New York Magazine published an article recently in which they examined ways depression has and has not been normalized. It’s an interesting read, and reflects some of the trends we’ve observed about softening stigmas that still have a way to go. Here’s an excerpt, and if you live in the greater Cleveland area and recognize yourself or someone you love in this article, we hope you’ll reach out.
Daphne Merkin is something of an authority on antidepressants — having relied on them for more than 30 years — but when the subject came up at a dinner party she attended a few years ago, she held her tongue. As the other guests piled on with their critiques of depression medications, she perceived “an unspoken investment in holding depression up to censure, as though it were still, after all these years, a fraudulent bundle of symptoms, an inflated case of malingering that everyone suffers from but that only a select, self-indulgent few choose to make a big deal about.” In her engrossing new memoir This Close to Happy, Merkin describes how she has struggled all her life with clinical depression — and how her suffering has been exacerbated by the stigma attached to mental illness. Depression, she writes, is “a sadness that no one seems to want to talk about in public, not even in this Age of Indiscretion.”
Merkin is in her 60s; she first wrote about her experience with depression and hospitalization for The New Yorker, in 2001, in a piece that also touched on the social fallout of speaking publicly about her struggles. In the years since, activists and doctors have mounted ever more creative and far-reaching campaigns to combat stigma. College students publish their stories of mental illness on widely read, university-sponsored blogs. Survivors of suicide attempts tell their stores in TED Talks and on podcasts. Drug companies pour money into campaigns pushing the idea that depression is a biological problem with a pharmaceutical solution. (Growing up in the 1990s on the Upper West Side, I absorbed that message before I knew what “depression” even meant. I often walked by a building painted with a four-story-tall, all-caps slogan: “Depression is a flaw in chemistry not character.”)