Beneath the Skyline

Everyone Else Is Doing Perfectly Fine

Deborah Good

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It can be hard to get up in the morning. This is sometimes because I have a cold, because I am imprisoned by a heavy pile of blankets, or because I must pay the consequences for unruly late-night activities (like studying, ahem).

But sometimes it is hard to get up in the morning because life does not feel worth getting up for. George, Colin Firth’s character in “A Single Man,” says in the movie’s opening lines that “for the past eight months, waking up has actually hurt.” He goes on to describe the terrible drowning feeling that has him contemplating ending it all.

I am occasionally visited by dark spells. My spells are usually brief and relatively mild, and I know my battles are small compared with those of friends who fight regularly with more vicious inner-beasts. Yet regardless of how long and intense they are, the life-valleys we walk through—my friends, myself, David the Psalmist, Rumi the poet, and just about everyone else I can think of—can knock the wind out of us, sometimes quite literally, and leave us panting and thirsty.

We often label it tidily with three syllables: Depression. While mild to serious forms of depression and other mental illnesses are very common in this country, we often bring them out of hiding only in our therapists’ offices, the privacy of our homes and cars, and conversations with our closest friends, if we share them at all.

Because we keep so quiet about our bouts with life’s heavier sides, it is easy to think that while we struggle solitarily—with our minds, our marriages, our small and large despairs—most everyone else is doing perfectly fine.

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There are many ways to cope with sad and hopeless days, and days where the mind runs off without our permission. John O’Donohue, a late philosopher and poet, spoke several years ago at a conference I attended. “I always think that the primary Scripture is nature,” he told us, “and that if you attend to nature, you never go too far wrong.”

Perhaps this is why, on bad days, I have often found myself sitting by Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, watching the ripples, the geese, and the elegant strokes of crew teams as the sun turns everything shades of orange and pink.

O’Donohue went on. “I knew this person one time who had fierce trouble with her mind,” he said. “And she said to me that she brought a stone into her living room and when she’d feel her mind begin to go, she would focus on the stone because, she said to me, there is huge sanity in stone.”

That image has stuck with me. Coping with serious mental illness is clearly a different thing than my occasional trips to the river, and I don’t mean to make an unfair comparison. The story, though, is remarkable and holds a lesson for all of us: The natural world has much to offer—in its beauty, its unconditional acceptance of us, and, yes, maybe even in stone—as we find our way through.

I have a variety of coping strategies when faced with my mini-bouts of depression, including trips to sit by the river, but I have found that a candid acknowledgment to a friend is one of my most foolproof. “It was a bad head day,” I say, meaning that I had endured a barrage of my own self-criticism throughout. Earlier in the week, the same friend sent me an email with a similar confession: Had to take about a half hour and silence the mean voices in my head at the end of the day, she wrote, so that I could sleep.

We tell each other these things because we feel less crazy that way. Perhaps we think that the critical voices in our heads will learn to hush up if we broadcast to others their secret existence. These simple, honest conversations when I am feeling awful help me feel cared for and less alone.

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“If we were better friends, we would need fewer shrinks,” I remember a professor saying to us, a classroom of undergrads, in our Introduction to Counseling course. His point was that even if we did not go on to be counselors, the skills we learned in this 100-level course could serve us well in our friendships. And he may be right that if we took better care of one another, we would need professional help less often. But even the best friendships are not always enough. Sometimes we do need shrinks. And sometimes we need medication, too.

One of my very best friends “has and will likely always have this unmerciful fight to fight, called bipolar,” to quote the words I wrote in my journal last year, angry about it. I admire Russell greatly, not only for the ways he has learned to live with his illness but for his willingness to talk about it—and to make someone drive him to the hospital when he knows he has hit deeply shaky ground.

Russell has worked with mentally ill clients as a social worker and raised money for NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness). He actively fights the stigma of mental illness. And he has opinions about medication. He took the issue on in a piece he wrote for an organizational newsletter, quoted here with his permission.

There has been an ultra-liberal backlash against medications and the companies manufacturing them, and rightly so. . . . Many along this line of thinking believe that alternative therapies are enough to quell the storm of mental illness. Proper nutrition, exercise, sleep, and routine are all things that must be present to help those of us who are afflicted with mental illness, and they really do. But sometimes it’s not enough. . . . A large majority of the SDMI (severe and disabling mental illness) population need the chemical supplement. I need the chemical supplement. . . . Walk a mile in our shoes; you’d be saying something different.

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Mental health is, of course, a field of academic study, complete with experimental-design research and volumes upon volumes of journal articles and books. In addition to the academics, there are the practitioners—clinical social workers, professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, clinical psychologists, counseling psychologists, and psychiatrists. It can be heard to keep track.

Yet while one might study Erikson and Freud, and write a paper comparing cognitive-behavioral and psychodynamic approaches, I think just about everyone in the field will agree that much of mental health remains a mystery (interesting that a few years ago, I wrote something very similar about our physical health and cancer).

Therapy, like life, is art as much as it is science.
It seems that a good place to start in removing the stigma from depression and mental illness would be to simply acknowledge that not all of us are happy all of the time.

My great-great grandmother, who did an exceptional job of handling a farm and raising ten children, had a fatal fight with depression. She took her own life in 1918, the year my grandfather was born. He himself did not learn of the suicide until years later. “Suicides in those days were the worst thing that you could do as a person,” he explained to me in an interview a few years ago. “Taking your own life was a mortal sin.”

Though times have changed, it’s a story that is not told often in our family. I sometimes wish it were. If I had known that depression was part of life, and maybe even part of my family tree, I would have felt less alone and abnormal at points along the way. Now I know she comes, but I have also learned that she always eventually packs up and goes. 

In the meantime, whenever she’s around, I make my trips to sit by the river. I write, listen to music, and read poetry, which I have often found to be more honest about these things than the rest of us are. I am so distant from the hope of myself, writes Mary Oliver. The universe is dust. Who can bear it? adds Jane Kenyon. I go for runs and work on building a relationship with a therapist. And I let my friends know when the world has become dark in my head, because I feel less crazy that way.

That is how I get through. What about you?

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a research assistant at Research for Action (www.researchfor action.org) and author, with Nelson Good, of Long After I’m Gone: A Father Daughter Memoir (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2009). She can be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com.