Within a Forest Dark

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” —Dante Alighieri, Inferno

I am well now, and I have been well for years. This is not a dispatch from the middle of crisis. It is a report from memory. But memory, in this case, remains faithful. I can still recall with great precision what clinical depression felt like when I suffered from it at a couple of points in my life. The texture of it. The atmosphere. The particular weight of ordinary actions. The way the world changed without ever announcing that it had changed.

For Mental Health Awareness Month, I find myself thinking less about awareness than about description.

Awareness has its place. People should know that mental illness is real, that treatment can help, that shame keeps too many people silent, and that compassion can make survival possible. But awareness is the easier task. Description is harder. Description asks us to say what the thing is actually like.

And depression, at least as I have known it, is almost impossible to describe. We are very poorly served by the descriptions and portrayals that tend to be available in literature and media, and this often leaves the family and friends of sufferers feeling both confused and unable to effectively respond.

The problem begins with the words we already have. Everyone knows what it is like to be sad. Everyone knows what it is like to be tired. Most people know what it is like to be mentally tired, to feel worn down by grief or stress or worry or the long grind of responsibility. So, depression is often imagined as some combination of these familiar states. Sadness and exhaustion, only with both dials turned up.

But that is not depression.

Sadness can be terrible. Exhaustion can be terrible. But when a generally mentally well person is sad or tired, even intensely so, there is usually still an immutable self at the center of the experience that can be leveraged against the suffering. That person may struggle. They may fail. They may need rest, help, time, or mercy. But somewhere inside them remains the capacity to oppose what is happening. A will. A defiance. A little internal hand reaching for the railing.

It is precisely the self that depression dissolves. Depression attacks that hand.

It erodes the self that would normally respond to sadness and fatigue. It robs the afflicted person of the very resources they would ordinarily use to survive the hardship they are enduring. In that sense, depression is something like an immune deficiency syndrome of the mind.

This is why so much well-meaning advice misses the mark. Go for a walk. Call a friend. Get some sleep. Count your blessings. Pray. Exercise. Eat better.

These things may be good. Some of them may even become part of recovery. But in the deepest periods of depression, they are outside the scope of the problem. They assume the existence of an intact self, standing somewhere behind the symptoms, ready to act if only properly encouraged.

And here is the strange paradox about the loss of the self. The phenomenological experience tends to feel like the loss of the world itself.

A person can understand, intellectually, that depression is internal. They can know that something is happening in the brain, that perception is being altered, that chemistry and memory and fear and fatigue have made a private weather system around them. They can know all of this and still experience the world itself as diminished. The mind does not say, “I am ill, and therefore I cannot feel the meaning of things.” The mind says, “There is no meaning in things.”

This is part of why William Styron’s Darkness Visible meant so much to me when I first encountered it. Styron understood, first hand, that depression is not ordinary unhappiness. He called it a “gray drizzle of horror,” one of the few phrases I have found that comes close to the thing itself. It captures the way depression can be diffuse and total, atmospheric and unbearable.

There is another passage in Styron that has stayed with me just as powerfully. He writes that many people in deep depression experience “the sense of being accompanied by a second self,” a “wraithlike observer” who, untouched by the sufferer’s derangement, can watch “with dispassionate curiosity” as the afflicted person struggles against the coming disaster, or even begins to move toward it. This, too, is one of depression’s paradoxes. Even as the self is being lost, another presence can seem to appear in the room. Not a comforter and not a conscience. Something colder and stranger. A witness without mercy.

Andrew Solomon makes a different but equally necessary distinction in The Noonday Demon when he writes that “the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.” That may be the most precise sentence I know about the illness. Depression does not simply make a person unhappy. It drains away the force by which happiness, sadness, love, anger, interest, appetite, and hope are ordinarily experienced at all.

Even now, I hesitate to write about my own experience. Not because I am ashamed of it. I am not. I have suffered from clinical depression. I have been treated for it. I have taken medication. I have gotten better. I believe people should say such things plainly.

But plainness has its limits. To say “I had depression” is true in the same way that saying “there was a fire” is true. It names the event, but not the smell of the room afterward. Not the melted plastic. Not the blackened studs. Not the silence of people standing outside with blankets around their shoulders, looking at the place where they used to live.

Years ago, when I was first prescribed an SSRI for an early bout of depression, I had an experience I have never forgotten. Or rather, it was the first bout for which I sought treatment and received an official diagnosis. In hindsight, I suspect there had been others before that. I had simply not known what I was enduring.

