The Noonday Demon

by Solomon, Andrew

  Dièry is the object of constant racism, which is exacerbated by his intimidating size and physique and, curiously enough, by his good looks. I have seen salespeople shy away from him in stores. I have been on street corners in New York with him when he was trying to hail a cab for fifteen minutes and none would stop for him; when I raised my hand, we had one in ten seconds flat. He was once arrested by the police three blocks from his house in Brooklyn, told that he fit the description of a suspect in a crime, and kept long hours in a holding cell, chained to a girder. His comportment and credentials made no difference to the authority figures who incarcerated him. The consistent indignities of racism and tokenism do not make depression easier to bear. The suspicion with which he is regarded on the streets and the presumptions of guilt are exhausting. It is isolating to be so misunderstood by so many people.

  When Dièry is well, he is habituated to these constant assaults on his pride and he pays them relatively little heed, but “it just makes your day so much harder,” he said to me once. “The depression itself is color-blind. I think when you’re depressed, you could be brown or blue or white or red. When I’m down, I see happy people of every hue and every shape and size around me, and I feel like, God, I’m the only one on the planet who’s this depressed. They have something going on and I don’t.

  “But then again the race card does come into play. You feel like the world is just hoping to pull you down. I’m a big, strong black man and no one is going to waste time feeling sorry for me. What would happen if you suddenly started crying on the subway? I think someone might very well ask you if there was something wrong. If I burst into tears on the subway, they’d assume I was on bad drugs. When someone reacts to me in a way that has nothing to do with who I am or what I’m really like, it’s always a shock to me. It’s always a shock, the discrepancy between my self-perception and how I am perceived in the world, between my internal vision of myself and the external circumstances of my life. When I’m down, it’s a slap across the face. I’ve spent hours looking in the mirror, saying, ‘You’re a decent-looking guy; you’re clean; you’re properly groomed; you’re polite and kindhearted. Why don’t people just love you? Why are they always trying to beat you up and fuck with you? And putting you down and humiliating you? Why?’ I just couldn’t get it. So there are certain external difficulties that I face as a black man that are different from those faced by some other people. I hate to admit the fact that race plays a role for me—it’s not in the symptoms but in the circumstances. You know—it’s hard enough being me even if I weren’t a black man! But I mean, it certainly is worth it. When I’m feeling okay, I’m really glad to be me and you know, it’s hard to be you too, and you’re not a black man. But that race problem is always there, always ticking me off, always tapping into my permanent anger, the permafrost inside me. It gets me so far down.”

  Dièry and I met through his wife, who is an old school friend of mine. We have been friends for about a decade and, in part because of our mutual experience of depression, have become extremely close. I am not good at exercising on my own, and for some time Dièry has also been my trainer—a position that breeds an intimacy in many ways as great as that, I experience with my psychiatrist. In addition to structuring an exercise program, he gets me up and keeps me going. Because he constantly tests my limits, he knows what those limits are. He knows when it makes sense to push me to my physical edge and when it is necessary to pull back short of my emotional one. He is one of the first people I call when I begin to dissolve—in part because I know that stepping up my exercise regimen will have a positive effect on my mood, and in part because he has a singular sweetness; in part because he knows whereof I speak, and in part because introspection has given him a capacity for genuine insight. I have had to trust him, and I do. He is the one who came to my house and helped me to shower and get dressed when I was at my lowest. He is among the heroes of my own depression story. And he is authentically generous, someone who chose his work because he believes he can make other people feel good, someone who can be gratified by his own kindness; he has turned the aggression of his self-torture into a productive discipline. This is a rare quality indeed in a world full of people who feel put-upon by the burden of others’ suffering.

  The panoply of national prejudices toward depression defies cataloging. Many East Asians, for example, avoid the subject to the point of abject denial. In this spirit, a recent feature on depression in a Singapore magazine described the full range of medications, then ended by saying definitively, “Seek professional help if you need it, but in the meantime, cheer up.”

  Anna Halberstadt, a New York–based psychiatrist who works exclusively with Russian immigrants disappointed by the United States, said, “You have to be able to hear in the Russian context what these people are saying. If a Soviet-born Russian person were to come to my office and not complain about anything, I’d have him hospitalized. If he complains about everything, I know he is fine. Only if he were to show signs of extreme paranoia or excruciating pain would I think he might be getting depressed. It’s our cultural norm. ‘How are you?’ ‘Not so good’ is the standard answer for Russians. It’s part of what confuses them about the U.S., this statement that seems ridiculous, really: ‘Fine, thanks, and how are you?’ And honestly it’s difficult for me too, even now, to hear how people say this. ‘Fine, thank you.’ Who’s fine?”

