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A few hours ago the Guardian UK published an article by Nigerian award winning writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi where she shared the heartfelt story of her struggle with depression. The story has now been removed from the website, but we decided to share some excerpts of the story with our readers who may find it helpful.
In classic Adichie style, the
writer talks about her symptoms, the effect of her depression on her
family and friends, and how the condition is often a writer’s scourge.
Read some excerpts of the article below:
I am sitting in a doctor’s office in
Maryland and reciting these symptoms. On the wall of the bright room,
there is a diagram of a lean female, her ovaries and uterus illustrated
in curling lines; it reminds me of old pictures of Eve in the garden
with Adam. The doctor is a kind and blunt woman, bespectacled, but
reading over her lenses the forms I have filled out. When she first asks
why I have come to see her, I say, “Because my family thinks I need
help.” Her reply is, “You must agree with them or you wouldn’t be here.”
Later, it will strike me that this is a quality I admire most in women:
a blunt kindness, a kind bluntness.
When she asks questions, I embellish
my answers with careful detail – the bigger-sized bra I wear for a few
days, the old frost-bitten ice cream I eat because I will eat anything. I
make sure to link everything to my monthly cycle, to repeat that I
always feel better when my period starts. I make fun of my irritability:
everyone I meet is annoying until I suddenly realise that I am the only
constant and the problem has to be me! It is, I tell her, as though a
strangeness swoops down on me every month, better on some and worse on
others. Nothing I say is untrue. But there are things I leave out. I am
silent about the other strangeness that comes when it will and flattens
my soul.
“It sounds like you have premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” she says.
It is what I want to hear. I am
grateful because she has given me a name I find tolerable, an
explanation I can hide behind: my body is a vat of capricious hormones
and I am at their mercy.
But the doctor is not done. Her eyes
are still and certain as she says, “But the more important thing is
that you have underlying depression.” She speaks quietly, and I feel the
room hold its breath. She speaks as if she knows that I already know
this.
In truth, I am sitting opposite her
in this examining room because my family is worried about the days and
weeks when I am, as they say, “not myself”. For a long time, I have told
them that I just happen to have hormonal issues, victim to those
incomplete tortures that Nature saves for femaleness. “It can’t be just
hormonal,” they say. “It just can’t.” Mine is a family full of sensible
scientists – a statistician father, an engineer brother, a doctor
sister. I am the different one, the one for whom books always were
magical things. I have been writing stories since I was a child; I left
medical school because I was writing poems in biology class. When my
family says it is “not just hormonal”, I suspect they are saying that
this malaise that makes me “not myself” has something to do with my
being a writer.
Now, the doctor asks me, “What kind of writing do you do?”
I tell her I write fiction.
“There is a high incidence of depression in creative people,” she says.
I remember a writers’ conference I
attended in Maine one summer years ago, before my first novel was
published. I liked the other writers, and we sat in the sun and drank
cranberry juice and talked about stories. But a few days in, I felt that
other strangeness creeping up on me, almost suffocating me. I drew away
from my new circle of friends. One of them finally cornered me in the
dormitory and asked, “You’re depressive, aren’t you?” In his eyes and
his voice was something like admiration, because he believed that there
is, in a twisted way, a certain literary glamour in depression. He tells
me that Ernest Hemingway had depression. Virginia Woolf and Winston
Churchill had depression. Graham Greene had depression. Oh, and it
wasn’t just writers. Did I know Van Gogh had wandered into the field he
was painting and shot himself? I remember feeling enraged, wanting to
tell him that depression has no grandeur, it is opaque, it wastes too
much and nurtures too little. But to say so would be to agree that I
indeed had depression. I said nothing. I did not have depression. I did
not want to have depression.
And now, in the doctor’s office, I
want to resist. I want to say no thank you, I’ll take only premenstrual
dysphoric disorder please. It fits elegantly in my arsenal of feminism
after all, this severe form of premenstrual syndrome, suffered by only
3% of women, and with no known treatment, only different suggestions for
management. It gives me a new language. I can help other women who grew
up as I did in Nigeria, where nobody told us girls why we sometimes
felt bloated and moody. If we ever talked about what happened to our
bodies, then it was behind closed doors, away from the boys and men, in
tones muted with abashment. Aunts and mothers and sisters, a band of
females surrounded in mystery, the older whispering to the younger about
what periods meant: staying away from boys, washing yourself well. They
spoke in stilted sentences, gestured vaguely, gave no details. Even
then I felt resentful to have to feel shame about what was natural. And
now here I was, burnished with a new language to prod and push at this
damaging silence.
