How art helps us understand depression
If you’re a lay person who wants to understand depression, don’t read textbooks. Go to the writers, the poets and the artists. Films like Melancholia, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, or the classic memoir Darkness Visible by William Styron. The artist is often capable of something which the scientist is not. By taking you to the interior of the depressive experience they bring you closer to that world, allowing you to peak behind the curtain of someone else’s subjectivity. Understanding the world of another is the essence of empathy. First person insight (phenomenology) gets us closer to what it really means to suffer from a mental affliction and removes the abstraction of theory. Consider this passage by William Styron:
It was not really alarming at first, since the change was subtle, but I did notice that my surroundings took on a different tone at certain times: the shadows of nightfall seemed more sombre, my mornings were less buoyant, walks in the woods became less zestful, and there was a moment during my working hours in the late afternoon when a kind of panic and anxiety overtook me, just for a few minutes, accompanied by a visceral queasiness.
He describes his depression as a “dank joylessness” and a “torpid indifference”. That “blowing through my mind like icy gusts of wind” were “formless shapes of doom that I suppose are dreamed of by people in the grip of any severe affliction”. The visceral understanding of Styron’s experience is shot directly into the reader’s mind through the dark beauty of his prose.
Or consider this poem by Charles Baudelaire:
When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit aching for the light
And all the wide horizon’s line is hid
By a black day sadder than any night
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And hearses without drum or instrument
File slowly through my soul; crushed, sorrowful,
Weeps Hope, and Grief, fierce and omnipotent,
Plants his black banner on my drooping skull.
Now compare that with the clinical DSM description of depression:
A. Five (or more) of the following symptoms have been present during the same 2-week period and represent a change from previous functioning: at least one of the symptoms is either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure.
1. Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report or observation made by others
2. Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day.
3. Significant weight loss.
4. Insomnia or hypersomnia.
5. Psychomotor agitation or retardation.
6. Fatigue or loss of energy.
7. Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt.
8. Diminished ability to think or concentrate.
9. Recurrent thoughts of death, suicidal ideation, suicide attempt or planned suicide.
B. Symptoms cause significant distress or impair social, occupational or other important areas of functioning.
C. Episode is not attributable to medical/substance factors.
D. Symptoms cannot be explained by another disorder.
Can you notice the difference in how you feel reading both these accounts? Which one gives you a better understanding of the state of mind? If our goal is to understand, rather than to merely explain, then art can offer us a great deal.
