Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2000 by Abigail Cheever

While Styron the award-winning novelist would never have committed such a faux pas as to insult the foundation honoring his work, Styron the depressive couldn't keep track of his dates, times, and obligations. "Dominated" by the illness and its "sinister hallmarks," the organized and socially reliable novelist finds that depression, in his words, "completely master[ed] my thinking, creating in me such obstinate determination that now I was able to blandly insult the worthy Simone del Duca." As Styron remembers, he came to his senses, "flabbergasted, stunned with horror at what I had done... [and] fantasized a table at which sat the hostess and the Academie Francaise, the guest of honor at La Coupole" (15). Like Primo Levi, about whose suicide even his friends feel such unwarranted shame and disappointment, Styron cannot control his irrational behavior; he is "mastered" by the depression that overcame him. When he insults the "worthy Simone del Duca," he is not himself.

Under this theory, then--arguably the most common in current circulation--depression is an illness that interferes with the capacity of the self to be itself Thus the person who killed Primo Levi was in some fundamental respect not Levi, and to blame him is to mischaracterize depression's mastery. Styron thus provides a strictly functional account: there are certain individuals who have a condition that prevents them from being themselves; one must correct this condition to enable full selfhood. As Styron describes his gradual recovery, he "felt himself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again" (75), and--lest anyone confuse mere sexuality with full selfhood--his physical reawakening to the self accompanies a rediscovered interiority: he "had [his] first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable" (75).

If this account of depression-as-illness is correct, however, it is unclear why Styron implies an identity between gay and depressed individuals. Despite widespread disagreement about the psychological or biological basis of homosexuality, there is general consensus that homosexuality neither prevents the individual from being himself nor represents an illness that can or should be cured. To the contrary, being gay is importantly understood as self-constitutive, as Sontag's own discussion makes clear. In comparison to the afflicted, about whom there can be no accurate "national stereotypes," Sontag observes that "in the 1970s... many male homosexuals reconstituted themselves as something like an ethnic group, one whose distinctive folkloric custom was sexual voracity" (AIDS 164). When HIV entered the gay community, it may have flushed "out an identity that might have remained hidden" and proved a "creator of community," but that emerging community importantly defined itself around being gay, not around being sick (AIDS 112-13).

The analogy between depression and homosexuality would make more sense if Styron claimed that depression itself is incurable despite the abatement of symptoms--and indeed, Styron is pessimistic about all varieties of therapy, commenting on "the inexplicable nature of depression and the difficulty of its treatment" (11). The implication of the comparison is that depression is in some way a permanent condition that defines even asymptomatic intervals. By this account, depression might operate not unlike alcoholism as understood by Alcoholics Anonymous, in which the afflicted may successfully control the disease by avoiding liquor but must always understand himself to be an alcoholic--even in the absence of alcoholic behaviors. Caroline Knapp writes in her memoir of alcohol addiction that "you wake up one morning and some indefinable tide has turned forever and you can't go back. You need it; it's a central part of who you are.., a slow, gradual, elusive becoming" (6, 8). That "becoming" is crucially irrevocabl e; at her core Knapp understands that "alcoholism is a part of me, a reality I am learning to live with" (269-70). But is this the condition of the depressive? In the same way that Knapp comprehends herself to be crucially defined by her dependence on alcohol, a formerly depressive self could potentially operate as a self defined in opposition or a self under siege. A self that must always fight to be itself. But against what does the former depressive fight? An alcoholic might spend every day battling the temptations of alcohol but, by Styron's own account, neither a depressive's behavior nor his character caused his depression. By extension, then, a former depressive's behavior and character should not be able to cause a recurrence. Eternal vigilance does not guarantee freedom from relapse. What is the content of depression-in-remission, in the absence of actual depressive symptoms?