Mum and I are in the car, I am driving. She is well. It means her tongue is not tied by Depression's paralyzing lethargy.
‘What do you think of the word, anyway', I ask, ‘of the word of depression?'
It's not big enough, Mum says simply.
She's right. It's not. Big enough. Not big enough to wholly capture the swallowing magnitude of the illness it is supposed to describe. Nor does it resonate with the echoing desolation it ought to.
Depression.
Almost every other word the Thesaurus throws out better describes the collapsing of the spirit, - the abandonment of energy, enthusiasm, joie de vivre - more concisely more aptyly, more sensitively than the one we have chosen: despair, hopelessness, dejection, misery. They'd all do a better job. And none of them bear the dangerous everyday connotation borne of flippant, careless, exhausted use.
I'm so depressed!
People who say that aren't. Depressed.
depression is Monday morning. depression is what you feel when your jeans are too tight, when your inbox at Outlook Express is empty, when somebody ate all the chocolate (the lower case d - for reference, for later - is not a lax use of my shift key).
Lewis Wolpert, in his wonderful book Malignant Sadness suggests that the illness ‘deserves some new and special word of its own, a word that would encapsulate both the pain and the conviction that no remedy will ever come. We could do', he writes, ‘with a better word for this illness than one with the mere common connotation of being ‘down''.
Hippocrates believed that the crippling despair that characterizes Depression was the result of producing excessive black bile. There isn't, of course, any such thing as black bile, however the words melan (black) khole (bile) conspired to lend melancholy and from then on the word was used regularly in literature: by Keats, who composed an ode to it, by Burton, by Chaucer.
Modern day writers grieve its passing. William Styron, who describes his experience of the illness in Darkness Visible feels obliged to ‘register a strong protest against the word depression'. He believes that ‘'Melancholia" better articulated the 'blacker forms of the disorder' and regrets that it has been ‘usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe a rut in the ground or economic decline', (I agree: my Google news alerts for ''depression'' leave me in no doubt as to the state of global economic collapse but offer little new insight into the disintegration of the spirit, soul, psyche). ‘A true wimp of a word for such a major illness', he concluded.
He has Swiss-born psychiatrist, Adolf Meyer to blame, a man who, in Styron's opinion, had ‘a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English' and was, as a consequence, 'unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering depression as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease'. As a result, since its introduction by Meyer in 1905, ‘the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control'.
I cannot come up with anything better than Depression (with a capital D - and here I strike the shift key and the d down together hard, purposefully: D). Not only because the capital letter elevates it to superior noun (proper noun, proper name, proper illness) but because Depression, despite the fact it saps the human spirit to the point of non-existence, always has a presence. Like a person. It is impossible not to be influenced by it, to ignore it (even if you try). But it is imperative to recognize it as something separate from the individual it invades and to whom it clings, grisly parasitic in its appetite and health invading, energy compromising, life-jaundicing nature.
So, no, depression isn't big enough. But promote the word to Depression, emphasize the capital D with deadening finality, drag out the double ss's with a sinister hiss and you have the sinking finality that accompanies the slow, hoarse whisper of air as it escapes a brightly colored balloon.
