The following comparisons may make depression more vivid and understandable to the
non-depressive. In 1972 I had a major surgical operation, a spinal fusion, serious enough
to keep me on my back almost constantly for two months. The day of the
operation
was worse for me than most of my depressed days, made so by the fear that the operation
might be disastrously botched and leave me permanently disabled. But though I was full of
pain and discomfort, the first day after each operation (when I already knew that
there had been no disaster) was easier to get through than were the run-of-the-mill days
of my first couple of years of black depression, and was about the same as the average
days in my later depression years.
Another example: A day in which a wisdom tooth was pulled had about the same pain
content for me as a day in my later "gray depression" years. The nice side of an
operation or of a tooth- pulling is that when you are already safe, though in pain and
confined to bed or crutches for months, you know the pain will end. But my depression went
on for month after month and year after year, and I became convinced that it would not
ever end. That was the worst of all.
Here is another comparison: If I were presented with the choice, I'd choose to spend
three to five years of that period in prison rather than live the thirteen years in the
depressed state I passed them in. I've not been a prisoner, so I can't know what it is
like, but I do know the years of depression and I believe that I'd make such a deal.
I refused to let myself do the pleasurable things that my wife wisely suggested I do --
go to the movies, take a walk on a sunny day, and so on -- because I thought that I ought
to suffer. I was superstitiously operating on the nutty presumption that if I punished
myself enough, no one else would punish me for my misdeed. And later on I refused to do
these casual pleasurable things because I thought that I would be kidding myself by doing
them, covering up the symptoms of my depression and therefore preventing a real cure--more
bad depressive-type thinking.
During my first year of depression there was one good day. My wife and I went to visit
overnight at a country shack with friends. In the morning when we woke in sleeping bags I
heard a bird and saw the trees against the sky, and I felt exquisite joy of relief--the
relief that one feels at the finish of a long exhausting ordeal of physical or mental work
when you can at last rest, lightened of your burden. I thought, maybe it is over. But
after a matter of hours I was again full of fear and dread and hopelessness and
self-loathing. And even an hour of such relief did not return for perhaps another full
year. (The next good moment was the night our first child was born, about three years
after the depression began. Incidentally, I will seldom mention my good wife because it is
not possible to do justice to one's spouse in an account such as this one.)
Though the pain grew less acute with time, and my outlook came to seem only a constant
gray rather than totally black, after six to eight years of it I became more and more
convinced that I would never escape. Such prolonged depression is medically unusual, and
physicians can honestly reassure patients that they may expect relief within weeks or
months, or a year or so at most, though the depression may return. But that was not the
case with me.
For a while I dreamed about entering a monastery, perhaps a silent monastery, where
there would be no burdens or expectations. But I knew that I could not run away until the
children would be grown. The prospect of hanging on for that long period of future
depression depressed me more.
