Making darkness visible
Simon Webb writes about his experience of depression
Setting the world to rights over plates of pasta, Emma, Pat and I decided that it would be a very good idea if someone found a cure for depression.
I nearly said that there was a cure, but I didn’t, because it seems to me (having struggled with the disease for over forty years) that if we think of it as a weed, it blends in so well with the plants we need to keep in our mental garden, that it would be a foolish gardener who said he had managed to uproot all of it.
On a very useful page, the Psychology Today website defines depression as ‘persistent feelings of sadness and worthlessness’. It took me nearly thirty years to realise that I even had the condition, partly because web pages didn’t exist when I was eleven, partly because people then didn’t know as much about mental disorders, and partly because, until around 1990, I suffered only intermittently.
A book that has been central to my own understanding of the disease is William Styron’s 1989 memoir, Darkness Visible. Styron, the American novelist who wrote Sophie’s Choice among other works, admitted in Darkness Visible that, despite his good education and a lifelong interest in medical matters, he had known very little about depression until it became a serious problem for him in 1985. Styron’s book lifted the curtain on depression for sufferers and nonsufferers alike and before he died, in 2006, the author received many grateful messages.
My indirect and accidental discovery of Styron’s memoir was a turning point on my own long road to recovery, which is something I write about in my new book Our Name is Legion: A Quaker Memoir of Depression. I should explain that for me bouts of depression always included a drastic shortening of my attention-span, so that, although I’m generally an inveterate reader, I was only able to take in short pieces, such as are found in newspapers. In Our Name is Legion I liken reading when depressed to trying to get through a book while standing on the centre line of a busy road, as the passing drivers and their passengers shout abuse at you.
By some blessed stroke of luck, I came across a review of Styron’s Darkness Visible in 1989 while riffling through a newspaper, trying to find something I could concentrate on, at least for a minute or two. I remember that the review, which I have been unable to trace, included a description of the condition: this made something inside me click. I felt as I imagine a schoolboy would feel when told that, no, he’s not stupid – he just has dyslexia.
In 1996, when years of counselling and drug therapy failed to keep back the flood tide of my condition, and ‘the breakdown’ happened, I was trying to pick up the pieces of my life and found faith lying patiently in the rubble. Faith found her expression and her home in Quakerism, and in the intervening twenty years Quakers and Quakerism have helped me slowly raise the barn of my new life.
Rubble? Reading in the middle of a road? Weeds? A barn? Yes, I have found it impossible to describe what depression and its aftermath are like without resorting to simile and metaphor, both of which I use liberally in Our Name is Legion. To those who regard such techniques as forms of evasion, I would refer them to Ecclesiastes 12:9:
And further, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge, and gave ear, and sought out — he made right many similes.
(Young’s literal translation)
Our Name is Legion: A Quaker Memoir of Depression by Simon Webb, The Langley Press. ISBN 9781522816805. £8.99.
Comments
Please login to add a comment
