The Faces of Depression in Literature

List of Contributors

Preface: From Boredom to Depression (From Philosophy to Psychology)

Josefa Ros Velasco

Harvard University, Cambridge

“You get depressed because you know that you’re not what you should be.”

Brian Hugh Warner (Marilyn Manson)

The Long Hard Road Out of Hell (1998)

I had never been interested in depression academically speaking, or so I thought. Depression was, for me, a state of anguished sadness—whose roots or reasons were sometimes explicable and sometimes nonconceptualizable¹—generally experienced as a constant whisper and, from time to time, more intensely and painfully. I know it because I suffered from such a state throughout my entire life: a permanent restlessness. I am convinced that this was what prompted me to study philosophy at the age of 17 to better understand myself. I never considered the option of enrolling in psychology and much less in psychiatry or something like that. I did not appreciate any connection between that state and the mental health sciences, even though I had seen a therapist, on two or three occasions—when the intensity curve reached unbearable peaks—who gave me tablets for combating depression that, I have to say, made me feel much better—I do not remember the name of that drug, it sounded like … I-don’t-know-nine. Philosophy did not help me at all. On the contrary, it increased my malaise to astronomical levels. When I hit rock bottom—I knew it because melancholy turned into paranoia and, in a short run, I developed an exaggerated arachnophobia—one of my last visits to a mental health professional—this time a psychiatrist—at the age of 22 concluded with the diagnosis of an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) with depressive symptoms. I went straight to the pharmacy—as I would have to do every month for the next few years and, as I later realized, for the rest of my life—to buy my Aremis;² this time I remember the name. Except when I had the brilliant idea, a couple of years ago, of stopping the treatment—coinciding with a professional promotion that took me to Harvard University, in Massachusetts, to work on my subject of research: boredom—I have not experienced such a time of collapse or crisis again. In those days, I had such a wrong time, and it took me so long to rediscover a zest for life after resuming my treatment—which, by the way, took more than a month to arrive in the United States—that I have never cast doubt again on the fact that my proneness to depression had at least something to do with the mental health sciences—or maybe I had become addicted to pills. However, at that moment, I did it, and I argued that the melancholy that had made Kierkegaard or Sartre so special had to be released. In an attempt to accept and self-affirm myself with my multiple defects, I was convinced that the state I called—and also other people called—depressive was part of me. I remember myself that summer deciding to open the Pandora’s Box that my Aremis so carefully guarded. My doctoral work on boredom was the culprit.

After recognizing my mistake and regaining the strength to continue working on my research on boredom—down-to-earth—I decided to adopt another approach to boredom: I began delving into the philosophical, theological, and literary narratives throughout the history of the West in which boredom had been understood as a phenomenon related to health to clarify the path by which it had come to become a matter of psychological and psychiatric interest in the 20th and 21st centuries. To that task, I dedicated my time in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Moreover, once again, I came across the couple boredom-depression. However, this time, it was not just a promising partner for contemporary researchers but one of those lifelong marriages in which one of the spouses does not go anywhere without the other, and only death separates.

Boredom and depression went hand in hand from the texts of antiquity to those of the most immediate present. Suffice to mention the biographies of Gaius Marius and Pyrrhus of Epirus, in Plutarch’s De viris illustribus (see optionally Toohey 1987, 1988, 2004—especially the first one, “Plutarch, Pyrrh. 13: άλνς ναντιώδης”—and also Ros Velasco 2017, 2021). Notably, this union began becoming more evident from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, when acedia started to merge in melancholy (see, at the beginning, Ponticus, according to Hernán Vázquez 2015; Cassian, from the point of view of Peretó Rivas 2010, 2011, 2013 [in this last work we can see also the association of boredom and depression in Hugues of Miramar], 2014, 2017; Saint Thomas, as Echavarría stated in 2005 [see also, again, Peretó Rivas 2011, 2014]; or, more generally, Márquez 2001 and Piovano 2016, to name a few—by the way, many disagree with this thesis [see Aguirre Baztán 1994; Rovaletti and Pallares 2014; and especially Forthomme 2000, 2003, among many others]. With regard to its secularization into melancholy, see Bunge 1999; Bäumer and Carm 2011; Eisenberg 2013; the list of works is endless)³ and later during Romanticism and the birth of Existentialism, with the ennui and the mal de vivre (see, to choose some cases among millions, the novels by Goethe, Flaubert, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy—these are my favorite examples). In this sense, the Greek terms aegritude (θλίψη, aegritudo) and black bile (μέλαινα χολή, melaina chole), the Latins acedia and taedium vitae, Renaissance tristitia and melancholia, the modern ones spleen, nausée, noia, Weltschmerz … were all of them one and the same thing or did they refer to different phenomena?

