depression – Page 2 – Sonya Ellen Mann

This website was archived on July 21, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.

Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Coming To Terms With Inequality (As In, I’m Still Doing It)

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

My economic politics are conflicted. On the one hand, I believe in relying on hard work and individual competency to get ahead. On the other hand, I realize that people are not created equal in any sense of the word. We can venerate the Declaration of Independence as much as we want, but ideals are ideals, not reality.

“Welcome to the Brave New World, one featuring even fewer haves and more have-nots than the current one.”

As someone who has suffered from debilitating depression, I know that hard work is not available to everyone. As for individual competency, that’s mostly luck. I happened to be born to wealthy white Ivy-educated parents, both very smart people. It sounds like bragging but I’m trying to be matter-of-fact. I’m intelligent and I do good work, because of cumulative circumstances beyond my control.

Good artists make art. Great ones make money. — Illustration by Christopher Dombres.

Anyway, this is related to something I posted on Medium: “Ew, Who Wants Meritocracy?” (The piece ended up there because I was in the process of revamping this website, so it was down.)

Crazy People Aren’t Real

Posted on March 22, 2015April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

A quote from the story “Jumpers” by Ted Friend, about Golden Gate Bridge suicides:

“Kevin Briggs, a friendly, sandy-haired motorcycle patrolman, has a knack for spotting jumpers and talking them back from the edge; he has coaxed in more than two hundred potential jumpers without losing one over the side. He won the Highway Patrol’s Marin County Uniformed Employee of the Year Award last year. Briggs told me that he starts talking to a potential jumper by asking, ‘How are you feeling today?’ Then, ‘What’s your plan for tomorrow?’ If the person doesn’t have a plan, Briggs says, ‘Well, let’s make one. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back here later.'”

I cried when I read that passage. Later in the essay, Friend reports:

“Kevin Briggs, the empathic patrolman, was surprised to learn, when he and some colleagues had a week’s training with a psychiatrist earlier this year, that suicidal people ‘are real people—not crazy people but real people suffering from depression.'”

The implied dichotomy is crazy people versus real people. So… I’m not a real person? Or maybe he means that paranoid schizophrenics, “raving” homeless people, aren’t real. If you’re too crazy you don’t qualify as “normal” so you’re hardly a person at all, right? This is Briggs’ insight after mental health training.

I can’t believe this ludicrous world. Whenever it starts to seem okay, I read something like this.

All the troubles lie on his shoulder — Photo by Rana Ossama.

The Dubious Criminality of Suicide

Posted on March 12, 2015May 20, 2016 by Sonya Mann

“A crime has been committed, but the victim and the perpetrator are one and the same. That is the essential conundrum of suicide, and a good part of what makes it so hard to discuss.”

Quote from a New Yorker article called “On Writing About Suicide and Not Finding Catharsis” by Philip Connors. The essay is a promo for his recent book, All the Wrong Places, billed by the publisher as “a powerful look back at wayward years — and a redemptive story about finding one’s rightful home in the world.” I can believe it; the article was good.

But listen, suicide is not a crime and we should stop describing it as such. I don’t have any beef with Connors and I don’t begrudge his bitterness. However, phrases like “victim of suicide” don’t make sense — is that the dead kid or the family? Which I guess is supposed to be the point. It’s a rhetorical device.

This is a bad time of year to be depressed — Image via wackystuff.

Suicide is definitely a tragedy. However, not every sad, violent thing that happens is a crime. (Although suicide is against the law, after a fashion, it doesn’t qualify as “a grave offense […] against morality” unless you’re a terrible kind of Catholic.) Let’s not blame people who commit suicide for suffering so much that they felt the only choice was to snuff out their own existence. They are brave in the sense of “persevering even though you’re scared”, and sometimes even justified. Suicide is not an ignominious act.

You might think that cultivating shame around suicide will discourage people from killing themselves. What actually happens is that suicidal people who haven’t taken the proverbial-or-literal plunge are too embarrassed to talk about their despair. Mental illness is isolating enough already. Let’s just say, I speak from experience.

Talking Casually About Depression

Posted on January 25, 2015April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

Am I allowed to make offhand remarks about being depressed, or is that too weird and upsetting for the people around me?

I don’t mean joking about being “depressed” despite being mentally healthy. I am actually a crazy person, of the sad type, and sometimes I’m suffering. That sounds hyper-dramatic but really, I suffer.

This morning I was drinking tea at the kitchen table and my mom told me, “I vote for you to wash your hair.” It’s an ongoing thing between us: I don’t care about being dirty but she thinks I’ll feel better if I’m clean. What I wanted to respond was, “Yeah, I was pretty depressed last night, so I probably should wash my hair.”

My dad was sitting at the table across from me, working on his computer. He made a joke about not realizing that votes were being collected. In such a normal, un-fraught situation, can I say what I was thinking? Is it too raw and candid? The words felt like they might be too raw and candid, too light for the serious subject. I stayed quiet.

My persistent dysfunction is a Big Deal. But it’s also an everyday part of my life. I feel like I should be able to talk about my mood like I would talk about the weather.

At the same time, I don’t want to disturb my conversational partners, to accidentally indicate that I’m in crisis. A certain amount of crisis simply attends my regular schedule. I wish I felt comfortable commenting on that.

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