Living in the box.....

So, in looking for a way to describe the experience of living in depression, I started picturing a box.  When you are depressed, you are stuck in this box.  You have no room.  The box makes your world small.  You can’t see outside the box.  It’s painful because your freedom of movement is impacted by the fact that the box is small.  You feel achy because you can’t stretch out. You can’t see possibility outside of the box because the box is your whole world.  In other words, you are very constrained.  Now, many people would say that the box is self-imposed.  But those people don’t have an understanding of the biochemical nature of depression.  If you can picture it, the box is due to biochemistry and personal history.  This is truly what makes it difficult to escape.  The box is solid.  If there isn’t an intervention of some kind, you are unlikely to be able to see an escape. 

I have spent some time trying to understand the suicide of Ernest Hemingway.  I can see the ‘box’ that Hemingway was dealing with towards the end of his life.  The Hemingway family did have issues with biochemical mental illness.  Starting with Ernest Hemingway’s father, the Hemingway family dealt with multiple suicides. There have been at least six suicides in this family and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that all of them were related to biochemical issues.  This article explains a lot of the reasons behind Ernest Hemingway’s suicide: http://ind.pn/mHCuLv   The article explains that Ernest dealt with many mental health issues, including bipolar disease, depression, chronic alcoholism, and repetitive brain injury.  Apparently, he had many brain injuries due to risk-taking behaviors related to how he grew up. Hemingway had gender issues connected to his relationship with his mother. They gave him kind of a hyper-masculinity which found expression in the way he lived his life.  It also exacerbated his depression as he aged and his abilities as a writer deteriorated.

I can certainly see the box in Ernest Hemingway’s life.  Can you?  He was boxed in by his depression and bipolar disease.  He was further boxed in by his alcoholism.  Strengthening the walls of his box was his history with his family and the resulting gender issues. His mother dressed him in girl’s clothing in early childhood resulting in feeling the need to prove his masculinity.  And in addition, his father committed suicide.  Compounding all of this was a pretty extensive history of serious brain injury.  Looking at it in that way, his suicide seems almost inevitable.  The layers of his box were pretty strong and made escape improbable.  Like most of us, Hemingway had more than one layer to his box.  Intervention should involve addressing all the layers. (I’m not really sure what kind of intervention was done with Ernest Hemingway.)

The stigma of mental illness might have been even more intense for Hemingway given his celebrity and his beliefs about what it means to be a man.  The biggest gift that we can give someone living with mental illness is recognizing the constraint that such illness imposes.  To help someone begin the healing process involves having the compassion to recognize that what is seen on the surface isn’t the whole story.  If you had looked at Papa Hemingway prior to his death, you would have seen an adventurer and an author. By reputation, Hemingway was a ‘man’s man’.  There was no room for the ‘weakness’ of mental illness.  Yet, his mental illness ended his life.  Your perspective changes when you look at family and personal history.  The entire story becomes much clearer.  Maybe that should be taken into consideration whenever you look at the mental illness of a friend or loved one.