Since the second phase of my postdoctoral time began, I realized that if I wanted to track the history of boredom as psychopathology through philosophical, theological, and literary sources, I would have to venture into the history of depression. Now I see that they are two inseparable tasks and, in the same way, two tough challenges. That is because boredom and depression are intertwined, mistaken one for the other, coated on the same and different clothes at the same time over the centuries. I figured I would find lots and lots of books and papers on the history of depression, and that was the case. However, most of them were part of a purely medical framework. What I did not find was any title to explore the presence of depression in its different variables through different narratives that go beyond mental health disciplines such as philosophy or literature, which are precisely the ones I work with. Apart from those authors who cover the topic of depression from the most orthodox mental health field, some others have devoted their efforts to analyze mental diseases in literature but go through depression superficially. Just a few focus on the antecedents of depression by taking into account literary, philosophical, and theological narratives (e.g. Clark Lawlor From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression, 2012). To sum up, I realized that many titles, including both books and papers, were addressing the topic of depression nowadays. However, almost none of them were focused on such a multidisciplinary approach to depression. Then, I was clear that it was time to get in touch with those who were interested in this approach worldwide to get to know each other, share our concerns, and contribute something valuable to the scientific community.

This book project was conceived during the last summer (2018) as part of my own postdoctoral research abovementioned, at Harvard University, under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Mariano Siskind, through which I attempt now to analyze the antecedents of some contemporary mental disorders, such as boredom and depression, from the wide variety of narratives at our hands beyond medical treatises. As I have already introduced, I particularly focus on those literary, philosophical, and theological narratives of the past, in which such conditions were understood not as mental disorders themselves, in the contemporary sense, but as existential, and even moral conditions, to track the evolution of their understanding until the present time. When dealing with depression, I am always surprised by how famous this disorder is today and how little is known about its antecedents in human cultural manifestations over history.

We all know that the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) has meticulously defined depression as a common but serious mood disorder that causes severe symptoms (asthenia, anhedonia, abulia, among many others) that affect how people feel, think, and handle daily activities such as sleeping, eating, or working. The NIMH has also established the cause of depression is a combination of genetic, environmental, and psychological factors that affect approximately 216 million people (3% of the world’s population), mostly ranged from 20 to 30 years old. Nowadays, depression is also known for its many synonyms: clinical depression, MDD (Major Depressive Disorder), unipolar depression, unipolar disorder, depressive episode, and recurrent depressive disorder, to name a few. However, do we agree concerning the historical antecedents of depression? Are we working hard enough to clarify them and to reach an agreement? Are we taking into account the multiple narratives through which depression has been described over history from a multidisciplinary approach?

Chapter one, “Acedia and Its Relation to Depression,” by philosophy Ph.D. candidate Derek McAllister (Baylor University, Texas), goes through the relationship between acedia and depression after claiming that the results of the recent work done in this regard are a mixed bag. In this first chapter in which he engages the recent scholarship comparing acedia with depression, McAllister endeavors to clarify the concept of acedia used by Medieval authors such as Evagrius, Cassian, Gregory, and Thomas Aquinas, to name a few, using literature from other disciplines, including specialists such as Wenzel, Bloomfield, Newhauser, and others. His key two theses are: first, the concept of acedia is not identical to the concept of depression. Acedia is not merely a primitive psychological predecessor to depression, but it marks off significantly different ways of being, not least because of one’s spiritual relation to God. Second, however, it is still possible that an instance of acedia can coincide with an instance of depression, if one’s condition, or state of affairs, is such that each term can be correctly and truthfully applied.

