Jeremy Clarke
Already a subscriber? Log in
Knowing Professor Wolpert’s luck, I was willing to bet he was one of the few people who don’t suffer a recurrence of their depression either. It was a splendid money-spinning one-off, I thought. More than likely he was depressed, got the T-shirt, dashed off the acclaimed book, made the TV series, then carried on being the well-balanced, successful, handsome embryologist he was before, only slightly richer. Mine had lately come back. All that yoga had been for nothing. When I knocked on Professor Wolpert’s door, I’d been back on Prozac for three weeks. My depression lifted perceptibly, however, when he confided straight away that his was back as well. This was good news. It wasn’t as bad as before, he said, and he felt better as the day progressed — he planned to go jogging later on — but the fact remained that he was wobbling a bit. He methodically made me a cappuccino and we settled down facing one another, the both of us, interviewer and interviewee, depressed and under the influence of our respective Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor antidepressants.
Professor Wolpert was on planet Seroxat, where, he says, he has lately taken up permanent residence; I, as I said, was on planet Prozac. Though belonging to the same solar system, with similar atmospheres, planets Seroxat and Prozac are light years apart. The main cultural difference between the two worlds is that on Seroxat alcohol is strictly prohibited, while on the whackier planet Prozac you can drink away. (It goes well with Stella Artois.) There’s no sex on Seroxat either. On Prozac there’s some, but not much. Homicide rates for both are about the same.
We sat there slowly revolving in our respective depressed orbits, silently regarding each other. One of the strip lights above our heads was buzzing inordinately loudly. My sense of duty obliged me to send out the occasional interrogative radio signal, which I could hear receding across the ether between us. After a generation or two it reached the receiving station in Professor Wolpert’s brain and there was a blizzard of confused radio interference, which abated when my signal’s wavelength was established, and recommenced while the content was being analysed. Then drifting back across the void between us would come a suggested interpretation of my question, followed by a carefully considered response — usually negative.
If he looks back on that first and worst depressive episode, could Professor Wolpert discern anything about it that might be termed beneficial? No. Not at all. Certainly not. Was depression in fact a middle-class illness? No. No, he hadn’t heard that one. Had he read Dorothy Rowe’s book Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison?
Dorothy Rowe’s book does for depressives what Dr Atkins Diet Revolution has done for overweight people. It’s given them a saviour and turned them all into evangelists. Rowe is anti-pills, pro-therapy. (She’s a practitioner of what Professor Wolpert contemptuously calls ‘psychobabble’.) Believing that your depression is basically a chemical imbalance, says Rowe, is a cop-out. Depression is not an illness, still less is it a form of insanity. She says it’s the mental mechanism we employ when our lives don’t measure up to our expectations. She’s ver y acute. When I read her description and analysis of the destructive thought cycle perpetually revolving in the mind of a depressive, I felt like I was standing naked before God with the Last Trump ringing in my ears. She had me down to a T. But lots of books make me feel like that. Linda Goodman’s Love Signs, for example, is one. Allen Carr’s The Only Way to Stop Smoking Permanently is another. But Rowe might be on to something. Depressives, she says, are all too eager to ascribe their own faults to external, uncontrollable events, and faults in other people to a defective personality. It is this kind of faulty reasoning, self-pity and hypocrisy that characterises a depressive’s thinking. We go in for it, she says, because we’ve put a false interpretation on our life story and we find it difficult facing up to the truth. We’re cowards, basically.
Pace Dorothy Rowe, I put my own depression down to a mixture of biological and psychological factors. I was sacked from a sexual relationship; I’d been smoking some horribly strong skunk; my immune system was depressed following a bout of bronchitis; it was beginning to dawn on me I wasn’t immortal; I was anxious about work and money. They don’t look much on paper, do they? Subscribers to the socks school of psychiatry — pull them up and get on with it — will probably laugh. ‘Tell us you are a ten-year-old boy living in Sierra Leone,’ they’ll say, and the RUF come into your village, give you an AK-47 and make you shoot your parents. ‘Tell us that,’ they’ll say. ‘Then you can tell us you are depressed.’
The problem is that on top of everything else depressives have been saddled with a misnomer. The word depression suggests a lowering of mood, or temporary unhappiness. Nearly three million people in this country might be miserable, and even qualify for some of Eli Lilly’s efficacious elixirs. Three times that number might possibly be profoundly unhappy. But the Depression Alliance should examine its terminology before depressing us with statistics. We registered mental nurses were taught to make a distinction if possible between ‘reactive’ depression that had been caused by an identifiable life event and ‘endogenous’ or spontaneous depression, a more severe illness often characterised by delusions and hallucinations. Endogenous depressives lacked the motivation required to commit suicide, but you had to watch them when they started to recover. Commonly they regarded themselves as damned or having committed an unpardonable sin. These terms have fallen into disuse. Today it is fashionable to speak of ‘major depressive disorder’ and a less severe form of depression called ‘dysthymic’ disorder. To say that up to one fifth of the population will be depressed at some time in their lives is meaningless if you don’t define your terms. When I was depressed, I was neither miserable nor sad. The overriding feeling, rather, was of having no emotions at all. I felt cut off from the rest of humanity. Nothing interested me. I wasn’t even motivated enough to contemplate suicide. I felt blank, cut adrift in outer space. I couldn’t move, and I could barely speak. I felt so peculiar that I was certain the origin was biological rather than psychological.
‘No, I haven’t read it,’ said Professor Wolpert, looking over at Dorothy Rowe’s book. I handed it to him and he weighed it in his hand like a greengrocer assessing the weight of a bag of plums. ‘Well, I have, actually. Bits of it. Dorothy’s all right. Friend of mine.’ And then we sat there in depressed but companionable silence for a very long time, like a couple of elderly sisters reluctant to draw the curtains after watching the sun go down because it would break the spell.
Trending
Also in Society
Also by Jeremy Clarke
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in