by Matt Haig
Gray argues, in an article for the BBC, that it was Churchill’s ‘exceptional openness’ to intense emotion that explains how he was able to sense dangers that more conventional minds failed to see. ‘For most of the politicians and opinion-makers who wanted to appease Hitler, the Nazis were not much more than a raucous expression of German nationalism,’ writes Gray. It needed an unusual mind to address an unusual threat. ‘He owed his foresight of the horror that was to come to visits of the black dog.’
So, yes, depression is a nightmare. But can it also be a useful one? Can it be one that improves the world in various ways?
Sometimes the links between depression, anxiety and productivity are undeniable. Think of Edvard Munch’s omnipresent painting The Scream, for instance. Not only is this a most accurate visual depiction of what a panic attack feels like, but it was also – according to the artist himself – directly inspired by a moment of existential terror. Here is the diary entry:
I was walking down the road when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.
But even without the ‘smoking gun’ of a specific depressive episode inspiring a specific work of genius, it is impossible to ignore the sheer number of greats who have battled depression. Even without focusing on the Plaths and Hemingways and Woolfs who actually killed themselves, the list of known depressives is staggering. And many times there is a link between the illness and the work they produce.
A lot of Freud’s work was based on his analysis of his own depression, and what he believed to be the solution. Cocaine was what worked for him, but then – after dishing it out to other sufferers – he started to realise it could be a tad addictive.
Franz Kafka is another member of the Depression Hall of Fame. He suffered from social anxiety and what people now see as clinical depression all his life. He was also a hypochondriac living in fear of physical and mental change. But being a hypochondriac doesn’t mean you won’t get ill, and when he was thirty-four Kafka contracted tuberculosis. Interestingly, all the things that were known to help Kafka’s depression – swimming, horse riding, hiking – were physically healthy pursuits.
Surely the claustrophobia and sense of powerlessness in his works – so often interpreted in solely political terms – was also a result of him suffering from an illness that makes you feel claustrophobic?
Kafka’s most famous story is The Metamorphosis. A travelling salesman wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect, who has overslept and is late for work. It is a story about the dehumanising effect of capitalism, yes, but it can equally be read as a metaphor for depression, the most Kafkaesque of illnesses. For, like Gregor Samsa, the depressive can sometimes wake up in the room they fell asleep in, and yet feel totally different. An alien to themselves. Trapped in a nightmare.
Likewise, could Emily Dickinson have written her poem ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ without deep mental anguish? Of course, most depressives don’t end up being a Lincoln or a Dickinson or a Churchill or a Munch or a Freud or a Kafka (or a Mark Twain or a Sylvia Plath or a Georgia O’Keeffe or an Ian Curtis or a Kurt Cobain). But then, nor do most people.
People often use the word ‘despite’ in the context of mental illness. So-and-so did such-and-such despite having depression/anxiety/OCD/agoraphobia/whatever. But sometimes that ‘despite’ should be a ‘because’. For instance, I write because of depression. I was not a writer before. The intensity needed – to explore things with relentless curiosity and energy – simply wasn’t there. Fear makes us curious. Sadness makes us philosophise. (‘To be or not to be?’ is a daily question for many depressives.)
Going back to Abraham Lincoln, the key thing to note is that the president always suffered with depression. He never fully overcame it, but he lived alongside it and achieved great things. ‘Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering,’ says Joshua Wolf Shenk in that article I mentioned. ‘Rather, it must be accounted an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering . . . Lincoln didn’t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy; the problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.’
So. Even if depression is not totally overcome, we can learn to use what the poet Byron called a ‘fearful gift’.
We don’t have to use it to rule a nation, like Churchill or Lincoln. We don’t even have to use it to paint a really good picture.
We can just use it in life. For instance, I find that being grimly aware of mortality can make me steadfastly determined to enjoy life where life can be enjoyed. It makes me value precious moments with my children, and with the woman I love. It adds intensity in bad ways, but also good ways.
Art and political vigour are just one spill-over of that intensity, but it can manifest itself in a million other ways, most of which won’t make you famous but many of which will, in the long term, add as well as take away.
Depression is . . .
An internal war.
A black dog (thanks, Winston Churchill and Dr Johnson).
A black hole.
An invisible fire.
A pressure cooker.
A devil inside.
A prison.
An absence.
A bell jar (‘I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar,’ wrote Plath, ‘stewing in my own sour air’).
A malicious code in the operating system of your mind.
A parallel universe.
A life-long fight.
A by-product of mortality.
A living nightmare.
An echo chamber.
Dark and hopeless and lonely.
