Posted by Bob on October 26, 1999, at 23:02:40
It is the Halloween season, afterall....
I was in the local B&N today when I decided to check out some of the books that have been appearing in various threads. You know how bookstores will take a section of their racks and instead of stuffing books spine-out into them, they display a few featured books covers out? Well, I hit a section with most of the books mentioned. Oh, and then there was "Sex Tips from a Dominatrix" right below them all, too.
Anyway, I picked up Jamison's new one and started reading the jacket info. It reminded me quite vividly of how much I identified with her descriptions of depression and how much I envied her manias. But there was Jamison's book on suicide, the jacket talking about the writings of people who have taken their own life that are included. Another book about depression ... something about black dogs ... the Beast ... even a book on how psychotropes are doing us more harm than good.
It quickly became so overwhelming -- I really had wanted to buy one or two to read, but I found that I didn't want to identify with any of these people ... particularly those authors who write their memoirs of depression and, according to the jackets, emerge somehow triumphant from the experience.
When I was a junior in college, we read Ordinary People for a psych class. I hated that book. They got it all wrong. The paper I wrote on it was so, I dunno, venemous ... my TA must have truly been clueless not to see what was going on in what I wrote. One brother drowns. The other fails at committing suicide (one of the parts they got wrong ... I felt he should have succeeded).
Is there a point somewhere in here? I guess its just to ask how all y'all deal with it -- how you deal with reading the accounts of others the way they get packed in a book? Insight? Catharsis? Or a sympathetic vibration that drives you down?
I think I'll stick with listening to CDs on the subway for the next few weeks....
Bob
poster:Bob
thread:13987
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19991016/msgs/13987.html