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Personal Perspectives
Depression: the New Black?
Depression for real? Or Designer Disorder?
Posted March 29, 2010
Dr Michael Shooter worried it might become a Designer Disorder.
Sorry to bang on about this.
(It's why an editor at the Telegraph once dismissed my CV with a derisive, ‘is depression all this bloody woman ever writes about'.
No actually, I wrote back, and enjoyed his subsequent squirming; somebody ought to have explained the Reply to All facility to him, I giggled.)
But banging on about madness is part of what I do (a recent bio ran AR is a mum of three and freelance journalist who lives in (not so!) splendid isolation in the west of Tanzania. She writes, she walks, she swims. Her primary writing interests lie in Africa, motherhood and mental illness ...)
I began years ago. When it dawned on me, in a perverse sort of Eureka moment, that Depression is part of what defines me. It's been around now for longer than it hasn't. And so I embarked, as one of a myriad measures I have employed since as some muddy prophylaxis, on an extended exercise which put me in touch with all sorts of people who live with madness. Shooter, then president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, was one of them.
I wanted to know what he thought of celebrities who outed their mental illnesses.
He thought, he observed, that there might be a danger there in manipulating a very real, very painful illness into some kind of Designer Disorder. Like a bag from Mulberry. Only not as useful.
And I am reminded of his words this week.
Google, because I thought if I asked it to deliver a daily prompt, it might preserve both Mum and me (in which case it hasn't worked), reminds me daily of the proximity of Depression (thought given current economic climate, sometimes the prompts spell financial doom, not emotional fallout, and sometimes they articulate the passage of a storm, which just goes to show what an inappropriate word we have chosen for a crippling condition if it can be employed in Wall Street and the Met Office alike).
And in the last few days Google has told me Emma Thompson says work saved her from ‘going under' in her battle with depression, British soap star Beverley Callard is to write about her battle with depression, Angelina Jolie suffered from postpartum depression just like Kendra and Katie Price described her own tussle with the Black Dog in one of the four autobiographies she wants to turn into a movie about her life.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that every single one of these woman fabricated their illness; I'm just saying I don't believe they all suffered the condition in its warts-and-all guise: I think some were just briefly disappointed with life, exhausted by fame. I think some might even have dressed a passing miserable phase up as mental illness in order to buff a fading star? After all, we aren't expected to be happy all the time.
I vacillate between feeling irked by red carpet treading film stars and globe-trotting-to-tour singers who wheel their experiences of Depression out (a publicity stunt? a means to garner our sympathies so that we will watch their movies, listen to their albums, buy their really, really badly written books? I can't help being suspicious of their recently evolved compulsion to Raise Awareness) and feeling oddly relieved that somebody, somewhere is highlighting an illness that few acknowledge - despite the fact it is estimated that one in four, one in six, nine in ten of us (depending on who you listen to) will fall prey to it.
Our celeb-idolizing culture means the masses will hear what Ms Price and Ms Wilkinson have to say and as a result Depression might enter its vocabulary, society might begin to absorb a modicum of what it means to be depressed (even if it doesn't grasp it rarely comes designer clad).
See, I'm not sure the Page 3 models and movie stars and pop singers - and subsequently the media - dress the illness quite as somberly as it deserves: Depression doesn't arrive at the Priory attired in immaculate Armani, shod in Jimmy Choos, clasping a Prada (or Mulberry for that matter) handbag whilst coyly hiding behind enormous Gucci sunglasses. It's habitually less attractive: Marks and Spencer sweat pants with washing machine fatigue, a pair of old slippers, scuffed at the toes. No need for a handbag - Depression doesn't get out much and never wears lipstick - instead shaky hands clutch a soggy tissue which alternates between blotting bloodshot eyes and wiping a streaming nose. And it frequently lacks the wherewithal to seek a private consultation, rather the tearful, awkward encounter with a GP who's overstretched and mightn't have the time to sit and listen.
And until they do, dress it down, I fear it won't be taken as seriously as it needs to be.
And yet, and yet ... Depression has been manifest in the minds of the good, the great, the beautiful and the brilliant for millennia; Aristotle observed that "melancholy men, of all others, are the most witty." French novelist, Marcel Proust, thousands of years later, agreed with him, ‘'Everything great that we know has come to us from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and created our masterpieces. Never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it."
And so now, now whilst my connection to my mother is stretched to unbearably-too-silent-tenuous, because a text message requires more interest, more energy than she can summon despite her daughter's far away pleas to Stay In Touch Ma! I have to try especially hard to believe people with shiny lives who profess to having had the gloss taken off by the hard edged experience of Depression really mean it.
