The Hilarious World of Depression

by John Moe

People should not underestimate the ability of the difficulty of suicide to dissuade someone from committing suicide. If it’s inconvenient, it’s like, ‘I’m not going to try to do this.’ For me, there’s always the dull desire to not exist, but it’s not an impulse to do something about it at the moment.”

“My own low self-esteem has kept me from suicide many times,” he says.

The song was “Blasphemous Rumours” by Depeche Mode, which muses that God must have a sick sense of humor.

An interjection here to say: don’t do it. People care about you. I care about you, and we likely haven’t even met. If you need help and live in the United States, confidential help is available at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255. It’s free twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The 8255 spells TALK on your phone.

Addiction is an illness, but free will must be part of it, right? If I’m addicted or depressed and I kill someone, I’m still responsible and I’m still going to jail. And that free will portion of Rick and Dad was the part that made me so confused and, subsequently, angry. I was angry because I couldn’t do anything.

But if depression could be cured by things going well, we’d have a lot more Nirvana and Elliott Smith records.

The general public doesn’t understand depression meds, and when people don’t understand something, they fear it. And when they fear it, they mock it and/or attack it.

In reality, antidepressant medication is pretty much a chemistry experiment, and a ton of things can influence the efficacy of medication. What works for one person might not work at all for someone else. The wrong dosage, too high or too low, can make you a total wreck. Taking the meds inconsistently can be as bad as not taking them at all, or sometimes worse.

Jenny Jaffe has been on some form of meds since she was a kid. The first time, she thought, “‘This is the baseline people function with?’ Like my brain is just processing things as they’re coming in and not necessarily looking at everything as another reason to have a panic attack. And I’m letting go of thoughts more easily and I’m not necessarily wanting to kill myself right now. It doesn’t change who you are; it just levels your personal playing field a little bit.”

“And I just remember one day not minding the Christmas music. And it was so extreme. It felt like I was dancing in the street like Scrooge. All I did was just not mind it. All I did was feel not bothered by every single thing. I was not happier than anyone else. I was just able to cope.”

I would have to walk the earth like this, no bullet in my pocket, no secret ticket out of here. Which is Hell. All of the depression, the grief, the guilt, the regret, the disorientation would be mine forever and I would be awake for it, strapped into the chair like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, a guy squeezing drops into my eyes as I’m forced to watch every second of footage.

I’ve never cottoned to the idea of a big invisible space monster called God dealing out events in a wise and prudent way, but it still made a kind of poetic sense that having killed my brother, I would be cursed to trudge through life carrying the burden of my actions with me. Rick got the death penalty, and I got life without parole.

kids have to get to birthday parties.” A few months after all this, a trained therapist advised me that my emotional reserves would be almost nonexistent for the foreseeable future, so I shouldn’t really go looking for them. Depression already had me at a disadvantage on emotional reserves.

After this edit, the obit is of someone still fairly young who died without explanation. No car crash, no cancer, no information at all. And when that’s the case, readers will likely figure it was suicide because they will detect that there is something the family is too ashamed to say.

To me, that omission always has some bad side effects. One is to give camouflage to the disease itself, because if no one ever talks about it, then everyone is much less likely to detect it. To discuss addiction or depression or other mental illnesses is to provide information about them, including their pathologies and symptoms.

Still, I thought at the time, that wasn’t who Rick was. That was not the Rick who did the thing that brought us all here today. Their version of Rick was the opening chapter or two of a very bleak biography. A history of the Beatles that ends in Hamburg. There’s more to the story, family friends. And as all these stories of Rick piled up, I became increasingly frustrated and felt the anger duct open. They were leaving out the parts where Rick fills his body with drugs and where he fills his head with a bullet. They didn’t have stories about the Rick who had a shotgun in his bedroom.

After a little while, I became cynical about the event in general. The only thing anyone had said that made any sense was on the boat earlier in the day when Diane said that we shouldn’t be here. This service shouldn’t be happening. Rick should have been alive when these friends of my parents died. He should have gone to their services. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Maybe I should go to his service, but I should be decades older. My kids should go to his service, but not until they were like fifty years old.

Society should have been evolved enough to notice problems he had with hyperactivity when he was a kid. Schools should have noticed his learning disabilities and addressed them, rather than concluding that he was a bad kid and a dumb kid. He shouldn’t have accepted that assessment. He shouldn’t have thrown away his school career as a result. Those guys at the airport shouldn’t have offered drugs to a kid. He shouldn’t have accepted the drugs. I should have had more sympathy. I should have called him back. America should run a mental health care system that isn’t shameful. America should offer people with mental illnesses like addiction, depression, and psychosis a chance to get help and stay alive.

And here was this thing, mental illness, that can be helped simply by talking about it. If Rick had been able to overcome the discrimination against mental illness in our society and in his own mind and talk to more people about what was going on, he could have gotten help, and then we wouldn’t be here. That’s not all there is to mental illness or suicide, I realize that, but if more people were able to freely speak about...

But what do we as a society choose to do instead? We freely elect to NOT talk about it. That is so goddamn stupid. It’s like we could administer the polio vaccine by saying the words “polio vaccine” but elected to not do that. I guess...

Few among us, when we were kids, were taught by the adults in charge to talk about such things.

