Reading the Times last weekend was a curious exercise in juxtapositions.  First, I read an article called “On Top of the Happiness Racket” about Gretchen Rubin’s book, “The Happiness Project.”  Then I turned to the magazine section and found an article by Jonah Lehrer, entitled “Depression’s Upside.” The title of this essay was a quote contained in that article by neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, who interviewed 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about their mental history, and found that eighty percent of them met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression.

Well, that comes as no surprise to most writers, or to the people who love and live with them.

There are so many books out these days on attaining happiness, though, that I suspect writers aren’t the only people who could use a little cheering up.

Now, I will admit that I haven’t read Ms. Rubin’s book, nor am I likely to.  I have read the free sample Amazon was kind enough to send to my Kindle, and I will, from reading that sample, agree with the folks who say Ms. Rubin’s got a nice chatty writing style, she’s well read, and from what I’ve seen on her blog, she makes some good suggestions, like “get more sleep” “Bring a sweater” and “Be polite.”  I think she’s quite earnest in her desire to improve what she describes as “midlife malaise,” however, I knew this book wasn’t for me when the book blurb told me she spent “a year test-driving the wisdom of the ages.”  A whole year?  Hmmm… According to her blog, she studied, “Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah.”  Oh dear. Oprah next to Aristotle?  Of course, this sort of framing is tailor-made for the self-help publishing world.  And her story doesn’t, for me, seem particularly inspiring.  She is already happily married (her father-in-law is Robert Rubin, former Treasury secretary, who stepped down last year as an adviser to Citigroup), has great kids,oodles and oodles of money, good familial relationships, good health, great career (one of the books she’s written is called, “Power, Money, Fame, Sex, a user’s guide”)… I’ll quote here from Jan Hoffman, author of the Times article:

You can make the razzy noise yourself

Ms. Rubin flicks away the suggestion that the just-us-folks tone of the book may be a tad disingenuous. “Bob [Robert Rubin] is important to me because he’s my father-in-law, so that’s the way he’s relevant in the book,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hide it. It just didn’t come up naturally.”

Readers may not realize that she doesn’t live on the generic row of low-rise apartment houses on the cover of the book, suggesting the West Village or Park Slope in Brooklyn. Her triplex is in a neo-Georgian building on the Upper East Side.

And to those who may feel daunted by how she does it all — the charts, the reading, writing, exercising, volunteering, socializing, parenting, scrapbooking and glue-gunning? Relax. She has a sitter and a housecleaner….

…Writing a self-help book with epigrams and advice embraced by thousands is, in Ms. Rubin’s view, certainly work worth doing. She has created her own cottage industry devoted to happiness (and to promoting book sales): the blog, an interactive companion site with a happiness project tool box, a monthly newsletter, weekly resolutions and tips, videos. There is also a starter kit for groups wishing to tackle her project.

Following her advice can take more work than fans bargain for. Diane Owens’s happiness project group meets in the public library of Mount Pleasant, S.C. — 13 members, all women, most widowed or divorced. “At the ‘love’ chapter, people said, ‘This isn’t a good subject for me,’ ” Ms. Owens said. When she asked who had started a resolutions chart, only two members raised their hands.

Okay, enough said.

The truth is I’m perplexed by North America’s dogged pursuit of ‘happiness,’ since the variety of happiness I see people craving is the frothy, brightly-lit, sugary emotion that has little value.  It’s what Eric Wilson describes in his book, “Against Happiness” this way:

Really, what’s lost in all of this? Isn’t it a mark of our American genius that we can now envision a cosmos of total contentment, a universe in which all things that chagrin us, from depression to corpulence, from distance to death, might soon simply fade away?  We have created that which Bradford dreamed and Franklin schemed.  We are smoothing over the rough edges of aging. We are transforming our dirty cities into massive shopping malls. We have even translated war into blips on our television screens. There is no better time to play at living. No wonder almost every American claims to be happy.