  In Poland, the 1970s were a time of few pleasures and of limited freedom. In 1980, the first Solidarity movement began to make headway, and a consequent hope and exuberance ensued. It was possible to speak out boldly; people who had for a long time been burdened by an alien system of government began to feel the pleasure of individual expression, and media were born that reflected this new mood. But in 1981, martial law was imposed in Poland, and a huge number of arrests were made; most activists served sentences of about six months. “Being imprisoned was something they all accepted,” recalls Agata Bielik-Robson, who was at that time going out with one of the leading activists and is a highly regarded political philosopher in her own right. “What they could not bear was the loss of hope.” The public sphere in which they had expressed themselves simply ceased to exist. “That was the beginning of a kind of political depression, a time when these men lost their belief in communication of all kinds: if they could say nothing in a public context, they would not say anything in a private context either.” The same men who had been organizing rallies and writing manifestos now lost or gave up jobs and sat at home, watching TV for hours on end and drinking. They became “morose, monosyllabic, disconnected, uncommunicative, closed.” Their reality was not so very different from the reality of five years earlier, except that it now had the shadow of 1980 crossing it, and so what had once been an accepted reality came to smack of defeat.

  “At this time, the only sphere in which there was any possibility of success was the domestic sphere,” Bielik-Robson recalls. The women who had been involved in Solidarity, many of whom had abandoned home life for activism, withdrew into traditional women’s roles and nursed their ailing men through the difficulties. “In this way we found a sense of purpose and had an agenda of our own. We got such satisfaction out of our role, which had turned out to be so essential! The early eighties was a period in which women were less depressed than at any other time in recent Polish history, and the men were more depressed than at any other time.”

  Among the groups most likely to suffer depression, gay people rank shockingly high. In a recent study, researchers looked at middle-aged twins of whom one was gay and one was straight. Among the straight people, about 4 percent had attempted suicide. Among the gay people, 15 percent had attempted suicide. In another study, of a random population sampling of almost four thousand men between the ages of seventeen and thirty-nine, 3.5 percent of heterosexuals had attempted suicide while almost 20 percent of those who had same-sex partners had attempted suicide. In yet another randomized study of about ten thousand men and women, those who had had sex with
members of their own gender during the previous year had a significantly elevated rate of depression and panic disorder. A twenty-one-year longitudinal study conducted in New Zealand of some twelve hundred people showed that those who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual were at increased risk for major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, conduct disorder, nicotine dependence, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. A Dutch study conducted on six thousand people showed that homosexual men and women were likely to have substantially higher rates of major depression than heterosexuals. A study of forty thousand youth conducted in Minnesota indicated that gay males were seven times as likely as their counterparts to experience suicidal ideation. Yet another study of about thirty-five hundred students showed that homosexual males were almost seven times as likely to make a suicide attempt as heterosexual males. Another study showed that in a sample of about fifteen hundred students, gay people (of either gender) were more than seven times as likely to have made four or more suicide attempts as straight students. One study based in San Diego found, among male suicides, 10 percent are committed by gay men. If you’re gay, your chances of being depressed are enormously, terribly increased.

  Many explanations have been proposed for this, some more plausible than others. A few scientists have argued for a genetic link between homosexuality and depression (a proposal that I find not only disturbing but also untenable). Others have suggested that those people who expect their sexuality to prevent their having children may confront mortality earlier than most straight people. A number of other theories have circulated, but the most obvious explanation for the high rates of gay depression is homophobia. Gay people are more likely than a general population to have been rejected by their families. They are more likely to have had social adjustment problems. Because of those problems, they are more likely to have dropped out of school. They have a higher rate of sexually transmitted diseases. They are less likely to be in stable couplings in their adult life. They are less likely to have committed caretakers in late life. They are more likely to be infected with HIV in the first place; and even those who are not, once they become depressed, are more likely to practice unsafe sex and contract the virus, which, in turn, exacerbates the depression. Most of all, they are more likely to have lived their lives furtively and to have experienced intense segregation in consequence of this. In early 2001, I traveled to Utrecht to meet with Theo Sandfort, who has done pioneering work on gay depression. Unsurprisingly, Sandfort has found that the rate of depression is higher for closeted people than for uncloseted people, and is higher for single people than for those in stable long-term relationships. I would say that being uncloseted and being coupled are both factors that allay a terrible loneliness that afflicts much of the gay population. Overall, Sandfort found that the level of difficulty gay people experience in their day-to-day lives is extremely high in many subtle ways and sometimes pass unnoticed even by those they affect; for example, gay people are less likely to share information about their personal lives with others in their workplace even if they are out of the closet with those colleagues. “And this is in the Netherlands,” Sandfort said, “where we are more open to gayness than almost anywhere else in the world. We feel that there is a lot of acceptance of homosexuality, but the world is still straight, and the strain of being gay in a straight world is substantial. Now, there are plenty of gay people with good lives; in fact, there are people who, through dealing successfully with the complexities of being gay, have built up a really amazing psychological strength, much greater than their straight counterparts. But the range of mental health is broader in the gay community than in any other, from this great strength to terrible incapacity.” Sandfort knows whereof he speaks. He had a very rough time coming out himself, suffering accusations from both parents. When he was twenty, he became depressed and debilitated. He spent seven months in a psychiatric hospital, which turned around his parents’ attitudes, led him into a new intimacy with them, and initiated a new kind of mental health he has since enjoyed. “Since I fell apart and put myself back together,” he said, “I know how I am made, and in consequence know a little bit of how other gay men are made too.”

