At last count, one in eight Americans was being medicated for depression. On the face of it, many of us of the sad countenance don’t have anything to moan about, which, if anything, makes us feel worse. We pay someone to mow our backyards and spend hours searching the internet to find the best deal for our next vacation. What’s our problem?
Back in the late sixties, my high school principal, whose office I made many trips to, pressed virtually the same question. I don’t know where it came from, but on one visit I attempted to excuse my disruptive class behavior by pleading that I was acting up because I was depressed. Puzzled for a moment, the beefy, flat-topped administrator waved me over to his desk. Picking up a pencil, he drew a straight line with an indentation. I had the feeling that he had given this sermonette before, but he explained that the notch was a depression like you might see in the earth. He then leaned back in his chair and concluded, “A depression is a hole, and a hole is nothing. So depression is nothing.”
This was a ludicrous equivocation, but I could not argue that at the time. The principal was a veteran of the war in the Pacific, and I must have seemed like a kid who just needed to toughen up and learn to deal with the hard times. Depression is not so simple. As Kierkegaard wrote, “Depression is something real that one does not delete with the stroke of a pen.” More than that, Kierkegaard maintained that depression was the signal defect of his own age, the defect “that has robbed us of the courage to command, the courage to obey, the power to act, the confidence to hope.”
When you are walking under the black sun,1 you generally feel like a victim—weak and powerless. No matter what you might think of Freud, who, by the way, was about as far from an existentialist as possible, he was astute in observing that there is a fury beneath the apparent passivity of the depressive, a merciless and relentless rage directed at the self. Among other things, depression is a disturbance in the way that we talk to ourselves. Personally, I connect the funk with being bombarded by debilitating thoughts, thoughts that lift me out of the present and engulf me with a feeling of utter hopelessness, thoughts that even manage to leave me bereft of all curiosity.
One day, I was re-reading a text, preparing to teach my class on existentialism. Somewhere along the page the word father loomed up, and I was immediately tumbling down the memory well to my father’s burial twenty-five years earlier. Peering out the snow-feathered window, I recalled, it was in December on what felt like the coldest day in my recorded history. I live in Minnesota and yet have never experienced a chill as piercing. It was so blustery that the priest, dressed in purple vestments and a long black coat, had to struggle just to keep his hat on as he read a short passage from the Bible. With the wind madly gusting, I couldn’t hear a word he said. My dad didn’t go to church. The priest didn’t know him from Adam, which meant he was at a glaring loss for some final words. It was evident that Father Whoever couldn’t wait to get in his car and back to the warmth of the rectory. A pervasive emptiness seemed to enfold everything, an emptiness so profound that it felt as though the devil himself had created it. Back in his salad days, my father was always surrounded by buddies, but only one pal was present when they laid him down.
Depression is a disturbance in the way that we talk to ourselves. Personally, I connect the funk with being bombarded by debilitating thoughts, thoughts that lift me out of the present and engulf me with a feeling of utter hopelessness, thoughts that even manage to leave me bereft of all curiosity.
In a fizzling funk myself, my thoughts kept crawling away from the book I was supposed to be freshening up on, and I started reminiscing about that once-successful businessman, how the breastbone of all his hopes were slowly crushed by depression and decades of trying to douse that depression with Seagram’s 7. In the good years, my old man was a classic dresser, Brooks Brothers suits, Oxford cloth shirts; but when the time came to place him in his six-foot office, we had to “borrow” a tie because he had tossed all of his. Wincing as it came to mind, I got to thinking that my mother could have gone out and bought a tie. Instead, she borrowed one from the retired iron worker who lived next door. Borrow? As though we were going to return it!
The connections between ideas zipping through our skulls is a mystery. A few synapses later, I circled back three decades to the autumn afternoon when I cheated on my onetime fiancé, necking with her best friend in a pew of Riverside Church. Grimacing as though from a foul smell, I squinched up my face and literally whispered to myself, “What were you thinking?”