In Johnah Leherer’s article on Depression’s Upside, I find more nourishing fare.  Mr. Leherer discusses the recent conversation in psychiatric circles about the benefits of depression, melancholy and rumination (the looping, obsessive thought process that defines depression), and how medication may not, in the long run, be the best bet. He talks about Darwin’s depression which Darwin said allowed him “to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work,” its clarifying force, how it focuses the mind on its most essential problems, and the purpose of suffering.

The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.

Andy Thomson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, and Paul Andrews, an evolutional psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, think this might be true,  — rumination might have a purpose. Psychiatry “has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods.” What if that weren’t so? The D.S.M. manual, the diagnostic bible for psychiatrists, we are told, does not take stressors such as divorce, profession failure, disillusionment etc., into account when diagnosing depressive disorder (with the exception of bereavement, when we’re given two months to get over it before it becomes clinically troubling).

Imagine, for instance, a depression triggered by a bitter divorce. The ruminations might take the form of regret (“I should have been a better spouse”), recurring counterfactuals (“What if I hadn’t had my affair?”) and anxiety about the future (“How will the kids deal with it? Can I afford my alimony payments?”). While such thoughts reinforce the depression — that’s why therapists try to stop the ruminative cycle — Andrews and Thomson wondered if they might also help people prepare for bachelorhood or allow people to learn from their mistakes. “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.”

Which is not to say that depression is always useful.  Sometimes, I suspect, it’s brain chemistry gone haywire, which is a different case.  But I’m by nature melancholy and I’ve suffered from situational-induced depression more than once, and I agree with Thomson who says, “To say that depression can be useful doesn’t mean it’s always going to be useful. Sometimes, the symptoms can spiral out of control. The problem, though, is that as a society, we’ve come to see depression as something that must always be avoided or medicated away. We’ve been so eager to remove the stigma from depression that we’ve ended up stigmatizing sadness.”

Maybe there's a silver lining to depression

I’ve also been medicated for depression.  And for me, it wasn’t useful.  For one thing, it triggered the craving for alcohol again after thirteen years sobriety.  I didn’t drink, thank God, but it was awful.  And the drugs didn’t solve the underlying issues, just numbed them.  A friend who helped me get sober years ago suggest that early sobriety would probably involve some depression, since I’d been self-medicating and not feeling many emotions for years.  She suggested I try to just go through it, sit with it, mine it for meaning.  If I medicated, I just might have to go through it all again later.  This is much the same as what modern research substantiates:

Consider a 2005 paper led by Steven Hollon, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University: he found that people on antidepressants had a 76 percent chance of relapse within a year when the drugs were discontinued. In contrast, patients given a form of cognitive talk therapy had a relapse rate of 31 percent. And Hollon’s data aren’t unusual: several studies found that patients treated with medication were approximately twice as likely to relapse as patients treated with cognitive behavior therapy. “The high relapse rate suggests that the drugs aren’t really solving anything,” Thomson says. “In fact, they seem to be interfering with the solution, so that patients are discouraged from dealing with their problems. We end up having to keep people on the drugs forever. It was as if these people have a bodily infection, and modern psychiatry is just treating their fever.”

Huh. Another interesting tidbit in this article is the evidence from a recent study that found “’expressive writing’” — asking depressed subjects to write essays about their feelings — led to significantly shorter depressive episodes.”  Well, we writers have long known that the only way to live with melancholy is to write!

How sad (pun intended) I find it that we’ve created a society (and an industry) around avoiding sadness.  When 30 writers were interviewed by neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen about their mental history, 80% met the criteria for “some form of depression.”  She says, “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down.”  Lehrer says she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering. If you’re on the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

The article concludes by saying, “The challenge, f course, is persuading people to accept their misery, to embrace the tonic of despair.  To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness.  A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.”