  While researchers such as Sandfort have been conducting large, well-structured studies to compile correlations and numbers, the meaning of these statistics has had relatively little exposition. In two remarkable papers, “Internalized Homophobia and the Negative Therapeutic Reaction” and “Internal Homophobia and Gender-Valued Self-Esteem in the Psychoanalysis of Gay Patients,” Richard C. Friedman and Jennifer Downey write movingly of the origins and mechanisms of internalized homophobia. At the center of their arguments is a notion of early trauma closely tied to the classic Freudian view that primary experiences shape us for life. Friedman and Downey, however, emphasize not early childhood, but late childhood, which they locate as the point of origin for the incorporation of homophobic attitudes. A recent study of socialization among gay men indicates that children who will be homosexual adults are usually brought up in heterosexist and homophobic contexts and at an early age begin to internalize the negative view of homosexuality expressed by their peers or parents. “In this situation,” Friedman and Downey write, “the patient’s developmental course was one in which early childhood was filled with self-hate, which was condensed into internalized homophobic narratives constructed during later childhood.” Internalized homophobia often originates with early childhood abuse and neglect. “Before they become sexually active with others,” Friedman and Downey write, “many children who will become gay men are labeled ‘sissy’ or ‘fag.’ They have been teased, threatened with physical violence, ostracized, and even assaulted by other boys.” Indeed, a 1998 study found that a homosexual orientation was statistically connected to having one’s property stolen or deliberately damaged in school. “These traumatic interactions may result in a feeling of masculine inadequacy. Isolation from male peers may result either from ostracism or anxious avoidance or both.” These painful experiences can generate an almost intractable “global and tenacious self-hatred.” This problem of internalized homophobia is similar in many ways to internalized racism and to all kinds of other internalized prejudice. I have always been struck by the very high suicide rates among Jews in Berlin in the teens and twenties, which suggest that people encountering prejudice are likely to doubt themselves, to undervalue their lives, and, ultimately, to despair in the face of odium. But there is hope. “We believe,” Friedman and Downey write, “that many gay men and women truly leave the consequences of their childhood behind them, and integration into the gay subculture is instrumental in facilitating this felicitous pathway. Supportive relationships often have a therapeutic effect on trauma survivors, enhancing security, self-esteem, and buttressing the sense of identity. The complex processes involved in positive identity consolidation are fostered in the context of beneficent interpersonal interactions with other gay people.”

  Despite the wonderful and curative effects of the gay community, however, deep problems persist, and the most interesting part of Friedman and Downey’s work looks at patients who seem similar in their “manifest behavior to those who appear to have put the worst consequences of trauma behind them,” but who are in fact severely compromised by an enduring self-loathing. Often such people will express strong prejudice toward those whose homosexuality seems to them ostentatious in some way, including, for example, queeny or effeminate men, on whom they place the scorn they feel for their own feelings of unmasculinity. They may believe, consciously or unconsciously, that they are not truly esteemed in areas entirely separate from their erotic lives—in the workplace, for example—because they believe that those who perceive them to be gay believe them to be inferior. “A negative view of the self as inadequately masculine functions as an organizing unconscious fantasy,” Friedman and Downey write. This fantasy is “an element in a complex internal narrative whose major theme is ‘I am an unworthy, inadequate, unmasculine man.’” People afflicted with these attitudes m
ay attribute all the problems of their lives to their sexuality. “Negative self-valuation may come to be attributed to homosexual desires; thus, although it may be rooted in phenomena that are quite different, the patient may consciously believe that he hates himself because he is homosexual.”

  I have always thought that the language of gay pride has dominated the gay establishment because it is in fact the opposite of what a large number of gay people experience. Gay shame is endemic. “Guilt and shame at being gay leads to self-hatred and to self-destructive behavior,” Friedman and Downey write. This self-hatred is in part “a consequence of defensive partial identification with aggressors ‘layered over’ earlier occurring self-acceptance.” Few people at the age of dawning sexual awareness would choose to be gay, and most people who are gay entertain for some stretch of time fantasies of conversion. These are made only more difficult by a gay pride movement that finds gay shame shameful. If you are gay and feel bad about it, pride-o-files will jeer at you for your embarrassment; homophobes will jeer at you for being gay; and you will be left genuinely bereft. We do indeed internalize our tormentors. Frequently, we repress the memories of how painful external homophobia was for us as we first experienced it. Gay patients will frequently discover, after extended therapy, profound beliefs such as, “My father (or mother) always hated me because I was homosexual.” Sadly, they may be right. A New Yorker study asked a broad range of people, “Which would you prefer for your son or daughter: to be heterosexual, childless, and unmarried or somewhat unhappily married; or to be homosexual, involved in a stable, happy relationship, and have children?” More than a third of respondents chose “heterosexual, childless, and either unmarried or somewhat unhappily married.” Indeed, many parents view homosexuality as a punishment visited on them for their own transgressions: it is not about the identity of their children, but about their own identity.