Chris Jones on depression (his own) and suicide

I know... I'm just giving you shit...

I can understand doctors being high on the list. I can't understand why dentists usually seem to be so much higher than doctors who deal with death on a daily basis...

 

Depression and related mental issues are enormously chemical. Maybe some of that chemistry is what drives creativity in some people, but it also drives depression in virtually every sector of society.

We've had some really raw threads on this topic; I really believe no one can truly grasp it until it hits you or someone you love.

 

Not to go all Tom Cruise, but that's not necessarily proven. I understand that medication alters brain chemistry, but we are just extrapolating that the altered brain chemistry must then have been the cause of the mental illness. I don't think there's much proof of that. Maybe not any actually.

I twice have seen speak, in a very limited private group, and participated in a Q-and-A with a woman who murdered her young child and put another into critical condition. (FWIW, she was a doctor - a pediatrician). She says that every single day, she wishes that she could point to an X-ray or a blood test and say, "There it is!"

Mental illness is like a ghost. A cruel ghost. I'm glad I've never had to deal with it myself, other than maybe a little OCD, but I'm proud of some of the work I've done as a volunteer advocate.

 

What does this actually mean?

 

Like a phantom. It's there, but nearly impossible to pin down or locate. Very unlike cancer or other diseases that are so tangible. Here, the effects are very real, but the cause is embedded deep in our most mysterious organ, the brain.

 

I can't speak for anybody else, but I know that I hated the idea of becoming a stereotype—which only made my situation worse. Oh, just like Hemingway! Fuck that. I had no desire to be one of those people I knew in college who dressed in black and listened to Joy Division all day. Like, zero. Which is another reason "normal" people don't talk about this stuff: They don't want to sound like some miserable, whiny Goth.

I have to word this delicately... There's a very real difference between being sad because you feel like you should be for whatever reason and being depressed. And there is nothing romantic about real depression. It just flat-out sucks.

I mean, imagine how hard it is to punch yourself in the face. Now imagine how hard it is to put a gun to your head and pull the trigger or step in front of a train. That act requires an enormous override of every natural instinct we possess.

The other day, I was walking with my son Charley—who's five—and a dog came running toward us, barking. A little Yorkie! And Charley bolted in the other direction. Like, at five, he knew enough that he should run. I kind of marveled at him. Self-preservation is just such an innate thing. So, for someone to get to that point where they can kill themselves—commit death—requires a horrendous misfiring of many different circuits.

I mean, I know how bad I was and I still didn't do it. I shudder to think about those moments when people actually have. They weren't thinking they were cool, I know that much.

 

Passionately disagree. It might take longer to diagnose, but if you suffer from true depression, or you are close to someone--spouse, lover, child, parent--who does, it's as tangible as a broken leg.

 

The symptoms are. But we don't know what the cause is the way we do the pain that results from a broken leg.

I'm not sure where the disagreement falls.

 

I've talked about this with my brother and he can absolutely remember that when he chose to take his own life, it was the only option for him. The only way that the pain was ever going to stop.

As for drinking, this is a huge problem with depression. It's a form of self-medication that prevents your actual medication from being able to work. And the idea of stopping the alcohol and waiting the length of time necessary for antidepressants to kick in is terrifying.

 

Agree completely.

Real depression is a killer.

I worry too, though, that somehow the idea of creativity gets tangled up with the idea of pathology. Undergrad classes are filled with young writers who think Hemingway or Faulkner were great because of the drinking and drugging, not despite it. Then they drape that pose over themselves like a cloak.

 

You're right, Az, that some kids confuse writing and "the writer's life"—they mix up the image and the substance of it. Being a writer isn't sitting in your cardigan in your cold-water flat while you peck shit poetry into your trusty Underwood.

You want to prove to me that you're a writer? Write something good and get paid for it. Then you're a writer. The rest of it is just a costume.

 

As a young writer coming up, that was certainly my point of view. I don't know that I really romanticized it so much as simply used it as a justification for drinking hard in the bar every night. It eventually got beyond that, and I simply drank hard in the bar every night -- but in the back of my mind, I still justified it as an understandable part of working in this business, with deadlines and the rest of it.