Perhaps not everyone is meant to be 'happy'

Well, for years I drank too much to get away from the pain, until I couldn’t drink any more.  Then I had to face the pain I’d been running from, and over the fifteen years since, I’ve still had to face crippling pain from time to time.  But I’ve learned there are enormous benefits from wandering in that dark wood, and I’m delighted I wasn’t distracted by a search for the sort of happiness that can be charted with checks and ‘x’s’ on a wall chart.

Angel, Passy Cemetery (photo by Ron Davis)

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliott – The Wasteland

Eliott was right, at least as far as my family is concerned.

On Easter Sunday, April 6, 1996, my brother Bernie went to dinner at the home of family friends. By all accounts he ate well and laughed and left saying he’d see everyone later. Then he went home and hanged himself.

On April 10, 2008, my brother Ronnie got up, had breakfast with his mother, kissed her and went for a walk. They found his body a week later. He’d gone down by the river and hanged himself from a tree on the shore, behind the Anglican Church, where the steep bank would ensure he wouldn’t be seen. He’d taken the rope from our parent’s garage.

Since 1995, getting through April’s been pretty rough. This year, the thirteenth anniversary of Bernie’s death and the first anniversary of Ronnie’s, well, let’s just say there’s a bumper crop of lilacs breeding out of the dead land this year, mixing memory and desire.

There have been other suicides this year. Novelist David Foster Wallace hanged himself on September 12. Nick Hughes, son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, hanged himself on March 16. His mother, of course, famously gassed herself in the kitchen of her north London home in February 1963 while her one-year-old son and his two-year-old sister, Frieda, slept in their cots in a nearby room. She stuffed towels around the kitchen door to make sure the fumes didn’t reach her children. Thanks, Mum.

And there have been others, Thierry de la Villehuchet and William Foxton, both victims of the sociopath Bernie Madoff, killed themselves, as did thousands of other, people who aren’t, even in the rictus of their despair, famous enough to warrant widespread attention.

We tend to think of suicide as something that happens to other people, but it’s far more common than we like to admit. I was talking with a friend the other day, and I told her I couldn’t count the number of people I’ve known over the years who’ve killed themselves. I get past the fingers of both hands and I stop. According to the National Institute for Mental Health, in 2004, suicide was the eleventh leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 32,439 deaths. The overall rate was 10.9 suicide deaths per 100,000 people.  According to NIMH, an estimated eight to 25 attempted suicides occur per every suicide death.

Expect that figure to jump. According to CNN, the Army reported 24 soldiers committed suicide in January alone — six times as many as killed themselves in January 2008, according to statistics released February 5. I expect the economic situation isn’t going to help either.

Many of the people I know, including both my brothers, have committed suicide as a direct result of alcohol and drug addiction. Mercifully, I’m one of those folks who sit around in church basements, learning how to live without booze or drugs, and thanks to what I’ve learned there, I’ve managed to do without alcohol or ‘dry goods’ for fourteen years. As long as I keep going, I have faith that the quicksand of despair which sucked them under won’t also devour me. But I hear a lot of stories from people in those church basements about their own suicide attempts, including one girl who came out of a blackout to find a cop sitting on the edge of her bed. Apparently, while drinking, she’d called an emergency hot line and said she’d downed a bottle of pills and a couple of bottles of Jack Daniels. She just wanted the pain to stop, she cried. She didn’t remember calling, and didn’t remember taking the pills, but as they wheeled her to the waiting ambulance, the cop took her hand and said, “I’m a recovering alcoholic. I was once where you are now. I promise you, if you get into recovery and stay sober, you’re never going to feel this much pain again.”  That was eight years ago. She’s sober and doing great. Not everyone is so lucky.

At my brother’s funeral, my father asked me to give the eulogy, and requested I speak specifically about addiction. I agreed, and afterwards the eulogy was published in the newspaper in my family’s home town, and after that people asked me to put it up on my website, which I did. Even after a year, I still get emails from people reaching out for help. Some check back in later and tell me how it’s going, in those church basements, some I never hear from again. I pray for them all.

