I don’t often veer into the autobiographical but for various reasons this seems a good moment to violate my own privacy.

Depression is a monster. It is a malignancy of the spirit. It is an embezzler and a daylight thief; it will rob you of your simplest pleasures, and often enough of your livelihood as well. It makes you slow, and it makes you stupid. It can drive you to drink and drugs. It will strain the patience and drain the strength of those who love you the most. It is brutal, seductive and, all too often, fatal.

Many famous, and famously productive, people have suffered from it. Creative types in particular seem prone to depression, and some of them like to consider it if not the defining factor in their art, at least a formative one. Some of them worry that successfully treating it might somehow damage their ability to create or excise some important quality of character. That association with creativity has afforded depression, almost alone among diseases of the mind, something of a romantic distinction.

Well, that’s bullshit. Depression can certainly have a formative impact—people afflicted with it are sometimes, for instance, more than usually empathetic, and there’s no question but that it can color or distort your view of the world—but they function as artists despite the disease, not because of it. It provides material, but there is always material for anyone who pays attention to their surroundings.

I don’t know whether or not it’s actually true that creative people are more susceptible to clinical depression than less creative ones. What is certainly true is that creative people, at least commercially successful ones, are in a much stronger position to make their woes known than are other people. William Styron, the novelist who wrote Lie Down in Darkness and Sophie’s Choice, was able to write and see published Darkness Visible, a memoir of his own depression. That’s an opportunity denied the voiceless. An afflicted plumber may soldier on to the point of collapse and may recover to return to plumbing, but only his friends and family, physicians and colleagues will know about it. He or she doesn’t have a publisher and an awaiting audience, and doesn’t enjoy the latitude afforded an artist.

Unlike neuroses, which I would argue do have considerable creative value, or sadness or anger, depression is not a quirk of the mind or an expression of angst. It is an ugly, debilitating, often crippling and sometimes fatal affliction. There is nothing romantic about it, any more than there is about tuberculosis, the disease so often and so lovingly associated with 18th and 19th century writers such as Poe and Stevenson—among tens of millions of less articulate victims—or cancer.

There remains a general sense that depression, and more so the failure to recover from it, represents a moral flaw, something which should be snapped out of, something that is briefly permissible in the event of a close friend’s or relative’s death, or a business failure or some other visible and easily understood cause, and that when it lingers is the fault of its owner. But there is a difference between being depressed and suffering from the unrelenting clinical depression Styron accurately described as an interminable “howling tempest in the brain.”

Depression taints everything. It affects your ability to enjoy things large and small: books, the weather, food, sex, movies, and worst of all, the company of other people. With every bout of major depression, the likelihood of a subsequent one increases. People who suffer sustained bouts, which can last for years, or who suffer more than one round of it often experience difficulty maintaining relationships of all sorts: familial, friendly, romantic. It promotes an unsupportable degree of self-absorption that can eventually degenerate into a complete lack of interest in anything other than your own pain. That’s no way to run a railroad.

A bit more than 30 years ago, in the throes of what was, even by the somewhat elevated standards of an early 1970′s college milieu, an epic meltdown involving bad wine, cheap liquor, drugs, two simultaneously imploding romantic relationships and a complete failure of intellectual, academic, social and physical nerve that led to a thankfully inept suicide attempt, I was diagnosed by an enthusiastic young Presbyterian psychiatrist as suffering from depression. When he said the word, it came with a capital “D.”

The diagnosis struck me as both revelatory and inevitable. I don’t remember much of my childhood, and didn’t even then when it was barely past, but what I did and do remember was and is largely unpleasant. My earliest memory is of my fifth or sixth birthday, riding in the back seat of my parent’s car through the slushy streets of Buffalo toward someplace I didn’t particularly want to go on a cold, overcast and generally ugly day, and thinking, as I looked out the window, something along the lines of “All of my birthdays will be like this.” The forecast was overly pessimistic but the tone of it still rings true and the recollection of it, as I stood at the bus stop after leaving the psychiatrist’s office on yet another cold and miserable day in yet another cold and miserable city, was enough to make me cry. (In retrospect it was also a strong hint that I should move to warmer climes, which I ignored for another 20 years.)

I said earlier that depression makes you stupid. It isn’t just an intellectual stupidity, although that bothers me as much as anything. It’s a stupidity of judgment, and a physical stupidity. You make bad decisions, large and small, about your life, and your body stops doing what you expect of it. It loses energy and it loses coordination; I was a better than average competitive swimmer, a decent pickup basketball player and a dogged if not very accomplished runner, and among the things I came to recognize as signs of a deepening depression were losing my shot and a half step on defense, being unable to swim as far or fast as usual and struggling to finish my daily runs. Eventually I gave them all up for lost, surrendering an important part of my life along with a valuable indicator of my mental circumstances. It was a bad, but fortunately not irrevocable, decision.

Of course lots of people make bad decisions without benefit of depression, and I’m skilled at doing so even when the illness is under control. But one of the corollaries of depression is that you know enough to know that you tend to make bad decisions, and it carries over into those periods when you’re not significantly depressed; you can, and I did and do, end up questioning virtually every decision of whatever significance. It amounts to a paralysis of will, where it seems safer simply not to decide and deal with the consequences later even though you know on some level that the consequences of failing to decide will probably be worse than the consequences of all but the worst decisions. You’re just too stupid and too scared to act on what you know.

