Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (5 page)

So in the next chapter we shall be getting insights from others who have been through what you are going through, people who have been able to express what it is really like, people who have
understood
. The fact that they were all geniuses should help: they may even give you back your sense of kinship with mankind. As Christine sings to the
Phantom of the Opera
, buried in the bowels of the theatre and frightened to come out because he is a touch disfigured:

Pitiful creature of darkness:
What kind of life have you known?
God give me courage to show you
You are not alone.

3

When words fail you

Knowing that there are millions of other people suffering from depression may not help you personally.
One laboratory animal can only feel its own pain: it doesn’t get any comfort from statistics on all the others. Yet a sense of kinship with people who have gone through the hell of despair and expressed it, and worked through it and triumphed over it, could provide a lifeline to you.

But
who has been there
? Not your average therapist or mental health expert, certainly. Not your psychological or psychiatric theorist and thankfully not most of your inner circle either (‘thankfully’ because you wouldn’t wish this on them). But some of our greatest writers, poets, composers and painters
have
been there. They had an intimate knowledge of personal despair – yet they fought it, vanquished it, used it to drive and enrich their work. When you choose your heroes, consider the courage of people who have done this.

Despair vanquished: the case of Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven reached a crisis of misery and loneliness when he realised he had lost his hearing and that there was no cure. It was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a composer who depended on sound for his inspiration. He was far beyond tears. He thought very carefully of committing suicide and wrote a letter intended for his family telling them in a dignified way how he had failed and intended to give it all up. Yet Beethoven stayed his hand, and went on to write the most triumphant music of his or any life.

Despair vanquished: the case of Etty Hillesum

You may never have heard of Etty, who like Anne Frank kept a diary during the war and lived in Amsterdam. Like Anne she was Jewish and eventually killed by the Nazis. But Etty was 27, fully aware of what was going on, and her diary shows her transformation from utter despair and terror to inspiration and courage. The entry for Thursday, 10 November 1941 reads: ‘Mortal fear in every fibre. Complete collapse. Lack of self-confidence. Aversion. Panic.’ Yet by 1942 she was writing: ‘I am a happy person and I hold life dear indeed … I know just as long as one small street is left to us, the whole firmament still stretches far above it. I’ve died a thousand deaths in a thousand concentration camps … and yet I find life beautiful and meaningful. From minute to minute.’
¹

Despair vanquished: the case of Winston Churchill

Churchill suffered from terrible bouts of apathy and despair. He called it his ‘black dog’. He took to painting not terribly good pictures, building brick walls in his garden and voracious reading to win back his ferocious fighting spirit. Because his ‘lion-hearted nation’ knew that he had done this, they were willing to trust his leadership during the Blitz when their world seemed very dark indeed. Churchill’s wartime speeches are among the most famous calls to courage ever recorded, and they galvanised a nation.

SCIENTISTS ‘DISCOVER’ LITERATURE

One branch of the arts that may be especially useful to you when you are beginning your fightback against despair is literature. Reading is now officially recognised as beneficial to our emotions. If you have never read a classic novel or a powerful poem, you have missed the door to an Aladdin’s cave, one that may give you back your sense of wonder and purpose. There’s growing scientific evidence that enjoying the great works of fiction and verse can make us feel and function better. Mankind has known about this link for centuries – we just haven’t always exploited it.

In January 2009 a Wellcome Collection event in London, promoted jointly by the UK’s Reader Organisation and the medical journal
The Lancet,
highlighted the work
of international scientists and doctors on the health-giving effects of literature. ‘The Reading Cure’ publicised new evidence linking reading with healthful brain changes that promote creativity, empathy and self-belief. This was not just another boffin conference. It may affect the way British doctors treat depression in the future. Professor Louis Appleby, NHS Director of Mental Health, said that this was ‘exactly the kind of work we at the Department of Health want to develop over the next ten years.’

HOW LITERATURE ‘WORKS’

Oh, literature – ho hum, you may think if you have never gone there. Why the fuss? Well, in a classic work of fiction, the reader communes not only with the writer but with characters on their emotional adventures, experiencing and understanding the effects on them. Reading is very different from watching characters in a television series. You are alone with the writer, who is a wordsmith with special insight into language that invokes powerful emotions and ideas. That language is specialised and highly concentrated. In a poem this is signalled by short lines on the page.