Ronnie, Lauren and Bernie in 1989 (Photo by Ron Davis)

Often people look at me with horror when I tell them both my brothers killed themselves. I even had a therapist tell me once that, if I ever approached her for therapy, she’d turn me down. “Since it’s so much more likely you’ll kill yourself, too.”  Gee, thanks. Okay, fair enough. The rate of suicide in families of suicide victims is twice as high as normal.[i] In fact, multiple suicides in families aren’t that uncommon. Think of Ernest Hemingway – his father, Ed, sister Ursula, brother Leicester and grand-daughter Margaux all committed suicide. That’s five suicides over three generations. In one study of Amish families, (Egeland & Sussex, 1985) almost three-quarters of 26 suicides bunched in just four families.[ii] Genetics? Maybe. I’m sure that’s part of it, since genetics is also a factor in depression and addiction, but there’s something else – the taboo has been broken. Suicide as a valid solution (albeit a decidedly permanent solution to what may well be a temporary problem) now exists as a real possibility.  “Suicide contagion”“has rocked more than one school and Jeffery Eugenides wrote about the family cluster syndrome in his book, The Virgin Suicides. Ross Maracle, a Mohawk elder, has written poignantly about the suicide epidemics among Canadian First Nations children.

So, what does all this mean to us? What does it mean to my family, and to me, and to you, who probably know somebody who’s been affected by suicide?  How do those of us who have lost loved ones go on? How do we cope with the grief, the anger, the guilt, the fear and yes, the shame?

I remember being at my father and step-mother’s house after Bernie died in 1995. It was the day after the funeral and my husband, Ron, and I sat on one side of their tidy, sunny, living room, and my father sat on the other side. We were talking about how many people had been in the church, how they’d filled the aisles and the narthex and spilled out into the street. My father looked up, toward the kitchen, and my gaze followed his. There stood my step-mother, her eyes red from crying, her hands pressed up to her mouth.

“Are you okay?” my father asked.

“No,” she managed to squeak out.

My father opened his arms and she ran into them and buried her face in his shoulder and he held her and she held him, and they found comfort and strength with each other.

I thought, they’re going to be all right, if they have that kind of love, the kind that reaches toward each other, that understands where grace and hope live, they’ll be all right. Not unscarred, but all right. And they were. Addiction and depression run like a dark and bloody river through our family, and none of us have been unharmed by it, and none of us have avoided, in turn, harming others, and they might have chosen to blame themselves or each other, but they didn’t.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have that kind of relationship, of course. So you do what you must – find a therapist, a support group, a clergy person, all of the above.

Turning toward the love which was symbolized in my father and step-mother’s embrace meant doing certain things, for love is, after all, a verb, and an active one at that. My father, who had stopped drinking three years before, stayed stopped, and I, who had stopped thirteen months before, stayed stopped, too. And the longer we stayed sober, the more our gaze turned away from selfish things, and we started to repair the damage we’d done, to create more healing in the world than harm.

And then, last year, it happened again. Even though my step-mother spent nearly every waking hour of every day for the past decade trying to save Ronnie’s life, it wasn’t possible. He was so far into his addiction that his body and mind were broken, I believe, beyond repair. So there was another funeral, and more people spilling out onto the church’s lawn, and enormous amounts of kindness and love along with the indescribable anguish, and the wounds that will never fully heal. You learn to limp, and turn toward the light, and your faith, if you haven’t lost it altogether, grows a little deeper, and you look for meaning in the lives of the one’s you’ve lost, and the pain you feel.

