Depression: The thief that took my joy

By Christine Stapleton

On my bedside table there are stacks of books, most on depression. On the table next to my beside table, there are stacks of book, most on depression. I have not read any of them. Sometimes I read a few pages from one. Then I put it back on the stack.

I did not buy these books. My friends gave them to me. I appreciate every one of those books. Each book represents someone trying to help me. I am grateful and touched by each book. That is why I keep them on my beside table and the table beside my bedside table.

The oddity of this struck me upside the head yesterday. I accepted an invitation to have lunch with a group of journalists to discuss the fate future of journalism. Someone asked me about writers who have influenced me. I easily named other hard-core news journalists whose work I admire. But mental health writers, I could only think of one: Sylvia Plath - my teenage role model)

It is not because there are no good writers writing about their struggle with mental illness. I mean, William Styron was a brilliant writer. But I only read a couple dozen pages of his classic, Darkness Visible, and then put it down. I haven’t even cracked Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind or Noral Vincent’s Voluntary Madness. I really should read these books. I really want to read these books. I can’t seem to do it.

I don’t want to read about another person’s misery right now. Been there. Done that. Don’t want to read about it. Believe me, I get the irony. Using my own logic, why would anyone want to read my writing? Good question.

I know this: I could not read or write - two of my greatest passions - when I was depressed and that scared the hell out of me. I could not read the newspaper I had been writing for over 20 years. I asked over and over, “It’s going to come back, right? I’m going to be able to read and write again, right?”

“Yes,” my therapist and nurse practitioner assured me. It did, but it took awhile. At first I could read only short, simple stories in the newspaper. Then magazines. Then books. Then I wrote and wrote and wrote. When I decided to write a column on mental health policy and my own experience with depression, bipolar and alcoholism, I wrote from my illness: little words, short sentences, simple thoughts. No long articles. Short columns, digestible thoughts. That is all I could handle when I was sick. That is all I wanted to write.

For all I know Styron, Jamison and Vincent write this way, too. It would do me good to read them. Still, I just can’t seem to do it yet. Someday I will. In the meantime, I’ll stick with journal articles about treatment and research, news events involving mental illness and an occasional movie - like A Beautiful Mind.

I am going to keep these books on my bedside table. They inspire me just sitting there. And they are starting to embarrass me, too. I think it’s time to try again. If I am not ready, I’ll just keep coming back. They’re not going anywhere.

Christine Stapleton has been a reporter for The Palm Beach Post for 23 years and in 2006, began writing a column entitled, Kicking Depression.