Depression is a disease of loneliness, and the privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity; it is a prison. Therapists can be perilously naïve about this. Marcello and all of us who loved Terry were locked out by the same privacy that kept him locked in. Privacy is a fashionable value in the twenty-first century, an overrated and often destructive one; it was Terry’s gravest misfortune. The unknowable in him, which I thought was just a kind of static, was actually his heart.
Friday, August 27, 2010
A kind of static
Via Bookforum, a very good piece in the Yale alumni magazine by Andrew Solomon on his college friend Terry Kirk's suicide:
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I understand that he is upset, but what is he getting at here?
ReplyDeletePrivacy is a fashionable value in the twenty-first century, an overrated and often destructive one; it was Terry’s gravest misfortune.
"Fashionable"? Privacy is actually unfashionable. But should the depressed forfeit their civil right to be left alone? And if they should, who should be allowed to intrude on their lives? What about the person who everyone thinks is depressed, and is not, but just doesn't like people and wishes to be left alone? What about the depressed extrovert with a million friends who isn't gonna say anything?