Stupidity: I mean this quite literally. You lose your mind. It stops working the way it’s supposed to work. You lose your vocabulary because you lose your memory for, among other things, words. You lose the ability to concentrate long enough to write or even read. You lose access to your stock of rote social responses: if someone asks you how you are or what you’ve been up to, you can stand there absorbed in a feedback loop long enough to make everyone involved uncomfortable. Depressed elderly people are sometimes misdiagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer’s because so many of the symptoms are the same. You lose your wit and wits.

I’ve been a writer during much of my adult life. I worked for a number of years as a corporate video writer and producer; I’ve done a couple of brief stints as a reporter; I’ve had a few poems published in journals I respect; and, for the past several years, I’ve written for myself on this site. Like any other work, writing becomes ingrained when you’ve done it for a long time. And like any other work, depression can make doing it difficult and sometimes impossible.

No matter what your job, you have to show up to do it. You have to have the physical energy to sustain an effort, and for efficiency you have to rely on what have become almost autonomic functions. Often you have to have at least a minimal awareness of your surroundings in order to keep from hurting yourself or your coworkers. If your work is primarily cerebral—anything from filing to physics—you have to maintain a certain level of focus and concentration. If you can’t drag yourself out of bed, the question is a dead one. If you can, work that may have been rewarding or pleasant or easy or at least tolerable becomes quite the opposite.

A few years ago, I suffered an especially bad episode that saw me sliding downward for perhaps a year and then left me completely incapacitated for months. I lost my job, which didn’t involve much writing but was nevertheless relatively pleasant and uncomplicated, and soon enough my apartment as well. After someone rescued me with some food and a few dollars and the offer of a place to stay, and while I was making a considerably less than half-hearted attempt to clean the place up before leaving, and trying to decide what to keep and what to leave, which was made more difficult by both my condition and the fact that I would be living with a friend in cramped quarters, I came across the boxes holding my demo reels and tapes from my video production career. I sat down to look at some of them, for the first time in years, and to my abject horror I could not imagine having written and produced any of them. They were not just beyond my immediate capacity; I couldn’t understand how I ever conceived the ideas, let alone put them on a page and turned them into videos. So I threw them all out. They seemed like an accusation of something.

Writing has form. You have to know where to begin and to have at least some idea of where you want to end and how you’re going to get there and what you want to convey. You want to get the proportions right. You want it to last. In some respects it’s like building a piece of furniture.

What you don’t want is to look at it from some distance in the future and wonder how you did it and think you can’t ever do it again. I don’t mean to claim an exalted status for anything I’ve written, especially what I’ve done with the blog. It’s mostly reactive, it’s not hard to know where to start, and for the most part it’s not long enough to get lost on the way to the end. But some of it is good and somewhat less of it is very good. When I look at the good stuff, in which I’ve obviously invested considerable thought and craft, I find myself in that position of wondering and fearing. For that reason I don’t often read too far in the past unless I need to for something I’m writing in the present. When I look at the other stuff, that isn’t good, I can see that it’s labored. It’s lumpy and there’s no life to it. There’s no wit. I can see that I was losing my mind and although I usually don’t remember writing it, I know what I was feeling and doing: I was sitting at the computer wondering if I could write something, and I was spending hours on the simplest concepts that when finally converted into words gave me no pleasure and seemed unlikely to do anyone else any good either. And I know there were any number of other things I wanted to write and finally gave up on.

A few months ago I noticed that my memory was going on the blink again. I was forgetting words and other things. For some reason the most aggravating problem was that I couldn’t remember Gregory Peck’s name. To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my favorite movies, and I have always lumped Peck in with a group of his near contemporaries, including Robert Mitchum, Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. When I think of one of them, I tend to think of them all. But Gregory Peck simply vanished. I asked a friend several times who it was had played the lead in the film. I even caught part of a Peck documentary on cable TV when I was visiting with someone, but that didn’t help either; within a week or so, I’d forgotten him again. I ended up Googling the film, writing his name on a post-it note and sticking it on my monitor for a few days.

That seemed to do the trick. It doesn’t work with words, though, because too often when the words go missing, so does the idea you want them to serve. You may as well be an amoeba for all the awareness you have.

That’s horrifying. The whole thing is horrifying. It’s horrible to look back at good things you’ve done and wonder if you can ever do them again. It’s horrible to look back at withered relationships and realize that whether or not you could have avoided doing so, and there’s never any escaping the sense that you could have done, you’re the one who salted the earth.

It’s horrible to feel worthless, or at any rate pointless. It’s horrible to think of suicide as a perfectly reasonable alternative to living, and to find the fixtures of your surroundings of interest primarily as possible instruments of your own death, and to develop an affection for them based solely upon their potential utility. It’s horrible not to want to eat, to find sleep impossible or inescapable. It’s horrible to wake up feeling, for no discernable reason, completely doomed, with your first impulse the one to ram your head into the nearest wall before you’ve even awakened enough to form a thought, however incoherent.

It’s horrible to look ahead, to the extent that you can, and see more of the same waiting.

The one redeeming thing about recognizing where you are, if not how you got there, is that you know you’ve been there before and got out. You rode it out, although that’s perhaps too active a characterization, and you can ride it out again. Presumably.

There are treatments, better living through chemistry, and counseling can help you identify the behavioral and cognitive accoutrements that tend to make a bad depression worse. But different people react differently to the drugs; they’re not invariably effective and in my case, at least, they’ve served more to raise the baseline rather than to eliminate the hazards. Day to day living is better than it used to be, but there’s a continuing conflict in my head—chemical warfare, you might say, with my brain on one side and GlaxoSmithKline’s best alchemists on the other.

I need my brain. It keeps me alive and it can be a lot of fun to play with. But sometimes it seems to want to kill me, and I wish it would just sit down and shut the fuck up.

Thank you all for being here this evening.

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