After a few weeks on the medication, I began to sense that something was changing, though not in any dramatic or cinematic way. There was no sudden arrival of happiness. No rush of gratitude. No triumphant return of myself to myself. The change was quieter and much stranger than that.

One afternoon I drove home from work and parked in front of the quadplex where I was living at the time. During depressive periods, I often felt as though I had only barely made it home awake. Once parked, I would sometimes sit in the car for a long time with the engine turned off, staring at nothing in particular. I had used up the last of my cognitive resources simply making the drive. Safe in the carport, I would have nothing left for the next sequence of ordinary tasks. Opening the car door. Stepping out. Walking to the house. Finding the right key. Unlocking the door. Crossing the threshold. Reaching the sofa that waited to receive me.

On that day, though, I got out of the car and walked toward the building. As I approached, I had the sudden realization that while I had been at work, the landlord had repainted the entire place a brighter shade of blue. It looked great, I thought.

I was surprised he had managed to do it so quickly. An entire building painted in a single workday. I moved closer and saw chipped spots on the siding. Dirt near the edges. Places where the old wear still showed.

The paint was not new at all.

I had a confused exchange with my wife about it before the truth began to dawn on me. I went back outside and looked around more carefully. At the other houses. The trees. The cars. The flowers in a neighbor’s garden bed. The siding. The sky.

The whole world looked different.

It was not that the landlord had painted the building. It was that some part of my perception had returned. Color had come back. The world outside my eyes was suddenly lit with an intensity I had not experienced in a long time, maybe ever. The blue was not metaphorically brighter. It was literally brighter. The world had not changed, but the instrument through which I received the world had been repaired just enough for me to notice what had been missing.

That is what depression had done to me without my even knowing it. It had literally made the world gray.

I think often about that moment because it revealed something frightening. Depression had altered reality for me while allowing me to believe I was seeing reality clearly. It does not always announce itself as distortion. It can feel like revelation. The depressed mind often believes it has finally stopped being fooled. Hope looks childish. Joy looks naive. Love looks temporary. Work looks futile. The depressed person often feels they are just now beginning to see clearly.

And because the depressed person may remain articulate, responsible, funny, polite, even productive, others may not see the collapse taking place. The person may still answer emails. Still attend meetings. Still make dinner. Still ask other people how they are doing and appear to care about the answer. Depression does not always look like someone lying in bed with the curtains drawn.

This is where our public language about mental health often falls short.

We say, “Check in on people,” and we should. We say, “It’s okay not to be okay,” and it is. We say, “End the stigma,” and yes, by all means. These phrases can open a door. But they do not tell you much about the room on the other side.

Inside it, a person may know he is loved and be unable to feel loved. He may know he has reasons to live and be unable to experience those reasons as real. He may know that treatment works and still lack the energy to make the appointment. He may know the world has color and still see gray.

This is not weakness or self-indulgence. It is not a failure of gratitude. Depression changes the mind before the mind can argue back. After all, it is that changed mind which has to do the arguing.

For those who have never experienced it, depression is not always an argument that can be answered or a mood that can be cheered. It is an illness, and like other illnesses, it requires care: therapy, medication, rest, sometimes hospitalization, and the ordinary presence of people who do not panic or vanish. For those who have experienced it, or are experiencing it now, the hard truth is that depression lies most convincingly when it tells you it is telling the truth.

But the blue building taught me otherwise.

If someone wants to understand depression more deeply, I know of no better starting place than Styron’s Darkness Visible and Solomon’s The Noonday Demon. They are very different books. Styron’s is brief, concentrated, and literary, a memoir of descent and survival. Solomon’s is vast, humane, and searching; an attempt to map depression through personal experience, medicine, culture, and history. Read together, they make clear why depression cannot be reduced to sadness and why those who suffer from it need more than encouragement. They need treatment.

I am grateful, now, that the world regained its color. I am grateful for medicine, and for people who stayed close. But I remain wary of making the story too neat. Depression is not redeemed by becoming useful material. Suffering does not become good simply because one can later write about it.

Still, I write about it because someone else’s description once helped me.

Styron and Solomon did not cure me. Books do not do that. But they gave language to something I had feared was formless. They told me that other people had stood inside that forest dark, and then they had regained their footing on the straightforward pathway. And what one person can do, another can do.

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