***
The doctor calls these symptoms but
they do not feel like symptoms. They feel like personal failures, like
defects. I am normally full of mischievous humour, full of passion,
whether in joy or in rage, capable of an active, crackling energy, quick
to respond and rebuke, but with this strangeness, I do not even
remember what it means to feel. My mind is in mute. I normally like
people, I am deeply curious about the lives of others, but with this
strangeness comes misanthropy. A cold misanthropy. I am normally the
nurturer, worrying about everyone I love, but suddenly I am detached. It
frightens me, this sense of slipping out of my normal self. It cannot
be an illness. It feels like a metaphysical failure, which I cannot
explain but for which I am still responsible.
***
In some of my family and friends, I
sense confusion, and sometimes, suspicion. I am known to nurse a number
of small eccentricities, and perhaps this is one. I avoid them, partly
not to burden them with what I do not understand, and partly to shield
myself from their bewilderment, while all the time, a terrible guilt
chews me whole. I hear their unasked question: Why can’t she just snap
out of it? There is, in their reactions, an undertone of “choice”. I
might not choose to be this way, but I can choose not to be this way. I
understand their thinking because I, too, often think like them. Is this
self-indulgence? Surely it cannot be so crippling if I am sentient
enough to question it? Does the market woman in Nsukka have depression?
When I cannot get out of bed in the morning, would she be able to, since
she earns her living day by day?
The doctor says, about the high
incidence of depression in creative people, “we don’t know why that is”.
Her tone is flat, matter-of-fact, and I am grateful that it is free of
fascination.
***
This is not the real you, my family
say. And I have found in that sentiment, a source of denial. But what if
it is the real me? What if it is as much a part of me as the other with
which they are more at ease? A friend once told me, about depression,
that perhaps the ancestors have given me what I need to do the work I am
called to do. A lofty way of thinking of it, but perhaps another way of
saying: What if depression is an integral but fleeting part of me?
***
The doctor says, “I’d recommend therapy, and that you try anti-depressants. I know a good therapist.”
A therapist. I want to joke about
it. I want to say that I am a strong Igbo woman, a strong Nigerian
woman, a strong African woman, and we don’t do depression. We don’t tell
strangers our personal business. But the joke lies still and stale on
my tongue. I feel defensive about the suggestion of a therapist, because
it suggests a cause that I do not know, a cause I need a stranger to
reveal to me.
I remember the first book I read
about depression, how I clung to parts that I could use to convince
myself that I did not have depression. Depressives are terrified of
being alone. But I enjoy being alone, so it cannot be depression. I
don’t have drama, I have not ever felt the need to rant, to tear off
clothes, to do something crazy. So it cannot be depression, this
strangeness. It cannot be the same kind of thing that made Virginia
Woolf fill her pockets with stones and walk into a river. I stopped
reading books about depression because their contradictions unsettled
me. I was comforted by them, but I was also made anxious by them.
I am in denial about having depression, and it is a denial that I am not in denial about.
“I don’t want to see a therapist,” I say.
She looks at me, as if she is not surprised. “You won’t get better if you do nothing. Depression is an illness.”
It is impossible for me to think of
this as I would any other illness. I want to impose it my own ideas of
what an illness should be. In its lack of a complete explanation, it
disappoints. No ebb and flow of hormones.
“I don’t want to take medicine either. I’m worried about what it will do to my writing. I heard people turn into zombies.”
“If you had diabetes would you resist taking medicine?”
Suddenly I am angry with her. My
prejudices about American healthcare system emerge: perhaps she just
wants to bill more for my visit, or she has been bribed by a drug rep
who markets antidepressants. Besides, American doctors over-diagnose.
“How can I possibly have PMDD and
depression? So how am I supposed to know where one starts and the other
stops?” I ask her, my tone heavy with blame. But even as I ask her, I
feel dishonest, because I know. I know the difference between the mood
swings that come with stomach cramps and the flatness that comes with
nothing.
I am strong. Everyone who knows me
thinks so. So why can’t I just brush that feeling aside? I can’t. And it
is this, the “cantness”, the starkness of my inability to control it,
that clarifies for me my own condition. I look at the doctor and I
accept the name of a condition that has been familiar to me for as long
as I can remember. Depression. Depression is not sadness. It is
powerlessness. It is helplessness. It is both to suffer and to be unable
to console yourself.
***
A few days after my doctor visit, I
see a therapist, a woman who asks me if my depression sits in my
stomach. I say little, watching her, imagining creating a character
based on her. On the day of my second appointment, I call and cancel. I
know I will not go again. The doctor tells me to try anti-depressants.
She says in her kind and blunt way: “If they don’t work, they don’t
work, and your body gets rid of them.”
I agree. I will try antidepressants, but first, I want to finish my novel.
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