Class started in two hours, but the scourge wouldn’t stop; first, various forms of self-flagellation followed by images of doom and disappointment. The beautiful woman whom I love and have been sleeping next to for thirty-five years is a breast cancer survivor. Now it’s Parkinson’s. We can forget the so-called golden years of retirement. Throughout my adult life, I was always able to do a respectable imitation of a tough guy. After all, I was a boxer and a boxing trainer. No one messed with me. And yet, when it came to being in the ring of life, paying the bills, moving, coping with family ills, Sue had always been the rock. It was no secret to me or my kids. And now with these relentless self-attacks, when I feel like I can’t change a light bulb, I’m supposed to be the one to rely on. Good luck.
As though my addled mind can’t help but try to figure out what is going on in the engine room, I draw a few deep breaths and try to reflect my way out of the cell. I picture this homunculus in my brain, Mr. Executive Function. I see him rocking back and forth in an office chair up there, unable to understand why he can’t stop the self-torture. Psychoanalysts talk about the importance of having an observing ego, a psychological third eye, a part of the self that keeps watch on the inner workings of your mind. In my melancholic case, however, the observing ego has been dragged into the muck that it, that I, was supposed to be observing. When the depression reaches a pitch, it is easy to lose all perspective, temporal and otherwise. This is when things get dangerous, when there is no longer any inside that is outside this inner cloud. Instead of reassuring myself “this too shall pass,” it seems perfectly rational to conclude, “My father and grandfather succumbed to this. So will I.”
Finally, I arrive at my edge, the point where I feel I can’t take it anymore. I shuffle into the bathroom and reach into the medicine cabinet, careful to avoid catching myself in the mirror. Like the existentialists, and the stoics long before them, my view has always been that we need to be able to absorb suffering, bear it with dignity, and keep on loving straight through it. So the greenish blue tablet I settle on delivers a dose of guilt along with its prescribed promised comfort.
People going through a crucible sometimes comfort themselves with the thought, “I have no right to complain, it could be worse,” as though the only person on the planet who had a right to moan was Job. Nonsense; yes, it could be worse, and it probably will get worse. There is much that I should and don’t know, but I am confident that I know what crippling depression feels like.
In his semi-autobiographical bestseller Either/Or, Kierkegaard sighs, “My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love.” Ditto. My depression has certainly been faithful to me, faithfully beclouded many joys and, in the process, placed a subtle shroud over my family, sometimes voiced by my children in a quiet “What’s up with Dad today?”
Of all the goods that I have allowed the teeth of the black dog to tear from me, none has been more precious than my sense of agency. Maybe it had something to do with all the medications I shot down my gullet, but over the years I lost confidence in my willpower, in my ability to change, in my ability to cope with moods and situations without a pill in the pocket. Occasionally, I have been granted the reprieve of a good night’s sleep. Before breakfast I might resolve something like regularly reading the Bible or maybe going to the meditation center, but by dusk my morning intentions are in the rearview mirror. In a form of gallows humor, I regularly joke about a morning self and an evening self. The morning self had one plan, the weary, cynical evening self another—instead of prayers and meditation, maybe a couple of pints and some superficial have-to-watch series on the appropriately named boob tube. A Buddhist teacher once told me that all the self-improvement regimes were tinged with violence since they all presupposed a lack of self-acceptance, that you are not good enough to start with. My evening self liked that idea.
Then I encountered something in Kierkegaard that shed fresh light on my darkling inner life, namely, a long-lost distinction between depression and despair, between a psychological and a spiritual disorder. Though many Americans blithely talk about being spiritual, they seldom if ever distinguish between psychological and spiritual maladies. These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will surely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook, he would surely complain that we who have listened to Prozac have grown deaf to the difference between a disruption in the way we feel and a sickness in our very being.
Kierkegaard was a late child of Romanticism, which stressed our connection to nature and the belief that the secrets of the universe were conveyed, feelingly, in the emotions. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and his immensely influential Sorrows of Young Werther were paradigmatic of this anti-rationalist movement. Going back to Aristotle, melancholy was regarded as the affliction of geniuses, perhaps belying the fact that great art and insights into human nature are often born of intense suffering. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard begins with a quintessential expression of Romanticism:
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. It is with him as with the poor wretches in Phalaris’s bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant’s ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music.2
Like the present era, the age of Romanticism was one in which melancholy was the disease du jour. Kierkegaard was no exception. Take for instance, this deep sigh emitted in his journals in 1836:
If Kierkegaard were on Facebook, he would surely complain that we who have listened to Prozac have grown deaf to the difference between a disruption in the way we feel and a sickness in our very being.
I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witticisms poured from my lips, everybody laughed and admired me—but I left, yes, the dash should be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit—–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––—and wanted to shoot myself.3
And this, another of scores of such plaintive entries:
From the very beginning I have been in the power of a congenital mental depression. If I had been brought up in a more ordinary way—well, it stands to reason that I then would hardly have become so melancholy.4
Make no mistake about it, Kierkegaard was familiar with the sorrowful feelings that so many of us drag to the clinic. Søren’s pietistic father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was fifty-seven when Søren was born. Kierkegaard was profoundly attached to the brilliant but quietly stern old man who would cast a pall over his son’s life. Kierkegaard remarked, “An old man, who himself suffered exceedingly from melancholy, has a son in his old age, who inherits all this melancholy.” In another strange morsel, Kierkegaard observes that his father ruined his prospects for happiness, but thanks him for preparing him for a life of faith.
In Kierkegaard’s Danish, there are two terms used for depression: melancholi and tungsindighed. The latter underscores the physical resonances of depression and literally translates into something like “heavy-mindedness.” Kierkegaard was a perspicacious student of moods and their significance. Recall Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety. While fear has a distinct object, anxiety does not; it comes with a veritable shooting gallery of objects. Depression, then, is a first cousin of angst.
In the second volume of Either/Or, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms observes:
There is something unexplainable in depression [Tungsind]. A person with a sorrow or a worry knows why he sorrows or worries. If a depressed person is asked what the reason is, what it is that weighs [tynge] on him, he will answer: I do not know; I cannot explain it. Therein lies the limitlessness of depression.5
And so, even in our own time, depression has been aptly described as the “inexplicable sadness.”
To listen to Kierkegaard, our moods run the gamut from giddiness to depression. Distinguishing between shades of gloom and doom is a difficult and inexact art. To reiterate, there is a sense in which our inner experiences are socially constructed. It has, for instance, been argued that for lack of leisure time, no one talked about being bored until the eighteenth century. After the Second World War, one would hear that so-and-so had a nervous breakdown, but nothing about “panic attacks.” Always in flux, the way we pick out and label our experiences shapes our experiences.
And yet, as Robert Burton’s 1621 classic The Anatomy of Melancholy attests, even as accounts of the etiology of depression continue to evolve, there is an age-old consistency in the depictions of the experience spanning back millennia. In other words, it would not have been a stretch for Kierkegaard to identify with the same self-tortured, stuck, hopeless feeling we so commonly moan about today. However, for Kierkegaard depression does not necessarily imply despair, nor does being in despair necessarily imply depression.
Today, scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit; and it is hard to fathom the idea that someone who is all smiles might be a case of despair. With physical health, it is, however, conceivable that someone might believe she is in superb condition and yet be on death’s door. I know a bodybuilder who made just this fatal misjudgment. In order to assess health, you need to possess the right conception of health; likewise, with spiritual health. While we can’t be mistaken about whether or not we are feeling pleasure or pain, we can, says Kierkegaard, be mistaken about our spiritual fettle. On his account, you can feel as though you are in a very good place when you are actually in the depths of despair. You can’t be happy and be depressed, but, to paraphrase the author of The Sickness unto Death, happiness is despair’s greatest hiding place, which is to say that happiness is not the right touchstone for spiritual well-being.6
There is a sense in which the Lutheran Kierkegaard was the Luther of the Lutheran tradition. But for all their differences, like Luther, Kierkegaard was a true believer that there are two kingdoms, two realms of reality, the spiritual and the earthly. Apropos of these two realms, Kierkegaard frequently points out that two people might be using the same word, one in an earthly sense and the other in a spiritual. In these instances, it seems as though the interlocutors are referring to the same phenomenon when they are actually talking past one another. The worldly understanding of despair calls to mind a distinctly desperate feeling. As Kierkegaard scholar Vincent McCarthy has observed, in English, “despair” draws from the French désespoir, indicating the negation of espoir (hope).7 However, spiritually understood, despair is something altogether different from the feeling of hopelessness. In fact, to take a cue from Kierkegaard, it is not connected with any specific feeling; instead, despair is a sickness of the self, manifested along a continuum from being ignorant of having a self to refusing to become yourself. How can someone be ignorant of having or being a self? Kierkegaard addresses the question at book length in his masterpiece, The Sickness unto Death.
