Talking of Depression

“A whole society soon metamorphosed into my benefactors. They soon drove me to illicit liquor joints where I sat all alone at a slimy table and drank cheap brandy, peg after peg. The drinks drenched my soul in shame. I felt utterly worthless. I felt unworthy of life. I longed for death.”

That is quoted from my forthcoming book, Autumn Shadows. I experienced a protracted period of depression that lasted a few years in my late thirties. Depression makes you feel totally worthless. Worse, the whole world appeared to exist for the singular purpose of decimating me. I refused to trust anyone.

My experience is that a depressive does not want to talk to anyone. How can he talk when everyone is his perceived enemy? At best, like poet Shelley, he can cry to the wind in the air to lift him like a dead leaf and carry him away to the emptiness in the skies. “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” Shelley lamented to the West Wind.

I used to sit on the parapet wall of a culvert near a graveyard and envy the dead people buried there. Suicidal thoughts overwhelmed me frequently. But the depressive carries on. His longing is not to die but to hide his shame. To hide, not to reveal. Rather, he thinks that too much has been revealed already.

I was convinced that the society around me had caught hold of my shame, shook it out and held it up for the whole world to see. “Then you become less than the shame,” I have written in Autumn Shadows. “You become utterly disgusting.”

What is there now to talk about when everything has already been exhibited by others? No, the depressive doesn’t want to talk. He wants to hide. His soul belongs to the graveyard. He is on the run. To the netherworld. Sinking. Sinking in a state of free fall. He has to hit the bottom. Not with a bang but with a whimper. Inaudible whimper.

PS. Written for In(di)spire Edition 232: Why is talking about depression still a stigma in our society? #depression

No, Ms Arora (the one who raised the above question at the blogger’s community), talking about depression is not a stigma, I think. The depressive is the stigma. He thinks so at least. So he won’t talk. That has been my experience.

PPS. My experience has helped me counsel a few other individuals who passed through the hell called depression. What I did was to use cognitive behavioural therapy one of whose fundamental assumptions is that depression is rooted in cognitive distortions. I assist the depressive to look at his or her distortions like ‘I’m good for nothing’ or ‘The world around me is conspiring against me.’ It requires a lot of patient efforts to bring a depressive back to healthy attitudes. Spring will follow winter, as Shelley concluded his Ode to the West Wind. But the snow takes its own horrendous time to thaw.