The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Secondary school students in New Zealand have recently finished sitting their end of year external examinations. One of those papers was a Level 3 History exam, in which final year students were asked to respond to this quote from Julius Caesar: “Events of importance are the result of trivial causes”.
After the exam, 1300 students signed a petition asking that markers not downgrade their answers if they hadn’t understood the meaning of the word ‘trivial’. The gist of their argument was that ‘trivial’ is not a word that seventeen and eighteen-year-old English speakers in 2018 can be expected to know, and therefore, for fairness, a definition should have been included in the exam paper.
British documentary film maker Katinka Blackford Newman’s 2016 book, The Pill That Steals Lives, opens with a nauseating story: a mother kills her eleven year old daughter and ten year old son, and then turns the carving knife on herself. She wakes in the secure unit of a private psychiatric unit convinced that there are cameras trained on her every movement. She’s on suicide watch and diagnosed with psychotic depression.
The mother in the story is Katinka Blackford Newman. But it turns out she didn’t kill her kids – she hallucinated killing her kids. Newman had had a toxic reaction to a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant.
I was meaning to write something about darkness and the health implications of street lights, but I’ve been swept away by Jay Griffiths’ 2016 memoir Tristimania: a diary of manic depression . Having previously read Griffiths’ Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, I had meant to track down more of her writing, but had forgotten. It was a joyous surprise to find Tristimania on the Dunedin Public Library’s Book Bus.
An award-winning non-fiction writer, Griffiths recounts a harrowing year of illness with a prolonged episode of mixed-state hypomania (for which Griffiths prefers to use ‘manic depression’ or the older term ‘tristimania’).
Heather is a plant name: a scrubby evergreen shrub. In New Zealand, a weed; in Scotland, where I come from, a symbol of identity. So it is with curiosity that I read in Robert Macfarlane’s 2015 book, Landmarks, that heather is a noun you will no longer find in the Oxford Junior Dictionary.
Heather, along with other nature words including acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, kingfisher, newt, otter, pasture and willow, have been removed from the dictionary as they no longer reflect the “consensus experience of modern-day childhood” – an urban, technologically-literate childhood – a childhood that needs only words such as attachment, broadband, celebrity, cut-and-paste and MP3 player.
Writer Andrew Solomon explores depression in Noon Day Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Recounting his own experience, he weaves a personal and cultural analysis of the illness. His is a sophisticated and deeply human discussion of our vulnerabilities. Solomon rejects distance, embracing personal stories and the wonderful intimate complexities of sufferers and their lives. Solomon also looks at how factors such as poverty and culture enter into diagnoses, something that has been largely unrecognised, even by sufferers themselves. Poverty, too, is a dark place.
Solomon’s insight is profound and has the power of an inside view. When Eric Wilson talks about the need for unease, he is doing so from a position of privilege, one that does not recognise that, for many people, what he could call melancholia or depression (depending on the person), leads to deprivation and loss – not to an ability to challenge injustice. Sometimes it is only treatment enables a sufferer to survive. When Peter Kramer talks about depression it is from a comfortable clinician’s point of view. Solomon, however, brings his light touch and careful nuance to the language and experiences of depression. [Read more…] about The intimate complexities of sufferers
There is wide debate about the cultural role of melancholia. American academic Eric Wilson writes of the dangers of bland candy-coloured happiness brought about, he says by swallowing pills. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008) Wilson asks what we are to make of the American ‘obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, for the innocuous smile? What fosters this desperate contentment?’
What would be the effect of ‘annihilating melancholia’ – that ‘major cultural force, a serious inspiration to invention, the muse behind much art and poetry’?
British documentary film maker Katinka Blackford Newman’s 2016 book, 
There is wide debate about the cultural role of melancholia. American academic Eric Wilson writes of the dangers of bland candy-coloured happiness brought about, he says by swallowing pills. In