When people ask me why I write about these things, I tell them that it’s partly because the pain live inside me every day, as it does in my parents, and as a writer I can’t help but write about those things which obsess me. But also, although I know not everyone commits suicide because of addiction, for an enormous number of people, it’s a huge contributing factor, and I hope that maybe, just maybe, someone who is struggling will read this, and reach out for the help they so desperately need. That is, after all, why my father asked me to deliver Ronnie’s eulogy, in which I told this story:

It was in 1991 and Ronnie had come to visit my husband and me in Toronto. He had nearly a year sober at the time – yes, he did get sober now and again, he just couldn’t stay sober. We had a little bungalow with a big backyard with a hammock and a pool. Ronnie loved to lay out, all that long and lanky length of him, in the hammock and listen to the birds in the trees, and wait for the baby raccoons to come out and play from under the deck where their mother had built a nest. He was working hard to stay sober, and it can’t have been easy for him, since I wasn’t sober yet myself and didn’t hesitate to drink around him, all the while – in that terrible, blind, self-centered way of alcoholics – talking about how great it was he was sober. One afternoon I asked if he wanted to go to an AA or NA meeting. Ronnie said yes, and so off we went into the projects of Toronto, the toughest of the tough neighborhoods. We found the meeting in the community room of a run-down apartment building. It was a good meeting and people were kind and thoughtful and encouraging as Ronnie talked about his commitment to getting and staying sober. Then a man turned to me.

“How you doing?” he said.

“Me? Oh, I’m fine,” I said. “I’m very careful.”

“Keep coming back,” someone said and people laughed.

We came out of the meeting and a gauntlet of drug dealers stood right outside the door.

“What do you want?” they said. “We got what you want.”

That’s the way it is. That’s how hard it can be. Ronnie didn’t manage to stay clean and sober. But a few years later, I walked into my second AA meeting. Even though Ronnie didn’t keep coming back, I did. Sadly, I don’t think Bernie even understood there was a connection between his depression and his drinking.

Addiction robbed both my brothers of everything, and left those of us who loved them in agony. Nevertheless, even though they died, I believe they planted a seed of salvation in me. So that’s why I write about this. I honor my brothers’ memory, and I know that if someone reads this and asks for help because of it, if someone turns from despair to hope, then their lives had meaning.

Although April may be the cruelest month, it is also the month of renewal and rebirth, during which death is overcome and life returns. And here I circle round again to T.S. Eliot, who also said:

So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

-         T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Corker

The darkness shall be light….. (Photo by Ron Davis)

[i] Runeson B, Asberg M: Family history of suicide among suicide victims. Am J Psychiatry 2003, 160(8):1525-1526

[ii] Comprehensive textbook of suicidology,  Ronald W. Maris, Alan Lee Berman, Morton M. Silverman, Bruce. The Guilford Press; (August, 2000)

I recently heard of an internationally acclaimed author whose work I admire IMMENSELY, having his newly finished novel turned down. (And no, I’m not going to name names.) I don’t know why the book was turned down, although I can’t imagine it was because it wasn’t well written. This man is simply incapable of writing a bad sentence. I’ve been thinking of him a lot. You can imagine the pain of working so hard for so many years to develop a readership; how you might deservedly feel, after lots of praise and attention and prizes and so forth, that you’ve earned the right to keep on publishing, and then…it stops; you’re silenced. Agony. I pray he’ll find the inner resources to come back from this, to keep the faith, to write again, but who knows. A blow like that can silence you forever. It can send you into depression’s bottomless pit; it can break you.

One of the things emerging writers (and some established writers)frequently talk about is how to sustain oneself as an artist, psychologically, emotionally, even spiritually, during these times of diminished publishing and reviewing resources. Fewer books are published overall, weighted in favor of the celebrity tell-all or self-help books rather than fiction. The novels publishers lust after these days seem to be of a commercial, plot-driven type. Now, there’s nothing wrong with plot-driven commercial fiction per se, it’s just that if you happen to write more literary, quieter, character-driven books, for example, it’s slim pickin’s out there. There are exceptions — Per Petterson’s OUT STEALING HORSES comes to mind, as does Elizabeth Strout’s OLIVE KITERIDGE, but if you’re a reader who enjoys that sort of novel you have to root a little deeper through the piles of Vatican-Masonic-mystery books.