Almost as a challenge to rebuff the less than serious reader, Kierkegaard begins this work, published in 1849, with a passage that we have already visited and will return to in almost every chapter, because these two sentences encapsulate the fact that we are self-relating creatures. Again,
A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.
For those who do not immediately pitch the book across the room, Kierkegaard continues, “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”8 It has nothing to do with feeling down; at first glance despair occurs when there is an imbalance in this synthesis.
After taking a stab at a definition, Kierkegaard presents a veritable portrait gallery of the forms that despair takes. Too much of the expansive factor, of infinitude, and you have the dreamer who cannot make anything concrete. Too much of the limiting element yields the narrow-minded individual who cannot think of anything more serious in life than bottom lines and spreadsheets.
The primary symptom of despair is a conscious or unconscious desire to get rid of the self. More often than not, this desire takes the form of flat-out wanting to be someone else. In a telling passage, Kierkegaard writes:
An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to be rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is “Either Caesar or nothing” does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it . . . precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself.9
Childish as it now seems, when I was a young man, I lived by the creed “The NFL or nothing.” During my playing days, the Vietnam War was in full flame. I could discuss the issue, but regrettably I didn’t care half as much about my brothers and sisters in arms as I did about my gridiron ambitions. I didn’t want to be myself unless it was a self on some NFL roster. It all came crashing down quickly in college, and when it did, I felt invisible, unmanned. If asked, I would have groaned that I was despairing over the loss of football. On Kierkegaard’s reckoning, it would have been more precise to say that I was despairing over having to be myself without my identity as a football player. I wanted to be rid of myself, and there were many nights when I nearly managed to do just that.
Americans seem to live in the future. We incessantly spout pieties about having some dreamed-up vision of the self that we desperately want to realize. Young people who lack such a vision are looked upon askance. It could be making a million by thirty or becoming a surgeon or maybe becoming the next JAY-Z or Ryan Gosling. Apparently, the present only acquires significance for us as a stepping stone to the pedestal of some triumphant future moment.
But suppose you publish that novel to rave reviews or land that role in Hollywood. Suppose you realize that ideal self. Suppose you become Caesar? You are, of course, in seventh heaven, “a state,” Kierkegaard remarks, “that is in another sense just as despairing”; just as despairing as failing to realize your dream.
In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard envisioned three sorts of selves. First there is the concrete self. Permit me to introduce him or her. As a professor of more than twenty years, I have encountered myriad students completely absorbed with the ambition of becoming a doctor. For some, their every move in life seems directed at attaining this goal. In this case, the concrete self might be the senior cramming for MCATs, beefing up her résumé by tutoring struggling high school students, and becoming certified as an EMT. The ideal, or second, self, the self that she fervently wants to become, is someone wearing a stethoscope around her neck, that is, a doctor.
But what of the third self? That is the true self, one that is not particularly interesting in and of itself. This self has nothing to do with your station or accomplishments. As Kierkegaard has it, that neglected but most important self would be a self who “rested transparently in God,” a self who made the movements of faith and from which a certain repertoire of feeling and behaviors issued forth. For those who roll their eyes in disappointment at such pietistic palaver, you could picture that third self as your moral ideal, as the sort of person you aspire to be, of the kind of individual who reminds you of what we are capable of.
Most people who go the extra ten miles never attract public attention. And yet, I recently read of two young Americans working as volunteer medics on the front lines in Mosul. At terrible risk, they were so close to the fierce fighting that none of the NGOs was allowed in the same precincts. These twentysomething buddies were not physicians, only trained medics with scant medical supplies. Still, scores of severely wounded civilians and soldiers were rushed daily to their encampment. I don’t know what has become of these brave men. They were a blip in between news cycles, but they surely could have been doing a lot of other things besides imperiling their lives and limbs. Who knows what went on in their heads. Who knows the full story of their motives, but it is easy to imagine this dauntless duo as Samaritans striving to realize something akin to the Kierkegaardian third self.
