Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

A word about depression. I’ve experienced melancholy and perhaps one bout of true depression, back in 1975 after my first divorce, but I know the real deal when I see it. As I think I’ve written here before, three of my aunts were manic-depressive. One aunt spent the bulk of her life in a mental hospital, another was in and out and the other starved herself to death. It’s a subtle beast, depression, not at all like the usual presentation of the slump shouldered, gloom faced lump in a chair.

No, the depressed person can push right up against life, engaging in work and social life, perhaps with less energy, but that’s often not noticeable. A mix of obligation, habit and denial can even make a depressed person seem normal, even to those closest to them. Robin Williams worked hard, it said in the paper today, in spite of his depression. This suggests that yesterday might have been different, worse than the other episodes of addiction and depression he suffered, but that may not be true.

This might be the time when the impulsive met the depressive, the time when, just for a terrible moment, the idea of death outweighed the struggle for life. It could be that had someone accidentally interrupted this moment he could still be working today. This is not at all blaming someone else, rather I’m pointing to the deadly consequence of entertaining, even for a moment, the notion of self-extinction.

Yes, existentialists, and I count myself among them, see suicide as a possible affirmative choice in a meaningless world. If life has become unbearable, for whatever reason, the decision to end it needs to be taken seriously, not discounted or abjured. And perhaps especially because I feel this way I’m sensitive to the effects of a momentary mood, a flight of dark fantasy, that may have irrevocable results. These moods are not the same as an existential choice, being overtaken by a feeling of worthlessness or dead-endedness is not a choice; rather, these are situations of capture when the self becomes hostage and even victim to psychic weather.

Moods, as the weather systems of the psyche, have great power and in our interior world we often mistake weather for climate. That is, we take the mood as indicative of a general state of existence, when it is really a thunder shower or a cloud blocking the sun.

We humans, and our lives, are so fragile, so vulnerable.