Black Bile

There are many great prophets of depression. I do believe it is true that, for some profound reason, Melancholia is the anti-saint of artists and philosophers and scholars. So there is no lack of guides to the experience of melancholy that ring true to its survivors. My personal favorite is Dorothy Parker, who channeled her own experience with depression and alcoholism into her short story "Big Blonde." If I was asked to share a passage that might give someone an inkling of what depression feels like, this is what I would choose: "Misery crushed her as if she were between great smooth stones. There passed before her a slow, slow pageant of days spent lying in her flat, of evenings at Jimmy's being a good sport, making herself laugh and coo at Art and other Arts; she saw a long parade of weary horses and shivering beggars and all beaten, driven, stumbling things."

I think Parker's words get at something that often gets overlooked when people write about depression. The personal and the global, others' pain and your pain, become one. By seeing the droning monotony in your own life, you also become convinced you can see into the hollowness in all things. There, I believe, is the true insidiousness of the disease. It's not really a retreat into yourself, into self-pity and isolation and despair, or at least not just that. Instead, depression rots even empathy and compassion into pain. As I write this, on the eighteenth day of the longest bout of depression I've ever experienced, thoughts about how I'm aging and am still just a low-paid office grunt despite all the effort and energy I spent on my chosen career have calcified in my mind. But I also find myself chased by the bleak emotions I sometimes have felt when I look out into the world, whipped into a frenzy by all the social media posts and news articles I can barely stop myself from reading. I wallow in how there is perhaps a 50/50 chance of my country re-electing to its highest political office an obvious con-man propped up by people who want to drag society back into the 1950s (if not the 1850s); in Gaza being razed by hellfire paid for by my tax dollars; in how the summers keep getting hotter and there are still far too many people in power willing to deny what is happening to the planet solely at the behest of parasitic plutocrats. It's hard to describe the overriding feeling, at least without sounding myopic. But it is like all these fears and anxieties and problems just mix together in my mind until it becomes a singular black bile, just like the bodily substance people in the past believed was the cause of melancholy, that seeps into every perception of the present, every memory of your life, every thought about your and everyone's future.

It just makes you so tired.

David Foster Wallace compared his depression to being in a burning building, where it seems like the only way out is to leap. That is apt, but I would compare at least my own experience to being trapped inside an empty room. Next door there is a television or a radio on that thunders through the wall. You can't get out of the room, there's nothing you have on hand to truly drone out the noise for long, and no one ever turns it off except maybe for a few hours or one precious evening. Sometimes it plays a one-person monologue that eviscerates you for your many failures and lost opportunities or patiently explains why everything is only going to ever get worse. Other times, it's just a low hum that creeps into the back of your head and echoes in your skull with a dull tone of sadness and resignation and anxiety. But even that is preferable to when you feel little more than nothing, because your mind has shut down your own emotions to protect yourself. That's when escaping from that empty room by any means necessary becomes the attractive, even rational option. It's not a decision you jump for in a hair-tearing fit of sorrow; it's one weighed as casually and pragmatically as you would when you consider if you should get groceries on the way home from work or wait until the weekend.

I do believe it's true that many people understand and empathize with depression, and it's something that's become more true over the course of my lifetime. Even so, there is still an assumption out there, even among the well-meaning, that depressed people can just through willpower or a change in mindset step into the room and turn off the noise. Honestly, I can't blame them too much, if only because even for someone who has gone through all-encompassing depression, it's easy to forget how bad it is when you are completely well. I've felt fine for almost a year now; why did I ever need medication? And then there's a death in your life or some piece of bad news or you don't get the job you thought you'd get after school—or perhaps nothing at all happens aside from months' worth of piling-up resentments and annoyances and little losses—and then you're stuck in that empty room again.

I wish I could close this with some tactic that would help those who find themselves in the empty room like I have. I have found in my experience that listening to music or watching episodes from an old favorite show can take some of the weight off, if only for a while, and anything that occupies the mind can give a little help. Sadly, this is a tricky remedy against a disease that can erode your willpower to even just brush your teeth or take up a book or a video game. Personally, I have taken measures to stop myself from doomscrolling, up to using an app that blocks social media sites and other websites for a certain number of hours a day, although I can't say how much that's helped.

For those who know or suspect that someone is depressed, the obvious is the best advice: talk to them. It isn't easy to be friends with someone who is depressed. To be honest, even if you have experienced depression, it's not easy to be with someone who is depressed. But when it comes to an illness that turns one's own most private thoughts against you, being reminded even in a small way that perhaps you are not trapped in that room after all, and there is more than one way out, could possibly be the simplest and best treatment.