Phil Quin on depression

Phil Quin blogs:

Since I began keeping tally after an especially bad patch in late 2009, I have been depressed for 50 of the past 62 months — or roughly eighty per cent of the time. There have been two sustained periods of relief, each six months or so in duration, and both thanks to a drug called Venlafaxine, which, seemingly alone among anti-depressants, is effective for me in short bursts.

In a depressed state, my mood, while resolutely low, isn’t static: some days, I can ride a bike or make a phone call or even attend a dinner party as I did this past New Year’s Eve; on others, the notion that I might be able to do any of those things seems preposterous. I am not actively distraught, or at least not often, because that demands too much energy: the master-switch that governs my emotions is shut off altogether. I am a dead-weight, incapable even of sadness. Author Andrew Solomon points out in The Noonday Demon that depression is not the opposite of happiness, but of vitality — the quality that enables most people to bounce back from disappointments, overcome grief, endure hardship, persevere, survive and find joy.

I see vitality in others, everywhere, all the time, and find it astonishing: in young genocide survivors I worked with in Rwanda who can’t wait to bring children of their own into a world that permitted such suffering; in friends of mine, parents of a 13 year old girl taken by cancer, whose dignity and resilience take my breath away; in another friend, recently HIV positive, who gave himself a weekend, but no longer, to mourn his diagnosis. Even in its most mundane forms — the daily striving of most people in most places — this knack for getting up and getting on with it seems no less impressive to me, or any more attainable, than playing a violin concerto or flying an airliner.

After sixteen years overseas, I tried moving home to New Zealand in May 2014. New York, in all its relentless go-getting, had overwhelmed me for the second time in five years, and I partly blamed the growing duration and severity of my depressions to a strange, static, solitary existence amid Manhattan’s buzz and bustle.

I have been persuaded against making consequential life decisions while depressed, so I used the latest Venlafaxine holiday, in early 2014, to weigh the pros and cons of what I felt, at 43 years old, might be my final move. I had always planned to see out my days in New Zealand, and my failure to make it work in New York despite its many ‘on paper’ advantages made me realise I no longer possess the tool to build a life from scratch anywhere else. I have lived at thirty addresses in 20 years; enough is enough.

It was thus by default, and was with comically low expectations (in essence, that time might pass somewhat tolerably until it stops of its own accord) that I arrived to settle back in Wellington in May last year.

For six weeks or so, the Venlafaxine worked its magic while I bought a car, furnished a house and sketched the outlines of a sensible, settled life. I even looked into getting a dog, as profound a commitment as I could fathom, but common sense prevailed: this can’t last, I told myself — and it didn’t.

The entire blog post is sobering reading, and a reminder that depression for many is not something that gets cured. It gets managed, but rarely leaves you alone for good.