Heather Bauchop
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’?
My early developmental experience included growing up on a farm in the Waikato. Although I enjoyed helping to care for the calves, lambs, piglets, chickens, puppies, and kittens, I never wanted to become a farmer. Animal handling practices at the time were not always baby-friendly, and some were cruel. It is reassuring that the practice has improved to some extent.
Off Prozac after a bit over a year, for a time there were colours and movement. But not the ease that I assumed came to other people. I still felt out of step, uneasy in the world. Looking at life through glass, trapped outside on an exposed ledge. And then over time – months or perhaps years – there was the fog and the rattle of chains and the familiar cell. Looking back, I realise that twenty-five years have passed, twenty-five years where I have made my way in and out of fog, with some years encapsulated in green and white pills, and some years marked by the awareness that the fog might roll in, and underneath all, was that the rattle of chains…. (depression is a hydra demanding over-writing and mixed metaphors, while eluding all). Even with the pills, the chains are still there, I am just more aware I am carrying them and that some of the weight is shared with modern medicine. Depression is a kind of knowing – there is no unknowing.
In New Zealand, a total of 36,684 referrals were made for people needing mental health crisis assessment during the 2015-16 financial year. Nearly 13,000 referrals were made for people needing an overnight stay – some patients being referred multiple times.