We are told in our culture that depression is the ultimate form of irrationality: that’s how it feels from the inside, and that’s how it looks to the outside. But on the contrary, George and Tirril were reaching the conclusion that, as they wrote then, “clinical depression is an understandable response to adversity.”13 Think about Mrs. Trent, trapped in a dead marriage with a man who couldn’t get work, scrambling to survive, with no chance of a better life—she was being given a guarantee that her life would be a stressful, joyless scramble forever. Didn’t it make more sense, they wondered, to
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