A collision between an ancient mind and a modern world (evolutionary psychology).
A fucking pain.
Depression is also . . .
Smaller than you.
Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky.
You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.
A conversation across time – part three
THEN ME: It’s terrifying.
NOW ME: What is?
THEN ME: Life. My mind. The weight of it.
NOW ME: Shhh. Stop that. You are just a bit trapped inside a moment. The moment will change.
THEN ME: Andrea will leave me.
NOW ME: No. No, she won’t. She’ll marry you.
THEN ME: Ha! As if anyone would tie themselves to a useless freak like me. Would they?
NOW ME: Yes. And look, you are making progress. You go to the shop now and you don’t have a panic attack. You don’t feel that weight on you all the time.
THEN ME: I do.
NOW ME: No. There was that time last week when I – when you – were out in the sunshine walking through the park, and you felt a lightness. A moment you weren’t really thinking.
THEN ME: Actually, yes. Yes. That’s true. I had another this morning. I was lying in bed just wondering if we had any cereal left. That was it. It was just a normal thing, and it lasted over a minute. Just lying there, thinking about breakfast.
NOW ME: See? So you know things aren’t always going to be the same. I mean, things today weren’t always the same.
THEN ME: But it’s still so intense.
NOW ME: And it always will be. You will always be quite intense. And the depression might always be there, waiting for the next fall. But there is so much life waiting for you. The one thing depression has told you is that a day can be a long and intense stretch of time.
THEN ME: Oh God, yes.
NOW ME: Well, then, don’t worry about t
he passing of time. There can be infinity inside a day.
THEN ME: I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.
NOW ME: Hamlet? Impressive. I’ve forgotten all those lines by now. It’s been a long time since university.
THEN ME: I am starting to believe in you.
NOW ME: Thank you.
THEN ME: I mean, the possibility of you. The possibility that I exist more than a decade in the future. And that I feel a lot better.
NOW ME: It’s true. You do. And you have a family of your own. You have a life. It is not perfect. No human life is. But it is yours.
THEN ME: I want proof.
NOW ME: I can’t prove it. There is no time machine.
THEN ME: No. I suppose I’ll just have to hope.
NOW ME: Yes. Have faith.
THEN ME: I’ll try.
NOW ME: You already have.
4
Living
‘And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on’
—Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The world
THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.
To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.
Yet we have no other world to live in. And actually, when we really look closely, the world of stuff and advertising is not really life. Life is the other stuff. Life is what is left when you take all that crap away, or at least ignore it for a while.
Life is the people who love you. No one will ever choose to stay alive for an iPhone. It’s the people we reach via the iPhone that matter.
And once we begin to recover, and to live again, we do so with new eyes. Things become clearer, and we are aware of things we weren’t aware of before.
Mushroom clouds
I NEVER SAW the double-whammy of anxiety and depression coming before it knocked me out when I was twenty-four. But I should have done. The warning signs were all there. The moments of despair as a teenager. The continual worrying about everything. In particular, I believe there were also a lot warning signs while I was a student at Hull University. The trouble with warning signs, though, is that we only have the past to go on, not the future, and if something hasn’t actually happened it is hard to know that it will.
The advantage of having had depression is that you know what to look for, and there was plenty to spot while I was at uni, but I never noticed it.
I used to stare into space, while sitting on the fifth floor of the university library, imagining, with a kind of bleak terror, mushroom clouds on the horizon. I used to feel slightly strange sometimes. Blurred around the edges, as if I was a walking watercolour. And I did need to drink a lot of alcohol, now I think about it.
I also had what was a panic attack, though not on the scale of the later ones. Here is what happened.
As part of my joint English–History degree I took a module on Art History. Though I didn’t realise it at the time, that meant that at some point in the term I would have to do a presentation on a modern art movement (I chose Cubism).
It sounds like nothing, but I was dreading it as much as you could dread anything. I had always been scared of performing and public speaking. But this was something else. I simply could not come to terms with the idea that I would have to stand in front of an entire seminar room full of – ooh – twelve, maybe thirteen people, and talk to them for twenty minutes. People who would be actively thinking about me and concentrating on me and listening to the words coming out of my mouth.
‘Everyone gets nervous,’ my mum told me, on the phone. ‘It’s nothing. And the closer you get to it, the closer it is to being over.’
But what did she know?
I mean, what if I got a nosebleed? What if I couldn’t speak at all? What if I pissed myself? There were other doubts too. How do you say Picabia? Should I use a French accent for the name of Georges Braque’s painting Nature morte?