Dr. Nancy Ciccone (University of Colorado, Denver) is in charge of the second chapter of this volume, “Depression in Ricardian Dream Visions.” The specialist in medieval literature showed that whereas Chaucer provides salient examples of depressive symptoms in Middle English dream visions, beginning with his narrator’s inability to either eat or sleep, the anonymous Pearl-poet presents a father unable to recover from the death of his daughter. According to her approach, Chaucer’s narrators find relief in reading, sleeping, dreaming, and presumably the activity of writing the dream narrative. Whether or not the Pearl’s narrator finds relief from his dream, however, is questionable, despite his ghost-daughter’s Christian teachings. As Dr. Ciccone admits, some scholars accuse the narrator of acedia. However, her presentation argues that his acedia is a symptom, not a sin fostering his continued grief. To support this point, she focuses on the definitions and cures for depression recommended by Avicenna and embedded in images throughout the narrative in terms of flora, jewels, and exercise. These images suggest somatic healing available to the poem’s audience, still reeling from their losses in the Black Death, on the one hand, and the political upheaval caused by the Richard II and the Lords Appellant, on the other hand. Whereas Christianity provides spiritual and intellectual comfort for late 14th-century England, the Pearl narrative reveals the gap between religious ideology and emotional recovery.

Chapter three, “Giambattista Vico and the Melancholy of History,” by Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in the University of Chicago, Miriam Muccione, is about the Neapolitan philosopher who said that all human civilizations develop through a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and decadence, bracketed between two forms of barbarism; a barbarism of the senses, belonging to the infancy of human mind and societies, and a conclusive corruption of human rationality and civic cohesion, which Vico calls barbarism of reflection or second barbarism. By comparing Vico’s main work, The New Science, with Vico’s autobiographical account in his Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself, Muccione’s chapter has the twofold purpose of examining Vico’s barbarism of reflection both at the individual and collective level, and to attempt a reading of the role that such a malady of human reason may still have in a Vichian conception of social advancement, though a melancholic one. A reflection on the limits that Vico assigns to human rationality will be of current interest in the perspective of a critique of the material progress of humankind in present times.

Chapter four was contributed by the academic teacher at the Medical University of Gdansk, Poland (Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology), and psychiatrist Dr. Pawel Zagozdzon. “Depression in the Literature of the Health Reform and Mental Hygiene Movement: An Example of Ellen G. White Writings” recovers the health principles from the writings of the most translated female non-fiction author in the history of literature, Ellen G. White, which contributed to making the Seventh-day Adventists—one of the most extended living groups of people in the world. Zagozdzon’s chapter explores how White used the concept of depression. Moreover, he analyzes how she understood the causes of a depressed mood and how to preserve one’s mental health.

Chapter six, “Can Melancholy Be Heroic? Walter Benjamin and the Vicissitudes of Melancholy,” by Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Dr. Shannon Hayes (Tennessee State University), establishes, despite the long-standing association of melancholy with creative, poetic activity, that melancholic depression remains chastized as an unpolitical mode of existence associated with stagnancy, paralysis, and a willful alienation. If one accepts Marx’s claims that under capitalism, we are already dismembered and distanced in our strategic relations, then melancholy has a political aspect and can be understood as a mood. As Benjamin recognized, the fatigue and weariness of the melancholic body grant us an insight into the decay and fragmentation that characterizes social existence. For Hayes, melancholy does not produce one’s alienation; it reveals it and exacerbates it in its unveiling. In her chapter, she explores the vicissitudes of melancholy in the poetic figures of Charles Baudelaire and Erich Kästner, the latter a poet of the Weimar Republic. Although both are melancholic and share an insight into the social, these figures differ in how they put their melancholic insights to work: according to Benjamin, Baudelaire enacts a heroic, emancipatory melancholy, while Kästner enacts a dangerous, nihilistic melancholy, coined by Benjamin as left-wing melancholia. It is precisely the difference between heroic and nihilistic melancholy that this chapter will illuminate.

Professor of English, Dr. Gail Shanley Corso (Neumann University, Pennsylvania), contributed chapter seven “Anhedonia, Dysthymia, and Tristasia: Depressed Characters in Alice McDermott’s Novels” in which she delves particularly into Alice McDermott’s contemporary fiction, whose characters exhibit a range of response to love and loss—sorrow, pretense and lies, delusions, loss of interest in pleasure, and even, attempts at suicide. She demonstrates that these characters often exhibit depression in many forms. While some might experience memory loss concerning trauma, others experience a heightened sense of specific incidents in their life.