The hidden horrors of depression

It took literary critic and author Daphne Merkin 15 years to finally complete her memoir, “This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression,” a keenly personal examination of her long history with the clinical disorder and the destabilizing childhood that may, or may not, have contributed to her adult despair. 

Invited as part of The White Hart’s 2017 Speaker Series in partnership with Oblong Books and Music, Merkin read from passages of her publication to a full room at the inn on Thursday, Feb. 16. 

The daughter of Orthodox Jewish German immigrants, Merkin grew up on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Her father was a Wall Street banker who “was 42 when he got married, did not have a paternal bone in his body,” and left his children in the care of a “brutal” nanny “who was physically abusive and terrifying in all manner possible.” 

With candor and thoughtfulness, Merkin described wrestling with the concept of “nature versus nurture” in correlation to depression, her experience with therapy and hospitalization, avoiding electroconvulsive therapy and her close relationship with her now-adult daughter. She recalled lows interspersed with notes of high achievement: She was 20 years old when her first New York Times book review was published. 

“In my 20s I was put on medication for the first time, what was then a trial run of Prozac. I wish I’d bought stock in the company.”

Reading from her book, Merkin illustrated the unmethodical way clinical depression can seize her, regardless of outside circumstances. 

“They come on, such suicidally colored periods, at times like these. I am writing this in the winter at my desk in New York City, when the days are short, evenings start early, the sky lacks light, and you have ceased admiring your own efforts to keep going. Although they can also come on when the day is long and the light never-fading, in early spring or ripest summer. They come because your mood, which has been sliding perceptibly downward for weeks, even months, has hit rock bottom.”

She described depression as a “torpor that claims” her, robbing her of “whatever it is that moves other people to bustle about out there in the world.” 

Later she read, “Never mind your daughter, your friends, your writing, the taste of something delicious, a new book or the TV series everyone is watching — the things that are supposed to moor you to this world. Even those who know you best don’t understand the glare bouncing off your eyes, the glare that prevents you from seeing up the road.”