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Chapter 1
The Prison
What is the difference between being depressed and being unhappy? There is a difference, and when you have experienced both you know what this difference is.
When you are unhappy, even if you have suffered the most grievous blow, you are able to seek comfort and let that comfort come through to you to ease the pain. You can seek out and obtain another’s sympathy and loving concern; you can be kind and comfort yourself. But in depression neither the sympathy and concern of others nor the gentle love of oneself is available. Other people may be there, offering all the love, sympathy and concern any person could want, but none of this compassion can pierce the wall that separates you from them, while inside the wall you not only refuse yourself the smallest ease and comfort but you also punish yourself by words and deeds. Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.
It is this peculiar isolation which distinguishes depression from common unhappiness.1 It is not simply loneliness, although in the prison of depression you are pitifully alone. It is an isolation which changes even your perception of your environment. Intellectually you know that you are sharing a space with other people, that you are talking to them and they are hearing you. But their words come to you as if across a bottomless chasm, and even though you can reach out and touch another person, or that person touches you, nothing is transmitted to you in that touch. No human contact crosses the barrier. Even objects around you seem further away, although you know it is not so, and while you are aware that the sun is shining and the birds are singing, you know, even more poignantly, that the colour has drained from the sky and the birds are silent.
How can you describe this experience and convey its meaning, to someone else? Saying that you are depressed, or really down, or fed-up, can mean to another person no more than the Monday morning blues, or something you could snap out of if you really tried. But you know that it is not a passing mood or something that will vanish if you try to ‘pull yourself together’. The turmoil of your feelings is so great that it is impossible to know where to begin to describe them. So it is better to remain silent.
Yet there is a way of conveying what you are experiencing. If you were an artist or a film-maker, you would be able to create an image which would convey at least something of what you are experiencing. It is for this reason that I always ask my depressed clients, usually at our first meeting, this question. If you could paint a picture of what you are feeling, what sort of picture would you paint?
Some people answer immediately and describe their image, often in a complex way. Some people are rather shy to answer and fumble for words, sketching their image in very simple terms. But no matter whom I ask, it seems that a person’s image of being depressed will be one of the following kinds.
First, there are the images of the person alone in a fog. The fog may be grey, or black, or a tangle of violent colours. The fog may be swirling round the person or still and thick like cotton wool. The person may be trying to find his way out of it, or he may be frozen in fright and hopelessness.
Next, there are the images of empty landscapes, waterless deserts or frozen wastes, or images of boundless oceans. The person sees himself trudging alone towards an empty horizon or caught in a violent storm, or sitting helplessly immobile on a burning rock or a melting ice floe.
Then, there are the images of the person, alone in a space, wrapped tightly in something or pressed down by some heavy weight. The wrapping may be a shroud, or a thick black cloth, or some encasing garment. The weight may be a crushingly heavy box, or a stone lodged over one’s heart, or a bird like a heavy black owl which perches on one’s shoulders. Andrew Solomon saw his depression as a heavy vine that wraps itself around an oak tree and sucks out its life, ‘a sucking thing that wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I.’2
The most elaborate images are those where the person finds himself trapped. He may be travelling along an endless black tunnel, or clinging to the sides of a bottomless pit, or grovelling in the crater of a burnt-out volcano, or locked in a cold dungeon, or sealed in a metal sphere or a black balloon. Cages come in many shapes and forms. A person may see himself alone in a diving bell deep in the waters of the cold North Sea, or abandoned high on a Ferris wheel in an empty fairground, or crouched in a small cage which is suspended by a fraying rope over a bottomless abyss.
All the images are terrible. Some contain a modicum of hope. Perhaps you could find your way through a swirling grey fog, or lift a weight from your shoulders. Help might come from outside – a friendly Eskimo might chance along or someone arrive with the key of the Ferris wheel. Perhaps you could gain the strength to help yourself – to clamber out of the pit or unwrap the heavy cloth. But, however the image is expressed, all the images have one thing in common. You are enduring a terrible isolation.
