Sure, you can be Depressed and be an Asshole

I almost missed wolfangel's response on her own website to a comment I left over at terminaldegree; my original comment was

Once long ago, a brilliant cousin of mine offered the theory that it’s really the most creative, free-thinking, mindful individuals who suffer what she called “dark times,” times in which the world about you greys out, and all you want to do is disappear. To a man–and woman–the finest people I know here at the University suffer these bouts, and I’ve grown to consider them not events of which to be ashamed, but the unfortunate fee that must be paid for such intense periods of engagement either with the world, or with their particular arts. Cold comfort, but so many of us are this way.

The issue is an important one, so I thought I'd elaborate a bit upon it.

First, I think that the spelling "grey" makes grey/day, grey/charade rhymes all the sexier, but more importantly:

My claim, if I was making a general claim at all (indeed it was a response to a specific post), was that depression seems to be the cost that one has to pay for the intense emotional/intellectual engagement required for creativity. I made no real direct causal link between depression and creativity; I was rather suggesting that it is one's engagement, one's engagement with the world, with one's work, and with great art that wears one to tatters, and that this can (and will) lead to depression. That is, if you're operating close to your capacities, and at all paying attention.

So I think that much of the discussion of the comment follows from people erroneously thinking that I was arguing a causal link between depression and creativity, which I was not. The real surprise, though, was wolfangel's conclusion that

I think this entire argument smacks too much of “there’s a reason for everything”, something with which I not only don’t agree but (as I have mentioned before) take great offense to; perhaps this is why I am so against this argument. Because, too, it makes depression sound like the interesting part of people, something I fight against in myself a lot. Or perhaps also because it makes depression sound beautiful and romantic, when it’s not: it’s dismal and colourless and sad and boring.

I suppose that I should go on record as saying that no, there isn't a reason for everything--as I tell my undergraduates, Nietzsche's popularly appropriated phrase "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is an ethical claim, not a factual one; one should live as if this were true, but most often it is not. There are barrelsful of individuals out there who get messed up and then die, or never completely heal, or heal in malformed ways, to no good end whatsoever.

My intent, I suppose, was not to "romanticize" depression, not to treat it as "beautiful," and not to suggest that anyone wallow in it; rather, I was attempting to domesticate it, to observe that depression in our business need not be a blistering indictment of one's personality. Like the mad hatters who lost their mind in the nineteenth century for working with mercury on a daily basis, our madness too, I believe, is a byproduct of the kind of work we do, and how we do it.

While I do not believe that depression is "the interesting part of people," I must admit that I am greatly suspicious of those colleagues of mine who don't wrestle with it; quite frankly, I find them superficial, conservative (even in their liberal views), not a little smug, and utterly bourgeois. Wolfangel is right on the money when she says that depression is "dismal and colourless and sad and boring," and I would add that when one is in it, one needs to fight like hell to get out of it. While I of course concede that depression is an indication of many things, for individuals working in the arts, it is also an indication of engagement; and when I see someone paying the price for engagement, it's true, I admire them for it. Those who have bought contentment and satisfaction at the price of not paying attention I despise.