Reading and Writing Depression

On the Rumpus, Sam Twyford-Moore has a revealing essay about depression.

From the essay...

I became infatuated with Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, a fictionalised take on the life of poet and manic depressive Delmore Schwartz, shortly before I was officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Reading the book for the first time at 21, I took Martin Amis’ quip that Humboldt ‘is a very dangerous book to read in your twenties’ literally, so much so that the book itself became an evil omen and whenever I saw it lying around the house – hard to miss, an original Viking hardcover in gaudy bright yellow – it taunted me to open its pages and indulge in its vices. When the titular Humboldt tells Charlie Citrine (Saul Bellow’s barely disguised alter-ego) that he needs a drink before bed to quiet his thoughts, I feared for my sanity, imagining my own ideas spinning like a tornado inside my head.

My psychologists were always beguiled by the language I’d adopted from Humboldt and other depression novels. I’d say I’d been in a funk for three months, for example, to which the psychologist would giggle: ‘I’ve never heard that word used for depression before.’ What have you been reading, I thought, just the textbooks? Through my own reading I felt I’d come to know as much about depression and psychosis and all the rest as they did. I knew the details so well that I sometimes wondered if my manic depression were not, in fact, a fiction.