In a classic novel you go through what the characters go through, and often there is a hero or heroine whose journey you share. Very important is that your experience with them is resolved and complete – you are not left hanging in the air at the finish, as you so often are with television series and soaps. The writer makes vivid what the characters are thinking and feeling, and the ending makes sense of the whole.

A great novel or poem can throw light on even the most soul-desiccating and turbulent human emotions – including despair itself. Because the words reach into your soul, literature does what television cannot. It stays with you, and the words linger. They have impact. They give you goosebumps. They can make you laugh, or weep with joy. This is why, in scientific experiments monitoring the brains of people reading classic novels, ripples of activation and pleasure are detected by the equipment.

Task 1: A story that grabs you

Even if you’ve never done so before, I want you to pay a visit to my ‘church’. There’s one in every town. It’s not an ordinary church but a Book Church, otherwise known as your local library. Go in and have a look round: shelves full of these strange collections of bound pages, spines facing outwards. Not technological, yet they tower above you. Some of them were written hundreds of years ago. Some weigh a ton.

Sense the atmosphere. Libraries are quiet, because most people respect the thousands of books that are housed here and speak in a whisper. In one section there are computers, but you won’t be going on those. What you are about to do can’t be experienced on a computer, or on the Internet. You have to be in this place to get the ‘feel’ for it.

I want you to walk over to the shelves marked FICTION, and without paying particular attention to the spines, or the authors’ names or titles, take down a book and open it in the middle. Read a paragraph or two. Put the book back on the shelf and repeat this three times so that you have looked inside four books. This is exactly how generations of children have discovered the joys of reading for the first time. You still see adults doing it in bookshops, on stations and at the airport. Dip in and look at the words till you find the ones you want.

One of those books will catch your attention, because of the language, or the dialogue, or the story. Look at the spine and remember the title, and the name of the author. You can even check it out for free if you like. Take it home and find out what happens.

THE ‘BLUE DEVILS’

Famous writers achieve their fame because they entertain us with their imaginative ideas, and because they put into words what we all feel. One literary genius who famously suffered from despair was the so-called Northampton Peasant Poet John Clare, who was stricken by the ‘blue devils’ yet produced over ten thousand pages of manuscript, an outpouring of passionate observation of nature, both in poetry
and prose, the sheer volume and immediacy of which is unrivalled anywhere in English literature. He wrote:

I am – yet what I am – who cares, or knows?

My friends forsake me like a memory lost;

I am the self-consumer of my woes:

They rise and vanish, an oblivious host

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am; I live, like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteem,

And all that’s dear, e’en those I love the best

Are strange – nay, they are stranger than the rest …

EXERCISE

•
Look at John Clare’s words. He wrote them when he was consigned to a mental asylum and had lost everything. He keeps saying, again and again,
I am
. Why?
 

•
Some of the words are ‘archaic’ – like ‘e’en’ and ‘nay’, but most of them convey exactly the same sense to us as they would have done to Clare 150 years ago.
 

•
They are stark. They repeat the same thought, and they are insistent and driven (‘into the nothingness … into the living sea’). Is the writer saying things in different ways because he hopes finally to be understood in one of them? Or is he trying to make sense of very painful ideas and feelings that threaten to overwhelm him?
 

•
Some expressions are unfamiliar to us, like ‘love’s frenzied throes’. What does he mean by that?
 

•
Look at the style. Why are the words written in short lines on the page? If you wrote them out like prose, as though they were a story in a newspaper, would they seem like ordinary everyday language to you? If not, why not?
 

•
Why do poets often use rhythm and rhyme? Do the words sound like an incantation or a song? Is there any other reason?
 

•
Poets have talked about ‘the language of the heart’, meaning words that spring from the imagination rather than analytical intelligence. Is this ‘the language of the heart’? 

Task 2: Finding the right words

While you are in the Book Church, go over to the section marked POETRY. If you can’t find it ask at the desk. There is one. Try to wipe the look of embarrassment off your face because the word ‘poetry’ is not macho or modern, and because you may associate it with old-fashioned birthday cards, or doggerel written by talentless twits in love.

Real poetry is simply this: very powerful condensed language. The German word for poetry is Gedichte, which actually means ‘condensation’ or ‘concentration’. The words are locked together very tight. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that in a truly great poem, to change just one of the words would wreck the whole, so carefully have they been chosen. A lot of the words carry more than one meaning, so that when you read them the first time, you may only pick up on one. Read again, and you’ll notice more.