That low feeling and the company we keep

Friends and family, family and friends: that is the mantra. (Representational image: Helena Lopes via Unsplash)

Content warning: This write-up contains a mention of suicide.

With the word ‘depression’ bandied about to cover entire spectrums of the blues, various ripples and radii inherent in that condition – from mild to suicidal – sometimes suffer from being lumped together. The questions are quick: is it clinical, seasonal, postpartum, a passing mood, PMS, in your DNA, after the death of a loved one? But the answers are slippery. Radiating from the mind and seizing the body, too many molecules go into making up a person for it to be easily labelled, defined or treated. Let’s start with the past, a counsellor is wont to say, with your childhood trauma, when childhood itself is traumatic at every level. What about being that young and defenceless is at any time easy while growing up?

Enforced positivity sucks and therapists don’t always end up keepers. Easy-peasy methods prescribed blithely by all and sundry to climb out of the absolutely black and bottomless well one may fall into during academic pursuits, employment in a strange city, tying the knot or suffering a miscarriage, can only be scoffed at. This almost reasonless, inexplicable suffocating blanket that descends, so romanticised by poets and the self-engineered departures of literary legends like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, is a beast like no other. Tame one minute, foaming at the mouth the next.

A friend explained how insomnia heralded the arrival of low in what is turning out to be an annual event. Roughly the same time of the year, down he goes. Being wide awake night after night, day after day, takes its toll, and within a span of days – blurry, bleary days – all he needs is a medically induced nap. A student confessed that being diagnosed with clinical depression was almost a relief, and being responsive to medication a blessing. ‘I talk a lot,’ says she, ‘so I won’t silently fall apart.’

What then is a practical everyday guide to mental health beyond the laborious diet changes and gym membership? Having stepped back from humanity and its ceaseless chatter, one must plot a return to routine and find it meaningful. Hindi writer Nirmal Verma has spoken about man’s need for society when alone and vice-versa. That delicate balance, almost a dance between solo performance and being a back-up artiste, is everything. In Prateek Kuhad’s song Favourite Peeps, pals come and go, taking care, leaving alone, and that beautiful tightrope walk only caring individuals can walk, into your space and out. Family and friends, friends and family: that’s the mantra. As Kuhad sings: ‘I need all the heart I can get from my favourite loves…’

Gilda, in Emily R. Austin’s novel Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, can’t stop thinking of death, but sending emails to someone could just be the distraction she needs. And Eleanor Oliphant in Gail Honeyman’s novel is at some point completely fine. When she is smiled back at in the very last chapter of the book, ‘the moment hung in time like a drop of honey from a spoon, heavy, golden.’ Interactions then, initiating them, underlining personal relationships?

Perhaps we sieve out that one sentence Woolf wrote in her suicide note to her husband: ‘What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you.’