“Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self – to the mediating intellect – as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it…” William Styron: Darkness Visible

I sought grief counselling in the wake of the loss of Mottsu, I recommend clutching at whatever support is available. After some weeks my psychologist requested I promise to let her know if I was depressed. I promised. I was surprised by the request, thinking she would know if I were depressed, surely depression couldn’t be as invisible as grief.

Did I say something that alarmed her?

Did she see something I didn’t?

I probably expected the insight of a psychologist to be on par with x-ray vision. I didn’t know depression,not from the inside I mean, and I didn’t believe I felt depressed. Then I worried that I might not recognise it. Despair and despondency had become steady companions but not, as far as I knew, depression. Feeling troubled by the possibility of suffering something I was unaware of was almost enough to bring on a mood disorder.

I told myself detachment from feeling was a symptom, if I couldn’t tell I was depressed maybe it was because I was depressed. That’s a lose/lose stance that churned around the windmills of my mind.

I was also struggling – sort of ‘valiantly’ struggling against mainstream opinion that a deep unipolar depression is abnormal. By abnormal I mean not spoken of, something those afflicted could not speak of or share. I worried I was not succeeding in my quest if I were too hasty to deny the possibility of even walking the perimeter of a mental wilderness. I didn’t want to be too quick to profess, “There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with me”. I wanted the wrongness struck out, I wanted depression empathised with more than pathologised. Such a bind, such a debate in my head. In order to confound the enemy isn’t it necessary to unmask them, reveal all?

Late in the 70′s I read Knots by R. D. Laing and I remembered:

“There must be something the matter with him
because he would not be acting as he does
unless there was
therefore he is acting as he is
because there is something the matter with him
He does not think there is anything the matter with him
because
one of the things that is
the matter with him
is that he does not think that there is anything
the matter with him
therefore
we have to help him realize that,
the fact that he does not think there is anything
the matter with him
is one of the things that is
the matter with him
there is something the matter with him
because he thinks
there must be something the matter with us
for trying to help him to see
that there must be something the matter with him
to think that there is something the matter with us
for trying to help him to see that
we are helping him
to see that
we are not persecuting him
by helping him
to see we are not persecuting him
by helping him
to see that
he is refusing to see
that there is something the matter with
him
for not seeing there is something the matter
with him”

There was certainly something wrong with me, and as it transpires, the thing that was wrong with me was that I (and my inquiring psychologist) thought there might be something the matter with me…