Often, those who have never experienced depression believe it is a fleeting thing, one with no power to destroy the natural flow of a person’s life.
They are wrong.
In Shades of Blue: Writers on Depression, Suicide, and Feeling Blue, editor Amy Ferris has gathered stories of depression in a book that illustrates the emotional, psychological, social, and even physiological tolls depression can take. The book aims to normalize the experience of depression and suicidal thinking and enlighten the reader about the day-to-day experiences of what often feels like a deep, dark pit.
Ferris begins by recounting her own experiences with depressed mood, feelings of anhedonia, lack of motivation, and suicidal ideation. “I was young, much younger and so sad,” she writes. “I was miserable and unhappy and felt all alone in the world. I felt like nobody knew what it was like, this damp darkness. Everything was pitch black. It was dark and lonely, and the best way I can describe how I felt at that time in my life was like being in the middle of a forest, and it’s eerily dark, and you don’t know which way to turn so you take baby steps. Teeny steps because you don’t know where you are, and you can’t see anything, and you don’t know how to find your way out, and reach out for something to touch, but it’s not there.”
According to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, depression affects about 14.8 million adults. In Ferris’s case, she admits that she has always thought of suicide as a way out of her pain. Some days, she writes, “I wanted to die” — though other days, she wanted to live, and with passion. “And then what I found out, I found out that you gotta save your own life,” she writes. “Because the person holding your hand, they can get really tired.”
As a therapist, for many of my child and adolescent clients, I refer to depression as dark-colored glasses. When you are depressed, you can never quite see the truth, that there is hope. You can become numb to life and begin to lose the ability to feel present, engaged, or included. The human mind just simply checks out.
But the wonderful thing about writers who create books like this is that although they share the pits of darkness with readers, they also share the insight and hope that they have developed over time. They share healing words of inspiration that can motivate readers to make a necessary change, hold on to hope a little longer, seek true purpose, and live life more fully.
Despite the depression, despite the suicidal urges, despite the self-injurious thoughts and behaviors, the writers of these essays validate what may be the reader’s experience and educate them while also motivating them to find purpose. And for readers who have not been depressed, the writers show what it is really like.
Each essay provides a different vantage point. One writer, Beverly Donofrio, shares her ordeal of becoming a convicted felon who feels trapped by the confines of poverty, lower socioeconomic status, and being the (formerly) teenage mother of a young boy who needed her. She recounts her struggle with depression amid very tough experiences.
Overall, Ferris has compiled a multitude of touching, powerful stories of difficulty tinged with hope. Aside from some choppy sentences that may distract the reader, this is a worthwhile collection for mental health professionals and lay readers alike.
Shades of Blue: Writers on Depression, Suicide, and Feeling Blue
Seal Press, September 2015
Paperback, 256 pages
$16
from Psych Central http://ift.tt/1ZxNcyG
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