Took the huge dog for a walk in a frisky cold wind, glittering with dew and sun brightness, stopped to talk with a pleasant-faced retired lawyer who lives on the other side of the village. In the course of our conversation he told me he doesn’t let his wife sit up late reading because it bothers his nightly routine and, further, that he doesn’t let his wife go shopping unless he has approved the shopping list. Fortunately the dog began barking at a squirrel and I had an excuse to dash off. Controlling the person you love, that age-old temptation. I hope his wife sneaks chocolates onto her shopping list and lolls around reading trashy novels and gobbling up chocolates when the head of the household is not at home. How I detest bullies, from the Taliban to self-righteous evangelicals.
Just read a review of Charles Lawlor’s From Melancholia to Prozac. We still understand so little about depression.
Causes become irrelevant because they are so much harder and more expensive to know about and to treat. Humoral imbalance, a rackety childhood, who cares? If you have five of the designated symptoms every day over a two-week period, a doctor can confidently diagnose depression and medicate it.
Some people claim (as Freud would) that this has resulted in the pathologising of normal sadness. Even grief is now subject to a time-limit. DSM-V, due out in 2013, will have a new condition called “complicated grief disorder”, which allows doctors to treat excessive mourning (designated by a symptom list) as depression within a few weeks of a bereavement, and puts a limit on normal mourning at six months. It isn’t just that we want certainty, we seem to have come to the conclusion that feelings of sadness or a low mood are not just intolerable but actually abnormal.
With the autumn comes melancholy, even out here in the heat and aridity. As a child I noticed how my moods tilted downwards and darkened as the summer ended. Not a bad sadness, just a sense of regret and loss, the leaves falling from the trees, the evenings chillier, the folding away of swimsuits and cotton shorts and tops, standing on a hilltop to watch the swallows and swifts flying high overhead on their long journey back to Europe. And wild geese too, reminding me of an old legend, the Children of Lir who were turned into wild swans and the sister who sat weaving shirts for them of starwort. She gives them the shirts and the swans become human brothers again, except for the brother who has a sleeve missing on his shirt and must live with a swan wing and not an arm or hand. Not enough magic to go around.
Another summer over. Another basket of Dimock Red pears, old orchard trees planted with seeds brought all the way from Gloucestershire. Not commercially sold any longer, but a beautiful scarlet-tinted hard pear good for cooking. Outdoors the wind is blowing across the fields like a door slamming against the house, a great smacking wind all the way from the Karoo, cold as well as dry., the smell of bleached grasses and possible rain.
Sheila Heti for The Believer, talking with Joan Didion:
BLVR: Do you think if you hadn’t written, hadn’t been a writer, could there have been some completely other—
JD: Oh, I wonder. I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. And when I was out of school and living in New York and working for a magazine, I actually went out to the Scripps Institute, which is now UC San Diego, but then it was just the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, run by the University of California, and I asked them what I would have to do to become an oceanographer. And basically they said I would have to go back to high school, you know. I hadn’t taken any of the science courses that would enable me to take the science courses that I would need to take in order to go to… any place. So I abandoned the idea of being an oceanographer, but I can see myself still as an oceanographer, if I could get to that point.
BLVR: Does it seem like a happier life?
JD: A happier life? I don’t know. I’ve liked being a writer.
BLVR: It’s a different way of going underwater.
JD: It’s a way of going underwater, yes. Well, I’ve always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
Oh dear, if we start medicating normal grief – it is a sad state of affairs – one might even say it is depressing!
The idea that grief should last only six months and then need medication shocked me so much — and I dislike the pathologising of emotional states. Fortunately many GPs and therapists are more skilled and have plenty of common sense.
So much to comment on–I hope that the wife of the attorney stands up for herself, tells him to back off, and buys what she wants. Such control is the death of love and trust and spirit.
Wow–Joan Didion wanting to be an oceanographer. And Scripps is a wonderful place, filled with top notch people. I’m glad that she had that fascination. So many, though, think that oceanography is about dolphin watching or Scuba diving. Sometimes it is endless hours of diving deep into millions of data points, trying to make sense of it all. Still it was a great career for me.
Thought you would like that Syd! I am always intrigued by the passions people follow and what interests they combine.
And yes, I hope she speaks up for herself, I hope he realises what he is doing, I hope the dynamics change. But it isn’t my problem at the end of the day, nothing I can do.
I like the part about writing being like “going under water” I can relate to that.
Hi there,
I find it interesting that you bring up the DSM V since I was talking about it with a neurosuregeon colleague whose father was responsible for the first DSM back in the 1950′s when he was the chairman of the APA. One of the motivations for the manual was the political situation of the time with the way Stalin and the communists were politicizing mental diseases. So the APA (American Psychiatric Association) wanted diagnositic criteria that could be accepted world wide to avoid people being sent to the gulags as “political mental deviants”, a diagnositic category that does not exist in the DSM.
One way to fight intolerance and injustice.
Bob