Don't Quit The Day Job:
Writing Through Depression
By Marshall J. Cook
Writer Kurt Vonnegut
Writers as diverse as Norman Mailer, Walker Percy, Neil Simon (and singer-songwriter Paul Simon, too, for that matter), Charles Schultz and Kurt Vonnegut all lived and wrote through paralyzing clinical depression.
Yes, the wise, funny writer who dismissed life’s horrors with a cheery “So it goes,” Kurt Vonnegut, suffered from depression, as did the man who created, scripted and drew Peanuts, with good old Charlie Brown, crabapple Lucy, Bible-quoting, blanket-toting Linus and piano prodigy Schroeder, good old Charles Schultz.
William Styron (Sophie’s Choice, Confessions of Nat Turner) was one of the very brave who not only wrote through depression but wrote about it, in his memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.
Journalist Tracy Thompson also tackled the subject head on and tried to destroy the stigma attached to it in her book The Beast: A Journey Through Depression.
We’re not talking about feeling funky here. We’re talking clinical depression, where life has lost all meaning and savor, where you wake up certain that you’re even more worthless than you were the day before -- if you were lucky enough to be able to sleep at all. You feel horrid now, can never remember not feeling horrid, and will always feel horrid, world without end, amen.
The forever lie is the second biggest fraud perpetuated by a disease that does nothing but lie and cheat and steal. The biggest is that the way you feel is your own fault. If you were only stronger, better, had more faith, weren’t such a mewling little pissant, you would snap out of it, lift yourself up by your spurs, and be happy, damn it!
You don’t hate the disease; the disease makes you hate yourself.
When you’re depressed, doing anything, including deciding what to have for breakfast or bothering to eat breakfast at all, is a bitter battle. But to write? Writing is tough enough for the “sane,” and every writer probably feels at least some self-doubt at times (as in “What you’re writing is tripe, and you should be shot for writing it”). To write while depressed is way beyond heroic.
Yet the list of those who have done so in extensive and includes the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day, cartoonist/writer Jules Feiffer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hermann Hesse (if you’re of a certain age, you’ve read his Siddhartha more than once) and many more.
Poet Anne Sexton’s depression probably led her to commit suicide in 1974. She’s far from alone in seeking what can appear to be the only way out of the agony.
The incidence of depression among writers is high enough to establish a correlation. (If you’re a writer, you’re statistically more likely to suffer from depression than if you aren’t a writer.) Those called to the writing life seem more prone to depression than a random sampling of the populace. But does that establish or even imply a casual link (writing makes you depressed; being depressed makes you write)? Researchers have gone to great lengths to find such a link between mental illness and creativity, but our knowledge of brain wiring and chemistry is still too primitive for anyone to say for sure.
And as my writing friend Lisa points out, not writing makes her depressed. I’m that way, too. I think for many writers, forming words into thoughts and images is a way of maintaining mental stability and some degree of peace in our lives and possibly even staving off depression.