A percolating coffee pot sounds a lot like a person dying of lung cancer trying to breathe. I made this analogy at age 8, sitting in my aunt Sally’s apartment in Springfield, Missouri, surrounded by depressed relatives. “What’s that bubbling sound? It sounds like Granny Anne.” I was just being honest. She died that night…
allied in nature, character, or properties
Tagged depression
The bends: The day I texted a suicide hotline from a philosophy conference
I am only half listening. It’s all too fast—for what I worry is too sick a mind. But something cues me back in. The speaker, David M. Peña-Guzmán, from San Francisco State University, is talking about the phenomenology of whales, but what catches my attention is when he mentions the bends. He explains that the…
A depressed Sisyphus* watches The Sopranos in bed
*Sisyphus, from the Greek Myth, was a king charged with the eternal punishment of endlessly pushing a boulder uphill, a boulder which would only, once it got to the top, roll all the way back down again. A just keep swimming mantra of old times. Albert Camus, that philosopher of the absurd, imagines Sisyphus not…
When the light is gone
As a man who walks daily with depression and anxiety, I often find myself in the darkness wondering what happened to my life. Dreams and possibilities seem to have fled into a yawning cavern of disappointment and meaningless loneliness. Reality reverberates with a cacophony of anxious voices echoing despairingly in my soul. It is from…



