If there's anything positive to be extracted from the death of Robin Williams, it's that people are talking about the subject of Depression. I'm no expert but I do know it's a problem that needs to be recognized, and not just every few years when someone you wouldn't think would kill themselves kills themselves. Folks who have it, mild or severe, need to know that there is help out there for them and it isn't a sign of personal failing to seek it. If someone wanted to build a lasting tribute to Mr. Williams, I would think a good way would be to see that the topic continues to be addressed long after the news of his passing scrolls off our blogs and from our minds.
I received this e-mail from someone who asked to be identified only as Mike…
I'm sure you are going to have many people write to you over the next few days about depression, about its insidious effects, the differences between sadness and depression, etc.
I'm writing since I was surprised that you used the exact word that my physician used several years ago to describe my battle with clinical depression — "compartmentalize." It was this exact thing that I could no longer do. For me depression reared its ugly head as something that prevented me from being rational. It hit me in such a way that even trivial issues consumed me.
When I finally decided to find help, I described to my (new) doctor my symptoms. The first thing he said to me was that I could not "compartmentalize" any longer and that I was describing a very common symptom of depression. I knew there was something amiss, but not in a million years would I have called it "Depression." After trials with different medications, we finally hit on one that helped. Now I have the ability to put all things into perspective — to "compartmentalize" those feelings and not have them consume me.
Just like those who have untreated mental illness may not understand that they have an illness, "normal" folks many times can not understand things like Depression. In this case, the exact thing you do to cope was the one thing I couldn't — until I received help.
I sometimes tell people that I can't begin to solve a problem unless I can scale it properly and see it as precisely the right size of problem. Thinking it's bigger than it is or even smaller than it is does not lead you to a solution.
Often too, it helps me to ask the question, "Why am I depressed about this?" The most dejected I've ever been in my life was a brief period in 1988 when a lady I loved very much died unexpectedly…and I mean unexpectedly. Did not see that one coming. No one did. So I got all sad and upset and down and I stopped writing — I have to be really bad off to not write — and I sat around my house for a few days, talking to no one, staring at bad TV and only eating what I had in my cupboard. Then two realizations, one on top of the other, lifted the whole thing off me.
One came when I was watching a rerun of some old cop show. I think it was a Hawaii Five-O. Someone was planning the funeral of a murder victim and they said, referring to some preparation, "She would have wanted it like this." That phrase hit me like a two-by-four to the kisser. When someone dies, we take it as a sign of respect for the deceased to do what they would have wanted. Well, I realized, my loved one wouldn't have wanted me sitting around all day, eating tuna sandwiches and watching Jack Lord play cop. That was one of the reasons she was a loved one…because she cared so much about my welfare.
Half of my despair went away at that moment and the other half followed soon after.
The liberation I felt over the first part got me to thinking about my general numbness and I got to asking myself, "Why do I feel like this?" The only answer I could come up with went roughly as follows: "Because you lost a loved one and this is how you're supposed to feel when that happens."
I don't often talk to myself but at that moment, I told me, "That's not a good enough reason. No law says you have to feel the way you think you're supposed to feel. And besides, you know you're going to get over this sooner or later. Why not save time and make it sooner? At the very least, you'll eat better." By that evening, I was writing again.
I'm not suggesting this will work for everyone — or even for me in other circumstances — but it's what worked then and there. To get to either solution, I had to step outside my dejection a bit, view it from that vantage point and get a realistic sense of its size. That's a lot of what compartmentalization is all about. You need to know the dimensions of something in order to file it away or begin to solve it. And often I find, when you do get a fix on its specifications, you realize that it's small enough to be ignored and that it will solve itself. Those are the good kind of solutions.