Depression
and anxiety
Sadness and dark moods, nerves and jitters. We all know what these
feel like. But sometimes a line is crossed and lives are tainted by such
extremes of negative thinking and dread that something seems to
be seriously wrong. This is when people are likely to be diagnosed
with depression or anxiety, or both – the two conditions frequently
co-occur. Awareness of these complaints and the misery they can
bring has increased hugely in recent decades. Where Victorian society,
at least in the West, referred coyly to nervous trouble and people
were expected to display a “stiff upper lip”, today the stigma of
mental illness is gradually fading. But there’s a worrying aspect to
this increased awareness, with ever more states of mind becoming
medicalized, and rates of antidepressant use soaring.
Depression
This is how the bestselling author Marian Keyes described her experi-
ence of the illness on her blog in 2010: “Although I’m blessed enough to
have a roof over my head, I still feel like I’m living in hell. I can’t eat, I
can’t sleep, I can’t write, I can’t read, I can’t talk to people. The worst thing
is that I feel it will never end.” Fellow sufferer, the American novelist
William Styron talked about his depression as a “gray drizzle of horror”
and “a storm of murk”. Others believe such attempts at description are
in vain. The developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert, author of the semi-
autobiographical Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression (1999) has
said that if you can describe your severe depression, you’ve never really
had it, adding that during his bout of the illness all he wanted was to
kill himself.
From the perspective of a formal psychiatric diagnosis, you’re
depressed if, for two weeks or more, you’ve been feeling in low mood
and/or you’ve lost interest and enjoyment in usual activities, plus you’ve