Chris Jones on depression (his own) and suicide

I love that play.

 

Damn it Dick, I'm a lawyer. Not a Doctor!

 

There's no catchall answer in diagnosing depression or helping others deal with it. Each person's depression is like a sadness snowflake, fucked up in its own unique and horrifying way. The combination of type of depression (manic? major? dystyhmic? bipolar? seasonal affective disorder?), how it came to be (stress? heredity? incident-based? unknown?), symptoms, how people cope with it internally and how it manifests outwardly lead to an almost infinite number of possibilities. What works for the person who can't shake off this vague sense of sadness doesn't work for the one whose mood swings are wilder than a supercharged merry-go-round or the one who was doing fine until hitting a wall out of nowhere or the one who puts on the brave face for years until blowing it off their head with a shotgun.

Which sucks, because your instinct when seeing someone outwardly sad is to help in some way. But sad and depression, while sharing traits, aren't synonyms. Solving the former is a lot easier than solving the latter. You can give someone an aspirin or ibuprofen for their headache, but how do you solve the brain tumor that caused it?

The complicating factor is the depressed person. Often, people struggling with depression want so desperately to talk about with someone, to the point that they daydream about laying bare their deepest fears and darkest thoughts to a friend, a family member, the barista at the Starbucks, anyone. But it's never that easy. Finding the right words to describe where you are is frustratingly difficult. You know it hurts, but how it hurts escapes your grasp. Sure, you can rattle off symptoms, from broken sleep patterns to detailed fantasies about suicide plans. But you can't actually get across the way you feel because it's too complex, or you're too tired to put it together, or the words are technically accurate but don't sound right at all. And even if you talk to someone brimming with empathy, their depression isn't your depression, and you can't get the feel of your depression across. It's like making someone see your grayscale rainbow; everyone can only see their own, no matter how much they want to show it to others. All you know is that it hurts a lot, and you really want it to stop, because it makes your life an unsustainable mess.

But what if you do actually give voice to your demons? Maybe society is more accepting and understanding of depression and mental disease in general, but all the while, you're worried that you'll be defined down by it. You'll always be, to friends and family, depressed. Even if you're cured, or improved or whatever you want to call it, there's always that underlying fear that it'll happen again, and that people are going to judge every off thing you do or say as a sign that you might be going down that path again. And those thoughts of dying might get you put in a hospital, and who the hell wants that?

So you swallow your fears and anxieties and tell yourself that it'll get better someday, that a painful present is more acceptable than an uncertainly painful future. You try to hint that things aren't so great for you right now, enough that people will help you but not enough to hit the panic button and change your life forever in ways that may or may not be comfortable for you. It's a fine line to walk, and people who deal with this handle it in their own ways. Which brings us back to the difficulty of helping the depressed. You may or may not be catching all the signs they're throwing at you, and they may or may not represent the whole of their problems, and it's not your fault or their fault, but you're still planets apart.

I'd be willing to bet that for as much grace and literary wizardry that the likes of Jones and Woody Paige and their ilk have put into the descriptions of their various psychological hells, they'll admit that they haven't really gotten the meat of it out there. It was simply the best they could do at the time they wrote it. And when the best writers in the world can't give paint a picture of the demons to their satsifcation, what chance do us passably literate schmoes have?

 

I don't think I suffer from depression, so it makes it very hard for me to sympathize with it. I hope that does not sound cold, but it is honest.

My father-in-law suffers from it, but it looks like it did not get passed down to my wife or our daughter.

I look at depression like my wife carrying a child. She can talk to me all she wants about it, and I will listen, but it is impossible for me to totally understand. Sort of like explaining color to a blind person or music to a deaf person.

And that is what really sucks for those that suffer from depression, is that those who do not have it cannot truly understand what is going on in the person's brain. But I do understand that they need help and understanding, but as for why, I do not know. I don't question it, though.

 

What kind of "damage" in the brain?

Flesh that out for me.

 

Either structural or chemical, theoretically. Or genetic, which would, I think, by definition affect the structure or chemistry of the brain.

 

Damage implies injury to me.

What are your thoughts on electroconvulsive therapy as a treatment for depression?

 

The woman I saw speak who killed her child said that it was the best thing that ever happened to her. That's about the extent of my knowledge of it, beyond "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

 

You said you talked to her twice. Was she in a psychiatric lockdown unit? If not, have you ever been inside one? That's not a joke or a shot at you. Maybe you did research, etc.

Just curious what experience you are drawing on here other than talking with her and doing volunteer work. I apologize if I missed more upstream on the thread.

 

What is strange is that Alzheimer's and dementia are not defined as mental illnesses, even though they are directly attributable to identifiable malfunctions in brain physiology.

 

She's out now, actually.

I have not been inside a unit, no.