In the NY Times, Daphne Merkin writes about her life with recurrent and "treatment-resistant" depression. A Journey Through Darkness is eloquent and honest, but it offers no convincing explanations as to the origin of her bouts of melancholy. Sometimes she is depressed and then eventually the state passes. In Merkin's account, and in my personal experience, being depressed is a brute fact. It is experienced, not understood. To call it a "journey" or anything else which implies some kind of narrative is misleading. And when a depression passes, it goes with a whimper not a bang:
It was about 4:30, the time of day that, by mid-August, brings with it a whiff of summer’s end. I looked up into the startlingly blue sky; one of the dogs was sitting at my side, her warm body against my leg, drying me off after the swim I had recently taken. I could ...