For about five weeks I couldn’t really enjoy anything because this was coming up, and I couldn’t do a no-show because it was assessed, as part of course work. The thing that I was particularly worried about was the fact that I had to co-ordinate reading my words with the presenting of slides. What if I put the slides in upside down? What if I spoke about Juan Gris’ Portrait of Picasso while actually showing a Picasso? There were a seemingly infinite number of nightmare possibilities.
Fittingly, given the subject of the talk was an art movement that involved abandoning perspective, I was losing perspective.
The day came. Tuesday, 17 March 1997. It looked like so many other drab Hull days. But it wasn’t. Looks were deceptive. There was threat in the air. Everything – even the furniture in our student house – looked like secret weapons in an invisible war against me. Reading Dracula for my Gothic Literature module wasn’t helping either. (‘I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.’)
‘You could always pretend to be ill,’ my new girlfriend and future wife Andrea said.
‘No, I can’t. It’s assessed. It’s assessed!’
‘Jesus, Matt, calm down. You have turned this into something it’s not.’
And then I went to the chemist and bought a pack of Natracalm and swallowed as many of the twenty-four tablets as I could manage. (I think about sixteen. Two sheets’ worth. They tasted of grass and chalk.) I waited to feel the calm that was promised.
But it didn’t happen. Itching happened. And then a rash happened.
The rash was all over my neck and hands. Angry red blotches. My skin felt not only immensely itchy but also hot. The seminar wasn’t until quarter past two. Maybe the rash was a stress response. Maybe I needed something else to calm me down. I went to the union bar and had a pint of lager and two vodka and limes. I had a cigarette. With ten minutes to go before the presentation was due to begin I was in the toilets in the History Department, staring at a swastika some idiot had biro’d onto the shining blonde wood of the door.
My neck was getting worse. I stayed in the toilets. Silently briefing myself in the mirror.
I felt the power of time. The power of it as something unmoving.
‘Stop,’ I whispered. But time doesn’t stop. Not even when you ask it nicely.
Then I did it. I did the presentation. I stuttered and sounded frail as an autumn leaf in my head and messed up the slides a couple of times and failed to say anything at all that I didn’t have written down in front of me in my best handwriting. People didn’t giggle at my rash. They just looked deeply, deeply uncomfortable.
But halfway through I became detached from myself. I derealised. The string that holds on to that feeling of selfhood, the feeling of being me, was cut, and it floated away like a helium balloon. I suppose it was your standard out-of-body experience. I was there, not exactly above myself, but above and beside and everywhere all at once, watching and hearing myself in a state of such heightened self-consciousness I’d actually burst right out of myself altogether.
It was, I suppose, a panic attack. My first actual proper one, though nowhere near the scale of those I’d know later in Ibiza, or back living at home with my parents. It should have been a warning sign, but it wasn’t, because I had been panicking for a reason. Okay, so it wasn’t much of one, but in my head it was. And if you are having a panic attack for a reaso
n – a lion is chasing you, the lift door won’t open, you don’t know how to pronounce ‘chiaroscuro’ – then it is not really a panic attack, but a logical response to a fearful situation.
To panic without a reason, that’s madness. To panic with a reason, that’s sanity. I was still on the right side of the line.
Just.
But it is always hard for us to see the future inside the present, even when it is right there in front of us.
The Big A
ANXIETY IS THE partner of depression. It accompanies half the cases of depression. Sometimes it triggers depression. Sometimes depression triggers anxiety. Sometimes they simply co-exist, like a nightmare marriage. Though of course it is perfectly possible to have anxiety minus depression, and vice versa.
Anxiety and depression are an interesting mix. In many ways they are opposite experiences, and yet mix them together and you don’t get a happy medium. Quite the opposite. Anxiety, which often bubbles up into panic, is a nightmare in fast-forward. Anxiety, even more than depression, can be exacerbated by the way we live in the twenty-first century. By the things that surround us.
Smartphones. Advertising (I think of a great David Foster Wallace line – ‘It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.’) Twitter followers. Facebook likes. Instagram. Information overload. Unanswered emails. Dating apps. War. The rapid evolution of technology. Urban planning. The changing climate. Overcrowded public transport. Articles on the ‘post-anti-biotic age’. Photoshopped cover models. Google-induced hypochondria. Infinite choice (‘anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’ – Søren Kierkegaard). Online shopping. The should-we-eat-butter? debate. Atomised living. All those American TV dramas we should have watched. All those prize-winning books we should have read. All those pop stars we haven’t heard of. All that lacking we are made to feel. Instant gratification. Constant distraction. Work work work. Twenty-four-hour everything.
