The Imagery of Depression.

I read a lot about depression, in an effort to try and understand it better. The different analogies that people use in order to describe it fascinate me endlessly. Depression is something that has troubled me since at least my teens, which is when I started to keep a diary about it.

I read a lot about Gabriel Byrne because I like his acting. People can take the piss out of me for this on occasion, which I also find depressing, until I remind myself that they do it on order to compensate for something lacking in their lives, by trying to belittle something good in mine.

This I stumbled across the other day, and it speaks volumes to me.

Excerpted from here: http://tinyurl.com/pbtu3e - An interview in the Irish Sunday Independent "Life Magazine." Interview by Barry Egan.

Emboldenment is mine. Those are the bits where I thought, "Blimey! He's inside my head. He's reading from the script I have written there..."

Of course, Gabriel Byrne has talked about his long, dark nights of the soul, recently describing his depression as being “about trying to not let other people know all you want to do is lie in a corner and have nothing to do with anyone”.

“I don’t think anyone is immune from...” he says, breaking off, when I raise the subject.

“First of all, I would dispel the notion that depression is some form of self-indulgence and some kind of desire to hide away from the world. It is not as simple as that.”

He says he believes “the roots of depression are as much physiological as psychological and emotional; they are a combination of many things”.

The award-winning and internationally acclaimed actor continues that he thinks “some people are more prone to depression than other people. There are some who are just born naturally optimistic. I envy those people. They are born with the happy gene. I don’t think I ever had that.”

He says that he doesn’t “quite buy people who say that they are permanently and totally and utterly happy. I don’t think you can live in this world and not experience the ...” he breaks off again.

“To be fully human would, in my opinion, embrace the notion of fighting against nihilism. You have to battle that. I have battled with depression. The only reason I [talked about depression publicly] was not because I wanted to be another of these people saying, ‘I have depression’ and then people saying, ‘What has he got to be depressed about?’”

That is, he says, a very easy assumption to make. Depression, like many other things in life, is no respecter of class or wealth, or success or lack of success, he adds. “It is something that can be exacerbated by the absence or the surfeit of any one of those things,” Gabriel believes. And he has good reason to believe this.

“Nobody actually really understands where it comes from; why it comes; how long it lasts and why it actually goes. They have theories about serotonin levels in the brain, but nobody truly understands the genesis of depression. But there are things that you can do to offset it. There are a lot of people, for example, who drink to get away from it, but that leads into a vicious cycle,” he says, adding that trying to maintain a positive outlook in life is something that he does daily.

“And there are some days I fall down. But most days I keep standing up. That’s just the way it is. You know, I have accepted it, and I acknowledge it. I don’t try to hide it any more. The only reason I spoke about it was not to do a kind of misery memoir, but so that other people would see it, too.

“People who really know me know that I have a tremendously light and humorous side to me,” he says. “If you spoke to anyone on the set of In Treatment, they would tell you that I am the one who is light-hearted.”

I could vouch for Gabriel’s whoopee-cushion funny side, too — having myself and Liam Neeson in knots of laughter with his anecdotes in a New York bar in 2003; him playing the piano in his red socks with holes in them in Yoko Ono’s apartment in Manhattan in 2001. He uses humour a lot.

“I do, don’t I?” he asks rhetorically. “I think for a lot of people who battle that particular demon, humour is something that they work with. A lot of comedians tend to veer towards that [depression] and humour is some kid of a weapon that they use to defend themselves. Humour is very important to me in my life. I try to keep a light spirit and I try to keep looking outward and forward. I wasn’t somebody who was going around in a black cloud all the time. I mean, most of the time I was in very good humour. These inexplicable attacks would come every so often. I have learnt how to deal with them now.”

Asked to explain how he deals with these inexplicable attacks of darkness, Gabriel says the first thing he has to do is acknowledge it — by acknowledging it, he says: “I mean, by saying: ‘Here it is.’”

And what is it?

“It is like a black serpent in the garden. It is a beautiful sunny day, you are lying under a tree and you know that in the garden somewhere there’s a serpent. Sometimes it can be asleep. Sometimes it can be roused. Sometimes you can step on it by accident. That’s kind of the way I feel about it. I look at it and I say: ‘There you go again.’”

Gabriel tries to do things for himself that are, he says, positive. Keep active. Read. Keep engaged with people. Don’t isolate. Remember that it will pass. It is not the reality of life. And so forth and so on.

“Why today does the world seem dark — whereas yesterday it was bright?” he muses.

“Try to talk to somebody else about it,” Gabriel adds. He says that one of the most difficult things you can do when you are depressed is to reach out and to talk to another human being.

Reaching out can be life saving and it can also be desperately difficult because, he says: “with depression goes a sense of shame and a sense of isolation and so forth. But I would hate to think that my life is defined by it. I think that life presents us all with challenges that we have to overcome and we have to battle.

“Some of us are better at fighting than others. You know,” he continues. “If I didn’t have that, I would have to say I would have a pretty happy life and a pretty contented life; even with the knowledge that [depression] is something that’s there now and again.” There is a final pause before he continues.

“So most of the time — 90% of the time — my life is pretty contented and pretty happy. I don’t want people to go around [thinking I'm] crippled by depression. That’s not true."