Kierkegaard suspects that people who fulfill their ideal selves will be inclined to think that they have hit the bull’s-eye of life. And why shouldn’t they? Maybe you are a big shot CEO whom everyone depends on and no one ever calls to task. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates recalls that when he was looking for proof that he, Socrates, was not the wisest person in Athens, he went to the craftsmen, who, unlike the politicians, actually knew something. But because of their lack of wisdom, the craftsmen imagined that because they were good at making harnesses or perhaps money, they knew everything. I suppose the same hubristic mentality is a temptation for people who realize their ideal selves. They thank God for their success, perhaps secretly thinking that at some level God looked favorably upon them for a reason, because they deserved it. In contrast, those of us who bumble, who fall on hard times, who are depressed might be forced to some degree of self-reflection. With a dash of awareness, we might even be moved to ask ourselves, How could I be so caught up in my ambitions as to feel I was worthless unless I made it to the NFL? Or again, for someone going through a breakup, How could my sense of self be so tenuous that I feel as though I don’t have any purpose on this earth unless I am partnered up with so-and-so? On this analysis, spiritually speaking, fortunate sons and daughters might not be so fortunate. Remember, “happiness is despair’s greatest hiding place.” And the seventh heaven of success can be the dung heap of despair when you forget what you are actually here for.
Contrarily, the depressive slogging through the bleakest of times need not to be in despair. Kierkegaard recognized that he was a depressive, but he also judged that he was in decent spiritual health. In 1846, he wrote a note to himself:
I am in the profoundest sense an unhappy individuality, riveted from the beginning to one or another suffering bordering on madness, a suffering which must have its deepest basis in a misrelation between my mind and body, for (and this is the remarkable thing as well as my infinite encouragement) it has no relation to my spirit.10
Depression metastasizes into despair by virtue of the way the depressed individual relates herself to her depression. When a person is ill and can’t concentrate on anything but his discomfort and pain, we say that he is in poor spirits. When a sick and hobbled individual can escape her own agony to care for others, we say she is in good spirits, not a good mood, but good spirits. It is no different with psychic pain, with depression. Kierkegaard wants us to understand that while we might not have much choice in how we feel at a given time, we have control over and responsibility for the way we relate ourselves to those feelings. Having sway over our emotions requires an awareness of those emotions, which is not always easy.
Be it sadness, jealousy, or rage, most of us find it hard to acknowledge Gorgon-like feelings, especially those of the sort that make us feel out of control or less than virtuous. Today we are invited to believe that many of our negative emotions are illnesses to be treated. In their The Loss of Sadness, authors Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield contend that with the medicalization of just about everything, we have arrived at treating ordinary sadness as if it were a depressive illness. These days, when a loved one is dying, it is not unusual for a physician to suggest a round of prophylactic antidepressants to close family members. We have come to treat grief, a sign of the invisible ties that bind us to one another, as a symptom. Psychologically speaking, being invited to believe that intensely negative emotions lasting more than a week are psychologically symptomatic does not exactly motivate a person to try to sit with and process those emotions. Take it from someone who has sometimes sought the “peace that surpasses all understanding” in bottles of various kinds. Taken to a fundamentalist level, the medical model of mental illness does not instill confidence that I can be a caring human being when the all-encompassing numbness is wrapping its cold arms around me. Kierkegaard attests that depression develops into despair—into a spiritual malady—only when we let ourselves be defined by our depression and, in our hopelessness, toss in the towel on our moral and spiritual aspirations. That surrender is despair, not depression.
While we might not have much choice in how we feel at a given time, we have control over and responsibility for the way we relate ourselves to those feelings. Having sway over our emotions requires an awareness of those emotions, which is not always easy.
