Is writing a cure for depression?
Mike Jimoh
Lacking a writing table, my laptop is where it is named for: not directly on the thighs for medical reasons but on a cushioned plank balanced on my lap, tapping the keys, punching out random recollections to rid me of what I thought was a mild “black dog.”
“Black dog,” as Winston Churchill so aptly described it, was the code name for a severe form of depression he suffered all through his life, especially during his laidback years, after the war with Hitler, after his years at 10, Downing Street, in between his decades-long public engagement and speeches. For a man who relished work, action, or both, for a man whose most cherished form of relaxation was being busy at something, his depressive moods recurred when he was mostly inactive.
Aware of his unusual medical condition, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite PM took to writing and painting. Though far from being a Picasso, he excelled in the former to become a Nobel laureate in 1953. Fate punished him with longevity, and so he experienced bouts of depression to his dying day. Sir Winston was 90 when he died.
Churchill’s “black dog” didn’t come out of the blues. It came encoded in his DNA via his family tree. His grandfather, John Spencer-Churchill, suffered severe bouts of depression just as his son, Randolph, Churchill’s father.
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I have never been depressive nor is there any sign of it in my lineage – maternal and paternal – I am not gloating, please. In that sense, I suspect that what I am suffering from now isn’t medical-type depression but the difficult times on account of being an unemployed idler – I am not gloating about this, either.
Let’s face it your spirit cannot soar when you don’t have credible employment to speak of. Worse still, it becomes ironic when colleagues and others acknowledge your work and worth yet you live on the dole. It is unbearable to live in perpetual inertia, self-induced or not. It makes your future uncertain and almost bleak when you don’t even know what future there is.
Nothing seems to be happening in Nigeria today. Even career criminals are complaining because there’s nothing to steal anymore. Before now, hard-eyed hoodlums could surprise a bank or two on a good day. But technology has rendered such daring raids useless. Neither has the cashless policy helped much; where moneybags used to log bricks of cash around in Ghana-must-go bags to and from banks, they now rely on electronic transfers, thus leaving the thieves in open-mouthed amazement and confusion.
Ever resourceful, some of them have turned their attention to opportunistic crimes such as kidnapping which, in some convoluted way, makes sense. If the money is hard to find in banks, homes, or wherever, abducting humans (father, mother, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, cousin, or just about anyone, farmer, lawyer, professor, doctor) should be more lucrative. Not so?
It’s been so now for some time, yielding oodles and oodles of cash to kidnappers and bandits bold enough to strike out at unsuspecting victims in transit on highways, at home in churches, mosques, farms, and some such vulnerable locations like educational institutions.
For ordinary John citizens, life has never been much harder, many of them going through some kind of hardscrabble existence, mostly living for the day and unable to plan for weeks or even months. The economy is in recession, which is bad news for all but particularly so for the jobless. Companies are laying off workers due to the rising cost of production. A major brewery with decades of operation in the country recently announced it will be relocating to Ghana next year.
In journalism, where I have a comparative advantage, offers are as few as my keenness to work is huge. To be sure, not many media houses break even today let alone hire more staff. One potential employer groused about my age recently. “But didn’t writing get better with age?” He pretended not to hear me, looking over and above my head, whistling a soft tune.
The other day, a friend took me along to the publisher of a specialized all-gloss magazine hoping to resuscitate a once popular monthly. In his office, the publisher spoke without letting out about his vision for the publication, spinning ideas upon ideas like an energetic performer with more rabbits to pull from his hat. “Send your CV to so and so,” he declared imperiously after the meeting. I was elated.
I sent him a carefully-worded reminder through sms after personally dropping the CV at the appointed place and time. No response. I called as follow-up. No response. In the end, his performance turned out to be, as George Orwell once quipped, “lending an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Well, I put all that down to the economy, stupid!
There have been several such put-downs that can, bit by bit, erode the confidence of even the stoutest of heart, from friends, former colleagues, and supposedly friendly neighbours, those who, unwittingly but assiduously, gauge your gradual ascendancy or come down on the social ladder.
How is he doing? Does he have a job? Is he married? Where does he live? Does he drive a Sports Utility Vehicle and so on?
I once chanced on a piece about the austere but accomplished life of a Hungarian professor of mathematics, Paul Erdos. Distinguished in every academic sense, Prof. Erdos denied himself all worldly acquisition, going about Europe and America burdened with a half-empty suitcase: no property, no children, nothing.
Arriving at the numerous scientific conferences where he was almost always a sure presence, he would declare: “My brain is in town.” Nobody disputed that, and so equally distinguished professors of mathematics and applied science accorded him due respect, the same way scientists of another generation looked upon Einstein with reverence. But that is Europe, or, as we say here, “na oyinbo land be dat, no be Africa.”
Around here, any jobless, ageing bachelor, however gifted or talented, would surely be looked at and treated differently – and not in flattering terms. “Dat man? E no well,” you often hear only when the subject is safely out of earshot, though. “Something de worry am. I even hear say na im be first pikin,” as if firstborns are duty-bound to be role models. And what if you’re an only child?
“If you don’t have a base, where you work or earn income, you are nobody,” a radio presenter said one night last week. It was the bitterest pill to swallow that night. Sleep flew through the window, leaving me sweating and confused, as if my destiny had already been sealed by unseen hands.
I remembered a touching letter a Jewish woman wrote to her sons before she was gassed in Auschwitz. Crushed by her suffering and that of others and the incredulity of it all, she lamented thusly: “I live with such a sense of unreality as if I were standing like a spectator beside my own fate.”
It is a feeling most depressives know too well, that feeling of things going awry and unable to do much about it to redeem oneself. Virginia Woolf had the misfortune of falling into that pit back in time. The eponymous author of To the Lighthouse didn’t survive it. A manic depressive, she wrote mostly to dispel her private demons. In the end, unable to cope, despite a doting and understanding spouse, Woolf loaded her pockets with rocks one day and then walked into a river the better to sink to the bottom like a piece of stone plonked down a lake.
Her co-depressive and colleague Ernest Hemingway didn’t fare any better either. Revered by his rivals and contemporaries such as Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, and a phalanx of the literary smart set in America and Europe, a Nobel in Literature, Papa put a gun to his chest one day and pulled the trigger. Of a possible cause for his suicide, Professor Harry Garuba late of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa once suggested Hemingway had nothing to offer anymore by way of literary accomplishment.
Hemingway’s senior colleague from hallway around the world Fyodor Dostoyevski suffered severe bouts of depression, famously before and while writing his magnum opus Crime and Punishment. Author of The Wretched of the Earth Franz Kafka wrote mostly, it has been suggested by literary historians, to rid himself of what he dubbed his “Mice,” the medical equivalent of Churchill’s “Black dog.”
For me today as I sit in a poky apartment, laptop where it should be, fingers spider-touching the keyboard, I feel a certain release from the internal turmoil and tension that has been building within me for some time.