Gary Gulman’s

Coming forward about my own condition was a different story. I was afraid. If I told the world I was depressed, it seemed pretty likely that my professional opportunities would dry up fast. Who would want to work with me? Who would be able to trust me? Would other employers want to take the chance on a rapidly aging and openly crazy host? At the same time, I simply could not continue to preach that people should open up about mental illness while not doing so myself.

something fell flat, my mind told me, it was because I’m an unfunny person and a bad person and dumb and I’ve let down the audience and all the other people working on the show.

“But how can I be having constant bleak despair when I have the dream job of a lifetime?” Which is a dumb question. Depression doesn’t evaluate your career. Depression wants to kill you. “Oh, you got a raise? Oh, you got passed over for promotion? Oh, nothing happened at work? Cool, cool. Whatever. Don’t care. Listen, I want to kill you,” says depression.

The thing about a traumatic fixated-upon memory is that it is exhausting to the brain. I wasn’t just haunted by this memory, I was tired all the time. Ever wonder why saddies can’t get out of bed? For many, that’s one of the reasons: an obsessive memory simply wears them out.

You can’t move to Minnesota and get away from all your problems. Or Seattle. Or New York or Los Angeles or Rome or Melbourne or Mars. Your problems have maps, and they will find you. And

To pull off that best case would mean trafficking in some psychotherapy clichés like finding your happy place or resolving mother issues. These are terms dragged out when someone wants to make fun of therapy. In popular thinking, imagining a happy place in order to help your brain is a denial of reality. This is a common way to dismiss mental illness and to dismiss possible ways to address it. This thinking often comes from the same people who believe that the best way to treat depression is to “snap out of it” or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” These are the same people who will bemoan “political correctness” when asked to treat those different from themselves with at least a minimum of politeness. Their mockery, their eye-rolling, and their scorn are, to my way of thinking, the result of being taught the same discriminatory perspectives shared by the people who raised them.

So these jerks make jokes and roll eyes, and the average person gets a little more hesitant to go to therapy and work hard at it because they’ve been told that these issues—which might be causing a lot of pain and stunting development—are ridiculous. As that discriminatory mindset further infests society, people might believe that therapy itself is ridiculous and that people who seek it are ridiculous. And then people who need help don’t get it.

My exact peaceful location is one specific spot on the beach, looking out on some huge rock formations in the water. It’s warm and breezy, and in my imagination I’m holding a Tillamook Brown Cow ice cream cone and my kids are there and somehow being civil to one another.

We established that spot on the beach as a safe place and rehearsed how to return to it in my mind, both during the impending EMDR sessions and in other parts of life.

The goal in my EMDR work was to take what I knew intellectually to be real, that Rick was responsible for his own death, and make it what I actually feel as the primary response whenever I think about how he died.

None of these sensations needed to be retrieved so much as let back in, me holding the door for the long-suppressed demons waiting in the lobby outside. With the sense memory came all the feelings of that moment. Whereas back in 2007 shock prevented me from fully experiencing the present, no such shock existed now. I was consumed by the pain of the past. It was awful. Really awful.

The guilt and all the other thoughts about Rick’s death, which had several years to mutate and calcify, now went to the thought that Rick shot himself, a horrible truth that both made sense and allowed me to live my life. It all worked.

Depressed people do this all the time. They take their fragile, underdeveloped selves and put them in what they hope will be a sturdier and more nurturing container. A shitty, ill-fitting carapace.

Of course, the other option for saddies, besides torpor, is keeping frantically busy.

Wimpy whose whole thing is that he wants hamburgers but is broke. But what does Wimpy do? He promises he’ll pay you on Tuesday if you buy him a hamburger today. And I would watch that and think, “Why don’t they show us what happens on Tuesday?” Because on Tuesday, Wimpy has either come up with cash (unlikely) or has to answer to some sailors who have a habit of resorting to violence as their primary means of resolving conflict. Tuesday is going to be HELL for Wimpy.

The normies think that it’s about being bummed out or lazy. That may be a factor for some, but a much more common reason is that, again, we’re exhausted. Having a brain spinning like that, having a brain bottoming out like that, carrying around that psychic baggage all the time—it wears you out. The body might be expending very little actual energy, but the mind is running a marathon combined with an obstacle course. Are you depressed and find yourself tired all the time? That may be because you do a decathlon every day.

Attendant to all that was an accompanying shame that I was depressed at all. I had a wife who loved me, children who loved me and who were going to be good adults, a home. And I still had a job. I also had all the privileges society could provide. I was a straight white guy with a college education, so all the machinery of our civilization was arranged to protect me and help me. What the hell did I have to complain about? The thing is, I knew better than to think depression was a result of something. It’s not a reaction, it’s a medical condition.

He doesn’t believe there are more depressed comedians than there are depressed dentists; it’s just that comedians talk about depression as part of their job. “More than any other profession, if a comedian is depressed, they have to very aggressively battle that state of mind in what they do. They’re up on stage, and if they’re depressed and very open and natural on stage, they’re going to talk about that. A guy that is a bricklayer or a cabinet- maker, their depression might not find its way into their art, the way it would a comedian.”

What I wanted to ask of future guests instead was a bit simpler. What the hell is depression? What does it feel like? How do you go on living? What works for you and what doesn’t? How does depression bend your mind?