You are alone in a prison.
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Chapter 2
Inside the Prison
‘When I wake up in the morning,’ said Rose, ‘I’m too scared to get out of bed. I’ve lived in that house for twenty years and I’ve slept in that bed for just as long, and I’m too scared to get out of it and walk across the room and open my bedroom door. So I lie there and I think the most terrible, terrible thoughts and I get so frightened, I want to get up and rush around doing something so I’ll be thinking of something else, but I’m too scared to get out of bed. So I just stay there getting more and more frightened.’
John gets up and goes to work. He feels safe in his small office, but when his boss comes in, first to criticise his work and then to tell him he has to attend a meeting at the factory the next day, John breaks out in a sweat and feels sick. At lunch-time he goes home, gets into bed and pulls the blankets over his head. His wife finds him there, but neither her sympathy nor her abuse can make him move. ‘You’re just selfish,’ she cries as she goes out, slamming the door.
‘Selfish’ is right. Inside the prison of depression you are very selfish. But then, aren’t we all selfish when we are fighting for our lives? Feeling the terror of imminent death, we strive to save ourselves. To the outside observer the depressed person does not seem to be in danger of dying, but inside the prison of depression you feel a fear as great as that of death. If you told people how frightened you are they would think you are mad. Perhaps you are mad. The thought of this makes you more frightened. The fear is so great that death might be welcome as peace, a cessation of the fear. But what if after death there is something worse than here? Or death may bring peace, but dying is so painful. There must be a reason for feeling so frightened. Perhaps you are dying – that pain in your chest – is it a heart-attack – or cancer?
But words like ‘death’, ‘madness’, ‘heart-attack’, ‘cancer’ do not convey the totality of fear that you feel when the totality of your very existence is threatened. If you are a Christian you can call it damnation.
That awful and sickening endless sinking, sinking through the slow, corruptive levels of disintegrative knowledge
when the self has fallen from the hands of God and sinks, seething and sinking, corrupt
and sinking still, in depth after depth of disintegrative consciousness
sinking in the endless undoing, the awful katabolism into the abyss.1
If you tell your friends that you are damned, they will hasten to tell you that you are not, that the idea of damnation is silly, that God is not like that, that you are a good person, really. If you tell your friends that you are frightened because you cannot do your job properly, you are not a good mother, that the world is a terrible place and everything is going to get worse, they will say don’t be silly, your boss really appreciates you, you’re a wonderful mother, don’t look on the black side, it’ll never happen, worse things happen at sea. They do not know what it is like in the small hours of the morning.
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
there are worse things than these miniature betrayals, committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them. It is 5 am. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.2
The fear permeates your life, undermining your confidence, until the smallest decision, ‘What tie shall I wear?’, ‘What shall I have for lunch?’, becomes an impossibly difficult task. Sometimes the fear comes raw and brutal as fear; sometimes it comes in the special guise of guilt.
You have become an expert in guilt. Every action or every omission of an action you can interpret as a cause for guilt. You have failed yourself and failed other people. You have not lived up to your expectations of yourself. You have not ensured the total happiness of the people around you. You review the stupidities and failures of your life and punish yourself for crimes known and unknown, while all the time you beg yourself for peace.
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet3
You feel guilty about being depressed and you know you deserve the punishment of depression – and worse.
Depression is like a dark mist lurking in the corners of the room, always there, always ready to come surging forward and rising up to envelop you. It is blackness, it is emptiness, it is meaninglessness and total inner despair. Others may think you are fortunate, but you know it is all an empty fraud, and that one day the hollow balloon will burst, you will be found out and your crime exposed. What crime? You don’t know; you only know you are guilty; and you can hear them coming down the corridor to get you. The penalty, of course, is Death and you might as well be your own executioner.4
You long for death to bring you peace and you fear death for it may bring you something worse than life. Death may bring peace, but it will take away the hope that one day the terrible grief you bear will be recompensed, that your heart will be lightened. You tell no one of this grief, since a sensible person would say, ‘You should be over that by now’, or ‘What a stupid thing to grieve over.’