In 1845, Kierkegaard published Three Discourses on Imagined Situations, which celebrated the sacral subjects of confession, marriage, and death. In his discourse “At a Graveside,” what might be his all-time most powerful spate of pages, Kierkegaard trumpets alvorlighed, which has been translated into English as “seriousness” or “earnestness.” These terms are difficult for modern readers to appreciate, let alone relate to. Good character we can grasp, but earnestness does not ring a bell. Nonetheless, in this text, becoming earnest looms as more important than happiness, the universally recognized goal of life. Yes, happiness might require certain virtues. Still, it is very much a matter of fortune—being born at the right time, in the right place, to the right family, with the right talents. All these contingencies redouble our prospects for leading a meaningful and pleasant life. But whatever earnestness is, it is not like happiness, and fortune, the lottery of life, has nothing to do with it.
Kierkegaard attests that depression develops into despair—into a spiritual malady—only when we let ourselves be defined by our depression and, in our hopelessness, toss in the towel on our moral and spiritual aspirations. That surrender is despair, not depression.
In depression, we are removed from the present, masticating past missteps and anticipating the horrors in the offing. Much like faith, earnestness is “movement of the spirit” that is not easily detected by the naked eye. “At a Graveside” portrays the earnest individual as someone who is profoundly aware that the kite string of his life could be cut at any moment. That awareness prods him to recollect the eternal while he is in time. By “recollect” Kierkegaard means that the earnest person does not just “remember” God, he makes himself contemporary with the eternal. Though his life is measured by the hourglass, he sustains a connection with that which is outside of time and unchanging. Again, earnestness is for us a remote concept, but while engaged in life, such an individual would see the buzz of earthly existence for what it is, one addicted to comparisons: who has the bigger salary, the more important job, the fancier plot in the cemetery? Just the other day, I was beside myself, knocked out of all tenderness, because a friend received an endowed professorship. “I’m so happy for you,” I effused, but not really. Jealousy is one of the thorny bushes on life’s way, and comparisons are the loam of jealousy. The earnest person is made of flesh and blood, and as such will naturally experience those green feelings, but ultimately he will not measure himself or his life by comparisons with others. His measuring stick is one of becoming that third self.
At one point in “At a Graveside,” Kierkegaard’s nondescript spiritual paragon feels shaken and despondent by the thought of death. Instead of permitting this innervating feeling to gain the upper hand, he reminds himself, “My soul is in a mood, and if it continues this way, then there is in it a hostility toward me that can gain dominion.”11 And should that hostile mood triumph, he realizes, there is an all-too-human tendency to take the trapdoor and try to sink through the bottom of the depression. I have often heard floundering friends and even the bearded guy in the mirror protest, “I need to hit bottom before I can begin to get better.” Cognizant that there is no bottom, that we can always sink deeper, Kierkegaard writes, “It is the cowardly craving of depression to want to become dizzy in the emptiness and to seek the final diversion in this dizziness.”12 The earnest individual tells him- or herself, “Wake up, don’t allow depression to develop into despair.”
Depression is not despair, but depression can certainly lay down the tracks to despair. Circumventing despair requires keeping a third eye on your inner life. It requires keeping a part of yourself outside the inner morass of long-standing bilious moods. The desert monks of the third century wrote of the dangers of acedia, the noonday demon, a state marked by agitation, weakness, lack of motivation, and above all indifference to the good and to oneself. Indeed, the roots of the Greek for acedia are a (without) keidos (care). The cure often prescribed for acedia was none other than manual labor, which seems like something my high school principal would have come up with.
Depression is not despair, but depression can certainly lay down the tracks to despair. Circumventing despair requires keeping a third eye on your inner life. It requires keeping a part of yourself outside the inner morass of bilious moods.
