Decoding the Darkness
What if our depression was trying to tell us something?
This is You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Recordings are made available for those who can’t make it on the night. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.
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In the midst of a depression, I tried to get hold of some pills. This was maybe fifteen years ago. Farrah and I had moved back from Sydney, Australia to Sydenham, South London. We’d swapped a view of the clinking boats and glittering waters of Double Bay to a view of some wheelie bins and a row of signs that warned our road was a ’High Risk Zone’ for car break-ins, and we should always take our valuables with us. The council had fastened the bright yellow and red notices halfway up each lamp post so that, when we opened the curtains of our first floor flat, they were at perfect eye level, parading all the way up and down the street like the shit town flags of a shit town. On our first week back we watched Crimewatch and one of the crimes was ‘Sydenham Murder’.
During our four years in Australia, I’d worked as a longform journalist for the prestigious broadsheet supplements: The Weekend Australian, Good Weekend, QWeekend, the (Sydney) Magazine. But now I was back home and I had no work and I had no money. After a few weeks, an ex-girlfriend gave me some dayshifts at the magazine she edited, a title they gave out free at train stations called Shortlist. It was kind of her, an act of charity.
Shortlist paid about £130 a day, enough, but not enough. I’d go into the office every morning smiling and chatting, but began to feel zoomed-out and unreal. Since I’d left Sydney, my life had become a source of pain. It was as if my mind was pulling me away from it so I could experience it from a safer distance. There was something protective about this, like a cushion had been placed between myself and the exterior world. But this pulling-away was not rational or intellectual in nature, it was more like being drugged. Reality lost its rich, deep dimensionality and its sense of possibility and the future, and became reduced to its narrowest dimensions. The people around me were little more than a series of movements and words, mechanical and shallow, and I could have no meaningful impact on them, or anything else. Life became drained of importance. It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered.
My state of mind began to feel dangerous, so I went to the doctor to ask for some pills. The waiting room was filthy, lined with plastic chairs, the carpet worn and stained, ceiling tiles bruised with damp, walls apparently made from chipboard. It felt like I was back in one of the Guatemalan barrios I’d reported on when I’d had a career, not a medical surgery in one of the world’s wealthiest cities. When my ten minutes with a GP arrived, I explained how I’d been feeling and that I wanted anti-depressants. “Why don’t you first try getting out a bit more and having some fun?” he said. “Why don’t you try going to the pub?”
I didn’t have the energy to argue. I got up and went home. It was fine. It didn’t matter anyway.
For a long time, experts believed the most likely cause of depression was a chemical imbalance in the brain. Beginning in the 1950s, scientists initially pinned the blame on the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, before moving to serotonin, which led to a generation of antidepressant medications, most famously Prozac. Psychiatrists believed they were treating patients who had serotonin deficiency, rather than problems arising from the story of their lives. In the 1980s, psychiatrists such as Nancy Andreasen argued “these diseases are caused principally by biological factors and most of these reside in the brain.” A 2006 article in the New York Times profiled the author of “a groundbreaking paper” that said “chemical imbalances in the brain must account for mood swings, which pharmaceuticals could correct, a hypothesis that proved to be right.”
Today, it’s widely agreed that the chemical imbalance theory is an over-simplification. Some academics have gone further, theorising that mental disorders such as depression might actually have an evolutionary purpose. On its surface, this seems unlikely. How could mental disorders have a purpose, when they cause such unhappiness?