You don’t have to be a writer to ask this sort of question, of course. How to spiritually, emotionally and psychologically sustain oneself during lean times is a conundrum to everyone, regardless of vocation. How to earn money is a different subject. Writers have always had to struggle for cash, it seems.. think of Faulkner in the post office, Cormac McCarthy getting tossed out of a $40/mo hotel because he didn’t have the rent, Jane Austen struggling to put food on the table. What I’m talking about here is how to keep on going when there doesn’t seem to be a good enough reason to do so.

Well, as writers, we write. Real Writers are not necessarily measured by their publishing history, but by their commitment to the work. I know, you may be muttering to yourself, “Easy for YOU to say; you’ve already published a few books!” Well, that’s true, I have been lucky in that regard, but publishing is like the movie or music business … industry tastes change, some bright new thing comes along to grab the spotlight, or for inexplicable reasons your particular kind of writing falls out of favor… the truth is that unless you are a major prize-winning author, publishing your last book does not ensure it won’t, in fact, be your last book, if you see what I mean. And in some cases, as in the unnamed writer whose book has just been turned down… not even previous accolades are insurance against rejection.

The publishing landscape can feel pretty bleak at times.

And then there’s my friend who’s been working for eight years on her first novel. She’s had a couple of agents interested, but they ultimately passed. She wonders if she should bother anymore, or if she should just stop and take up knitting or gardening or something.

So, that’s the sort of thing that was on my mind last Thursday evening when My Best Beloved and I went to Philadelphia to see Leonard Cohen in concert.

The story goes that a few years ago he returned from a long time spent in retreat at a Buddhist monastery, only to discover his manager stole his life savings. He was 71 years old, everything he had put aside for retirement was gone, and someone he considered a friend had betrayed him.

In an interview with CTV he said:

“It’s enough to put a dent in one’s mood,” he says of the betrayal by his manager, who’d looked after him for 17 years.

“Fortunately it hasn’t,” he adds after a short pause as if to show that while he’s dejected by the situation, he’s not completely undone.

So, he took to the road again, and has been performing around the world for the past couple of years. I had heard from musician friends in Toronto, Paris and Geneva that this was the concert of a lifetime, an extraordinary experience not to be missed. They were right.

It was a three-hour concert the likes of which I have never experienced before — generous, uplifting, moving, poignant and inspiring. If you have a chance to see him before he stops touring, I urge you to do so. Still, I wasn’t expecting how tremendously touched I was by his rendition, along with the sublime (his word) Webb Sisters, of his song, “If It Be Your Will.” He began by saying the piece had been written during a time of obstacles, when he had been silenced, as happens from time to time. He said it was a poem, a prayer… Here’s the version they did in Dublin:

For me, that prayer is the essence of what it means to be a writer… a Real Writer. All writers are silenced from time to time, some by the business of writing, some by writer’s block, some by addiction, illness or infirmity, some by conflicting obligations… there are any number of reasons. Those of us who aren’t writers are ’silenced’ as well … we lose our voices, we lose our way, we lose our faith, our freedom, sometimes even our hope. We find ourselves on the broken hill in the deepest night. And then what?

Leonard Cohen has said, of his dark night, “At a certain point, that background of anxiety and anguish lifted.” I suspect that before it did he may have stood on that broken hill, in his “rags of light” and prayed, as he does in that song.

If it be your will that I speak no more, and my voice be still, as it was before, I will speak no more. I shall abide until I am spoken for, if it be your will. If it be your will, that a voice be true, from this broken hill, I will sing to you…

(Photo: Laurent Gillieron/Keystone/Associated Press)

Thanks, Lenny. A lot of us join you on the broken hill, our voices true, praying for the end of night. Because of you, I for one don’t feel so alone.

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