I have a friend who is giving a talk this Sunday on Suicidal Thinking, and having immersed my head in Infinite Jest with David Foster Wallace all summer with the readers at the Infinite Summer web site, I wanted to share a small part of the most incredible passage on suicide and depression I have ever read. I am not sure of the page number because I have my Kindle propped up by the keyboard; the passage begins at 61% Locations 15833-38:
"Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isn't the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition
clinical depression or
involutional depression or
unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is
itself a feeling. It goes by many names -
anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's
melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative
psychotic depression -- but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it.
It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence.
It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self
It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in
Its black folds and absorbs into
Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self.
Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes
It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency -- sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying -- are not just unpleasant but literally horrible."
There is more, including the loneliness and terror; "You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."
Harrowing and terrible, DFW battled this kind of depression and lost his life, may God Bless and Keep him Always. May we make a difference for blessing, healing, and deliverance for those who suffer so much.
