Article about how depression/melancholia makes us human

Mari · 02-23-2008, 03:13 AM

Greetings,
I am not sure if the writer sees depression in a helpful way for the rest of us, but the article gave me something to think about for a minute.

Ever since my old pdoc successfully controlled most of my mixed moods, I live in Depression Valley with an occasional visit to Anxiety City. I know that I move about in the daily world in ways different from people who do not experience serious depression.

People who do not experience depression might actually be missing out on a fundamental human expression of life -- that's how I see it sometimes. They are lucky to escape its clutches, but they are could be missing something that can be profound.

The article mentions the depressions of
-poet Keats,
-music composer Handel,
-painter, Georgia O'Keeffe,
-singer and songwriter, Joni Mitchell

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...,5045522.story

The miracle of melancholia

Quote:

. . . Joni Mitchell confessed in an interview that she has frequently endured long periods of gloom. But she has not shied away from the darkness. Instead, she sees her sorrow as the "sand that makes the pearl" -- as the terrible friction that produces the lustrous sphere.

Given her fruitful struggles with sadness, Mitchell has understandably feared its absence.
"Chase away the demons," she has said, "and they will take the angels with them."

Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.

This of course does not mean that we should simply wallow in gloom, that we should wantonly cultivate depression. I'm not out to romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide.

On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I'm valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene.

I'm offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted.

I'm saying that it's more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie.

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