As I think about World Suicide Prevention Day, it’s in a fortnight, I can’t help but wonder how effective that initiative will or won’t be, and I’m drawn to recall Elizabeth Wurtzel’s dark and compelling work, her experience of depression. The World suicide Prevention Day site is rudely smiley and brightly coloured, it almost chuckles at me. The site irks me, as does the notion of a prevention day. Why link something that can’t always be conquered in weeks, months or even years with ‘a day’. Isn’t that a bit of whack for those who can be gripped with depression for endless periods? The notion of WSPD is all out of kilter, to prevent suicide wouldn’t we need to address depression first? I do acknowledge that depression is not the only cause of suicide but the major one.
Elizabeth Wurtzel doesn’t pin down a cause of depression, what she does is describe the burden, it’s overarching breadth and seemingly bottomless depth of the affliction. I believe understanding depression and people afflicted by depression, people Wurtzel describes as the walking waking dead, a greater priority than suicide prevention. To me, prevention is not a position to start from, it sets up an adversarial (helping?) relationship between preventer and the suicidal. Ready for battle? Building understanding is my preference.
This is one of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s descriptions of what depression can look like from the inside:
“… Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.
In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake.
That’s the thing I want to make clear about depression: It’s got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal — unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature’s part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.
And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he’ll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too.”
Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir, Elizabeth Wurtzel
A dear friend told me the same thing, gradually and then suddenly, that was her experience. In retrospect I can see the same in Mottsu and how he lived and left, it helps me to know that. That simple statement does more to encourage understanding and support depression than any number of world-wide prevention days.