For some, however, antidepressants can also provide a life preserver. In his honest and insightful A Hell of Mercy, Tim Farrington writes of suffering from a withering decades-long depression. Farrington seeks to differentiate plain old pathological depression from St. John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul,” which dissolves the ego to leave an opening for God. He makes rigorous and consistent efforts at everything from Zen and yoga to living in a monastery. After his mother’s death, Farrington is hospitalized and, over time, hammered into a hopeless and passive acceptance of the world, an acceptance that seems to closely resemble acedia. One day, an old and chronically depressed friend visits. Much more upbeat than ever before, she reports having been on a course of antidepressants and burbles, “It’s changed my life . . . I wish I’d started twenty years ago.” After having resisted antidepressants for years, Farrington agrees to give them a try. His wife is so relieved that she sobs with joy. Farrington starts on a cycle of Effexor, and almost miraculously feels as though he were born again. He writes:
A good proportion of the side effects duly occurred, but about a week after I started on the drug I was driving home one afternoon with a bag of groceries and a pack of cigarettes and I noticed how beautiful the winter trees were in the crystalline February light. That got my attention all right. It seemed like forever since I had noticed any trees.13
Judging from the coda to Farrington’s chronicle, the magic potion continues to do its work. One might expect that Farrington would regret all the desert-like experiences he has undergone before the coming of his pharmacological savior. But instead, he writes, “It is in that surrender, in the embrace of our own perceived futility that real freedom comes.”14
The ultimate truth, the one most of us can’t brook, is that of our total vulnerability and dependence on God. But Farrington’s point is that lifelong suffering and a completely joyless existence are not prerequisites for achieving this understanding. After all, Jesus himself wanted to pass the cup. You don’t have to be on the rack your entire life to fathom that you should stop grasping for control.
In contrast, Kierkegaard was adamant about keeping the thorn in his side from beginning to end. In fact, he insisted that the one thing he never prayed for was for the “thorn in his flesh” to be removed, and that thorn was his depression. But his faithfulness to his mistress melancholy was idiosyncratic. A thinker of his preternatural powers could have easily floated off into the empyrean, could easily have become intoxicated with his otherworldly abilities; however, his ever-present melancholy helped remind him that his books about faith and earnestness did not in any way ensure that he was a faithful and earnest individual.
Kierkegaard also felt blessed by his depression because it helped keep him alert to the fact that “we are always wrong before God,” that we are sinners. And Kierkegaard was insistent that we are more in need of a revelation to understand that we are sinners than to believe we have been saved. There may be something uplifting in Kierkegaard’s grateful attitude toward his saturnine nature, but the message that we are always in the wrong is one that depressives are inclined to assimilate into their cruel instruments of self-torture. Realistic guilt is one thing, neurotic self-immolation another—and it is in the latter that depressives excel. But when it is prevented from ransacking our existence, depression can be the vehicle of a kind of wisdom.
Nietzsche’s most famous adage is “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” This, of course, is far from a universal truth since what comes close to killing us often weakens our spirit, then slowly kills us. Still, depression kept at bay can augment our ability to empathize with those feeling broken and without purpose. A friend of mine with three children lost his wife and developed throat cancer in the same year. A few years back, I had a student who was quiet and always sat in the rear of the classroom; one afternoon, he confided that it was hard to concentrate because both of his parents had died separately in a nine-month period. Naturally, he felt so abysmally sad and lonely that he could not keep his mind on anything. There are millions of refugees floating around the globe, often despised and looked down upon by the countries in which they find a tent and temporary anchorage. Not to diminish their agony, but, at a certain pitch, pain and misfortune make refugees of us all. I had another student whose eleven-year-old sister died of leukemia. Likening grief to a modern form of leprosy, he wrote a touching opinion piece in which he maintained that people don’t know how to address the bereaved and so they, or we, avoid the stricken as though we might catch something.15 If loving our neighbors as ourselves is the second most important task in life, then perhaps that lingering sad and anxious feeling that might come out of nowhere can soften our hearts and help us accomplish that less-than-glamorous fundamental task.
Can you be an existentialist and a Tibetan monk? I don’t see why not. Tibetan Buddhist monk Pema Chödrön knows what it is to be under the thumb of feeling worthless. It may ring naive, but Chödrön suggests that when under siege, we should gently battle the tempting and benumbing thought that the world is crazy and there is nothing we can do. Instead, we should whisper to ourselves that we have millions of cellmates all over the world enduring the same or similar funk. It is easy to say but hard to appropriate the notion that depression should help us to fathom our vulnerability and dependence on one another.
A frequent chord in this book is that our feelings are one thing, and the way we relate to our feelings another. Chödrön teaches that when the feeling of worthlessness crashes our gates, we should not think that we have been singled out. Instead of feeling isolated in a cage of our suffering, we should pry open our black-and-blue hearts and send out love and compassion to all our self-torturing brothers and sisters; in a secular sense, that would be depression without despair.