One medicates the self with the nearest thing at hand. One does not wish to call attention to one’s dis-ease. Frailties are exploited by social carnivores. Even as an adolescent, I used writing as a balm, as a solace, as a poultice for what I came to know, fifteen years later, as chronic, seasonal depression. Eventually, and nurtured, this reaching for writing allowed me to develop as a poet. I remain in conflict with this annual six-months’ duration. Looking at my writing that treats depression directly, I am struck by two things: how little of it I’ve done; and how pervasive the roots are in almost everything else I attempt. When approaching depression directly, I have to acknowledge that this familiar infusion of mood is also one of my commonly productive modes.

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Here is a poem, retrieved from a place I inhabit often, and usually in private (my writing group deigns to go there only as a suffered punishment): sonnetville.

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I’ve battled back depression all my life.

He flanks and charges, spies, and sues for peace.

Should I agree, he then withdraws the lease.

He finds me in contempt and throws a knife.

We wrestle without rules. He takes delight

in foiling any fairness or appease.

And if I try to cease hostilities,

he lifts me off the ground and picks a fight.

But sometimes while I’m sharpening my tools,

he comes in guise of trusted confidante,

and soothes and coos and mentors me with care.

I trust him to infuse the very air.

I breathe for him, shape his words. I’m the runt

who works his mine, who digs and brings his jewels.

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Compare this with another poem, written on the occasion of the first birthday of my third child. It’s obviously shot through with depression, although I love all my children dearly.

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The baby’s year encased me like a rock.

A perfect quartz whose angles never showed,

it skewed my vision ‘til the summer snowed

and mornings came upon me like the dark.

Days there were when light came through like a talk

with friends and I could laugh and lose the load.

At other times the clocks unwound like roads,

while I moved like a boat without a dock.

By equinox the crystal cracked, and I

felt loosened, like a captive whale set free:

I pause before the rift--as if a lie

were clear--and pond’ring what the sea might be,

I reach for his extended arms and lift.

We hold each other and, together, drift.

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It’s a sort of a paean to the depressive state. I find it significant that the poem apostrophizes precisely the boundaries of my seasonal depression: equinox. Once when someone asked me what my winter state is like I responded: “It’s like having had a close friend die. But you can’t remember which one.”

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Many years ago I discovered light therapy. It works simply and reliably by exposure to full spectrum bright white light, early in the morning, to initialize one’s circadian clock. I also tried several SSRI medications for about nine years and finally gave them up (lovely side-effects) and returned to “my lights.” Does this completely remove the depression? No. But it goes a good ways toward making winters more bearable for me and for those people around me. For the rest I have poetry.

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Why or how does writing work as a treatment? Speculatively, I’d say it provides what my mind seeks in winter: attention to the self; a place for reflection; a therapeutic page-space. This doesn’t mean that I stop writing in summer. I have a correlative mania in summer that makes me a lot of fun to be around. And that summer person likes writing in the middle of the night every bit as much. The process of composing poems is also a process of composing the self. There is order, stabilization, perspective. That’s what I discovered as a depressed kid. And it nourishes and sustains me still.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café

David A. Epstein, Ph.D., Guest Blogger

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David A. Epstein, Ph.D. works as a house-spouse and a carpenter. He is a member of the Brickwalk poetry group in Connecticut, and is a board member of The Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens. He has published poems in Poetica, Poetic Hours, The Lyric, Blue Collar Review, and Shofar. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor