Depression is the disease of loss. Our lives seem pointless because we have lost what is most valuable to us. But communicating what we have lost, in the exact terms specific to ourselves, is almost impossible.
A broken arm is a clearly defined condition, although the subjective experience may vary greatly from one person to another. Broken arms can be treated, people feel safe asking how you did it; the plaster cast becomes a site for get-well messages and schoolyard graffiti.
By contrast, there are as many depressions as there are people to suffer them. The symptoms differ, not just in intensity but in kind, and also in emphasis. One person cries, another is numb. One gives an appearance of normality, another cowers under the bed, unable to move. Some calmly plan their own death; others cannot work out how to take a shower.
Treatments have unexpected, sometimes contradictory, consequences. You take a pill and get better. I take the same pill and nothing happens, or I get worse. Is what you have the same as what I have? How much is in our minds and how much in our brains?
If we think of our minds as experiencing weather, then depression is grey. The actual sensation is difficult to describe—a kind of isolation, but intermixed with the most terrible fear. It is not the same as being sad, because sadness links us to the world; depression, however we try to describe it to ourselves, takes us away from the world.
The sense of a life force drying up, or vanishing, is very strong. The branching dendrites of our brains lack flow, and we feel much as a tree in drought must feel when the ground cracks around it. As the English poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins cried to his God, at the end of a sonnet in which he lamented that he could not ‘breed one work that wakes’: ‘Send my roots rain.’
Or we might recall Hamlet, finding that ‘this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’.
Because depression is so common, the experience says something important about being human. In fact, working out how to overcome depression means understanding what it does for you