That low feeling and the company we keep

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.’