Unholy Ghost - Writers on Depression (Review)

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression

Edited by Nell Casey. Perennial. 299 pp. $13.95 (paper)

Reviewed by Colman McCarthy

Being people of words, the writers in this collection of 23 essays see in the word depression a vagueness that comes nowhere near to a definitional preciseness. It is a word, writes novelist William Styron, a past sufferer of depression, that has “slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.”

For Joshua Wolf Shenk, who writes for The Nation and other magazines, says in his essay, “A Melancholy of My Own,” that depression “is cobbled together of so many different parts, causes, experiences, and affects as to render the word ineffectual and perhaps even noxious to a full, true narrative.”

To David Karp, a sociology professor at Boston College whose illness journey took him into a Massachusetts mental hospital, depression “arises out of an enormously complicated, constantly shifting, elusive concatenation of circumstance, temperament and biochemistry.”

However indefinable, a few facts are known. Depression can be passed along from parents to children. The average onset occurs in the mid-30s. Depressive illness can persist in a person who is loved at home, is professionally successful and ably cared for by a therapist. Symptoms—sleeplessness, rage, self-loathing, panic attacks, suicidal impulses—may be incurable in one person while manageable in the next. The lifetime vulnerability to suicide is between 10 and 15 percent. “At age 55,” Karp writes, “I have surrendered myself to depressive illness. I do not believe I will ever be free of it….I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom.”

Among the essayists are several who, though not sufferers themselves, lived with relatives who were. Nell Casey, the editor and a specialist in mental health journalism, reveals that witnessing the pain of depression brings on a misery of its own, one not eased by Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac or the other medications. At 16, Casey saw her older sister Maud, 18, hospitalized for manic depression. She recovered, but at 29 was institutionalized again, this time committing herself. Sisterly, devoted and kind, Nell Casey writes candidly: “There are always private suspicions in the presence of the depressed: Is this person just spiritually weaker? Am I stronger? Couldn’t it be worse? You have life! You have your health! I wondered if Maud was clinging to her sadness, stubbornly digging her heels in on a life that had become unwieldy and disappointing.”

Creatively, Nell Casey included her sister’s essay, “A Better Place to Live.” Movingly, and with no trace of self-pity, Maud Casey tells a story of gratitude, of her sister, family and friends who offered comfort during the years of hellishness. Her collection of short stories, “Drastic,” will be published this spring.

Several authors are luminaries: Styron, Larry McMurtry, Anne Beattie, Donald Hall, Edward Hoagland. Of these, only Beattie’s essay, “Melancholy and the Muse,” fails. It isn’t about depression. It is a 3,000-word reflection of the writing life. It runs deep with sparkling lines and bracing anecdotes, but if Beattie, a fiction writer, ever sloughed into depression, even for a day, the tale is not told here. This is less her fault than the editor’s, who should have taken a pass and saved the essay for an anthology of writers on writing.

Despite depression being a major mental illness, only a few of the writers here recall their dealings with psychiatrists. These were positive, mostly. “Unholy Ghosts,” a work of lasting value that deserves a special place in the fields of both literature and medicine, would have been even stronger with an essay or two by psychiatrists who had the disease. An introduction by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is here but it is only a welcoming hand opening the door to the essays inside. What Jamison endured during her own tumult of manic-depressive illness is told stirringly in her memoir, “An Unquiet Mind.”

The title--“Unholy Ghost”—is taken from a poem by Jane Kenyon, of whom her husband Donald Hall writes. The title is something of a stretch. What is unholy about a disease? Can a holy disease exist? A better title would have been “Unwelcomed Ghost.”

Along with offering medications or clinical therapy, psychiatrists should consider asking depressive patients to read the essays here. One of the reported terrors of the illness is feeling that the pain is unique to you and no one else has ever bit hit so hard.

All of that is powerfully dispelled by writer after writer. Survival is possible. Normalcy can be rewon. Health can be restored. Unintentionally perhaps, the authors offer themselves as proof—living proof, the best kind.

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace, 4501 Van Ness St., Washington DC 20016. He is the adjunct faculty at Georgetown University law school, the University of Maryland and American University, His book “I’d Rather Teach Peace” is due in April.