The grief might be one from childhood when a parent died or deserted the family – or deserted you. How can you describe what that meant or still means? How small and weak you were, how vast and dark and terrifying was the world. No one could understand or comfort you. ‘Children soon get over it,’ you heard people say. You stopped crying, but you didn’t get over it. And sometimes, even now, when you remember that terrible day, you wonder, ‘Was it my fault?’
The loss might be more recent, when the person you depended on, or a child you should have protected, died, or when a loved and hated parent left this life without a word of reconciliation. How can you show how guilty you are at your failure, how angry at being deserted, how desolate at being left alone, abandoned, never to make recompense, never to be reconciled, never to be approved of and receive absolute, unconditional love?
Perhaps the loved one has not died but has gone away and loves another. ‘Find someone else,’ say your friends, but how can you do that when the defection of the loved one proves that you are unlovable? And how can anyone else know how important the unfaithful one was to you? You can well understand the epitaph to the trooper killed at El Alamein.
To the world he was a soldier,
to me he was the world.5
How can you go on living when your world has ended and everyone else’s world is tawdry and dull?
You can grieve over the loss of more than just people. What about grieving over the loss of childhood, and so fearing to grow up? What about grieving over the loss of youth, of beauty and virility, and so seeing yourself no longer desirable, while dreaded old age approaches? Or do you look back to when your children needed you, or you were the man in charge, the leader in your field, and now no one needs you, no one admires or respects you? You fear becoming dependent on others and having them pity you. Or are you mourning a dream, something that was once bright and splendid but now unrealisable in this hard, cruel and sordid world? There will be no promised land, no happy ending. Such losses are hard to name and even harder to mourn.
Griefs like these bring hopelessness. Things will never change, or if they do they will only get worse. What is the use of hoping or striving? Once you were ambitious; now you are bitterly resigned to your awful fate and cannot fight against it. You are filled with grey and heavy indifference, even towards people who were once important to you. Love has fled, leaving only an awareness of an absence of love. Once you were concerned about other people and yearned to right other people’s wrongs. Now other people’s tragedies do not impinge on you, or only serve as further proof, if further proof were needed, that the world is in a perilous state.
You do not love, but you are filled with bitterness and jealousy. Bitter that your life has gone awry and jealous that other people, quite undeserving, have such easy lives and do not suffer as you do. You hate yourself for feeling such horrible jealousy, just as you hate yourself for being unable to love. You get so angry, angry with yourself and angry with the world. Why isn’t the world the way you know it ought to be? You try and try to make the world, life, people, what they ought to be, and you get nowhere. You feel futile, frustrated, and very, very angry.
Loved ones – my wife Sally and the children – all agree I’m less impatient than I used to be. And that was no minor failing. An intolerant, and intolerable, demand that things happen, people act, just when I wanted them to happen and act. I never really thought that the whole line of traffic in the jam ahead should immediately get on to the verge and let us pass; but I spoke and behaved as if I did think this. Possessed by a noxious demon of furious impatience. The rampant, tumescent self.
Not that I’m now a model of saintly patience; far from that. I doubt if I’ve even reached the average level. But now, when held up on the road, I get out my rosary and repeat my mantra – ‘The Peace of God’ – and nearly always manage to keep my mouth shut – instead of taking it out on poor Sally. (Though at bad times the beads get rough treatment and the unspoken mantra sounds more like a curse than a blessing.)6
Irritable and miserable, you push people away from you, and then get scared that they will go and leave you all alone. So you pretend that everything is all right. You try and smile and to be ordinary, but the pretence is so wearying and inside you are silently screaming.
‘When I walk down the street with my friend,’ said Jackie, ‘I feel there’s a glass wall between us. I feel I’m alone. I want to scream and shout out. I try to break the glass but its like plastic. It bends but it doesn’t break.’ One day, despairing that those around her would ever understand what was happening to her, she wrote the following account and gave it to her doctor. He passed it on to me.
