Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
There is no physical manifestation of my “illness.” Would I become psychotic and want to off myself? I know I wouldn’t do anything rash like actually jump off a bridge. I’m too much of a coward. Instead I’ll just lie in my bed and let the days pass by. That’s my physical manifestation, sleeping for days in bed.
Elisa probably didn’t know this, but what she was doing is actually considered a healthy way to manage depression. Verbalizing one’s depression—creating a lexicon for how it feels and what its features are and then sharing those impressions with others—is considered a crucial aspect of self-care for depressives.
In one passage, Elisa described her boyfriend trying to get her out of bed and her refusing to move.
Depression is “the most debilitating, humiliating disease I have ever been subjected to. It makes a fool of you. [It] sucks out every shard of hope or motivation that you ever had in your body, and it makes you want to destroy yourself.”
This lethargy is, of course, one of the hallmarks of severe depression, along with disrupted appetite and sleep troubles (both oversleeping and undersleeping).
Scientists have been trying for years to determine why exactly major depression alters so dramatically one’s sense of identity. While there is much to learn, what we know is that depressive events trigger major changes to the biochemistry of the brain, affecting the movement, levels, and functionality of neurotransmitters (including serotonin and norepinephrine), synapses, neurons, gene expression, hypothalamic and cortical functions, the thyroid releasing hormone (TRH), the amygdala and possibly the hypothalamus, melatonin, prolactin, body temperature, cortisol secretion, thalamus circuitry, and more.
It is difficult sometimes to differentiate what is a cause and what is an effect, but what is clear from brain scans is that an episode of severe depression can permanently alter the brain.
Elisa’s earliest references to antidepressants are vague but it appears that she sought treatment from a doctor during her later teenage years and was prescribed antidepressants. Like many people who suffer depression, at times Elisa questioned the legitimacy of the “illness” and the need for taking medication.
Part of me is still in denial that I’m not sick and this can be solved without pills. No matter the argument against, I think taking the pills is weakness. I am not strong enough, I do not have the courage or conviction to do the right thing.
And then there’s always the cynic saying depression is a made up disease so Big Pharma can make us all dependent on these pills and thus they are rich.
BETRAYAL 2.0
A big part of accepting depression involves your social network, she wrote on Formspring:
With my friends in particular, I think I have had depression for so long that I would have hoped they would have found a way to support me. It’s just really hard to take when they have absolutely no response when I say I’m having a bad day. The whole of November so far has been the shittiest in my life and my friends are busy with school and so forth (understandable) but I don’t think I ask too [much] if they could check in on me once in a while (a text message even) especially after I basically resorted them to tears after telling them how disappointed I am in them.
Social isolation from depression may have been a factor in her ill-advised solo trip to the West Coast. Elisa described herself as a “fiercely loyal friend” but felt betrayed.
Elisa describes a specific night, her nineteenth birthday, on which she was drinking with one of her best friends from high school. Evidently, this friend had, unbeknownst to Elisa, made plans to drink with her boyfriend that night. Elisa started to cry and because of her inebriation was especially emotional and infuriated. She tried to physically stop her friend from leaving, at which point the friend called her boyfriend to alter the plans so that she could stay with Elisa, who obviously needed her. But later in the evening, Elisa noticed that three of her friends had left and when she went to look for them, she noticed her best friend trying to slip out unnoticed.
I will never speak to this friend again. We were the closest friends in high school and she dumped 5 years of friendship so she could drink with a loser guy and her douchebag of a boyfriend who insulted my sister.
This and other stories suggest that many of Elisa’s friends did not always know how to help her. Despite her fierce loyalty as a friend, Elisa’s mercurial moods and depression may have isolated her from the people closest to her.
BLESS THE INTERNET
The Internet, for Elisa, was a tool in the fight against depression and loneliness. When she discovered the social blogging platform Tumblr, it was the beginning of an important relationship that she often wrote about in anthropomorphic terms. Tumblr was her best friend, sometimes her only friend, the “solace to her woes.”
She often used the Internet for research and perusing fashion blogs, but she wasn’t keen on Facebook, which felt like a facade, a social hall of mirrors where happiness would forever elude her.
She dabbled in the other platforms—Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter—but there was something about the architecture and community of Tumblr that soothed her. She became a frequent blogger and found a sense of catharsis in divulging her life with the anonymous invisible wall of faces.
Elisa used the Internet to communicate with others about depression.
“I am using this tumblr,” she said, “as a platform to record my progress to get life in order and stop lying in bed letting the depression take over my life.”
She wrote to one Tumblr user:
Oh greyface you have unfortunately become a member of the sad club. We number in the millions and we roam the internet feeling very lonely and desperately want some sort of human connection.
Bless the internet. All those who wish to find a way to express their sadness can go there and feel less alone. So many of the tumblrs I follow seem to carry the same grief as me in some way or another . . . Thanks to internet we record our lives and put it on some stage for creepers to stalk and follow so they can stop thinking about their own troubles for a moment and escape into someone else’s.
Elisa knew that while the Internet allowed her freedom and solidarity, there were dangers associated with sharing personal information online. Transparency and self-expression in the age of the Internet existed alongside a dark truth: Online followers and friends can, if they choose, use your social media posts to track your movements. Later, I would find a websleuth who had done just that with Elisa’s posts.
But the Internet was a necessary emotional outlet for Elisa. In what would prove to be a grim irony, the Internet became her haven, a place where she could be her true self. She spent much of her social life on the Internet, making it so poetically, eerily sad that that’s where she would ultimately reside in death, as a viral horror story entombed and immortalized for all to consume.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEROTONIN
I started taking antidepressants and mood stabilizers when I was eighteen, and have been on various cocktails and medleys of them since. I’m a valued customer of the pharmaceutical industry. They probably have a framed photograph of my face in the company boardrooms.
Despite my cynicism toward the Big Pharma industry, my desire to not be abjectly miserable consistently wins out over any sociopolitical protests.
The stigma over depression, mental illness, and pharmaceutical treatment has started to abate in recent years, but there is still a deep cultural scarlet letter embossing the foreheads of people who take psychiatric meds. Many of the prevailing viewpoints toward psychiatric illness have carried into the current era from “unenlightened” times, albeit they usually don’t result in outright violence.
In the ancient eras of Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, and the Middle East people commonly attributed aberrant behavior and mental activity as spirit possession. During this and even in later epochs, people exhibiting this behavior, which today we might diagnose as being symptomatic of schizophrenia or bipolar