling that goes out of control. It's the difference between waiting for the sun to come up, which is sadness, and the knowledge that the sun will never shine again, which is depression.
Wallace Stevens, "The Plain Sense of Things":
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The priest in Ecclesiastes:
