CGR Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter 2000)

Scatter Plots: Depression, Silence, and Mennonite Margins

“It is a serious matter to bring someone back from the dead.”

-T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party[1]

Statisticians talk about “scatter plots,” a series of points on a graph that when carefully plotted and analyzed can be made to yield all sorts of useful information on the correlation between two variables. They have elaborate and rigorous ways of calculating such correlations, and a considerable vocabulary for discussing them.

On the interlocking subjects of depression and silence and Mennonites, there are many more than two variables, and I have no hope of achieving the kind of rigor that statisticians pursue. After a summer of research I have plenty of data, enough for hundreds of “points,” but those points resist being plotted onto a neat graph or yielding a set of clear statistically significant results. When dealing with the knottiest and most troubling human realities, simple conclusions are elusive. But we can hardly abandon those difficult realities, or the people that find themselves within them, merely because of their difficulty. So my effort here is to place some plots, some points, some information, some stories, before you, and hope to weave them all together in a way that might lead toward greater understanding of how depression and silence and Mennonite traditions have intersected, resonated, and reverberated in human lives.

Points for a scatter plot

Point 1

A voice, reading. Words from one of those Little Golden Books for kids you can still get in supermarkets. A low, strangely flattened, slightly hurried voice, as though she didn’t quite trust the story but was resigned to reading it through, hoping it would not take too long. Why? What would be there when she finished? Children don’t ask such questions, or if they do, they ask only in selfish terms: Read another one, Grandma? One more? Read this one again?

What was a child to know about her, there on the couch with the fuzzy, pinkish-brown raised loop upholstery, there in the living room of the small squarish brick house she and Grandpa had built in town. The boy was young, didn’t remember much, didn’t notice much. Why would he remember the note of sadness in her voice when for years he didn’t understand it to be sadness?

Point 2

The boy is ten, on the floor in the upstairs room he shares with his younger brother, a tangle of small metal pieces around him. The Erector Set came to him from his father or his father’s younger brothers, and it’s old, but it has lots of parts and a heavy, clumsy electric motor with a complicated set of gears. He’s already built the elevator and the merry-go-round, and now he’s working on the Ferris wheel.

Footsteps on the stairs. It’s his father, looking through the railing, with something to say. Grandma is gone. The boy doesn’t flail around or cry out. They had gone to see her last night in the hospital, and his grandfather had died a while before. He knows he should be sad, and he is sad. He won’t cry; he’s learned on the playground and in the gym that only sissies cry. Though he never exactly decides not to, he will never finish the Ferris wheel.

Point 3

Henry Stalter, the boy’s great-grandfather, was a curly-haired, vigorous man born in 1872. His only son died in 1915, and Henry decided in his early forties that he’d had enough of farming. He rented out his land, although he continued to live on the farmstead, keep a big garden, and raise chickens. In 1921 his beloved wife Mary also died, and it was just the four girls and Henry. A grandchild remembers Henry saying, “Why farm and work hard when there’s no son to carry on the work?”

Point 4

Music. Perhaps the invocation that used to be sung every Sunday in the Waldo Mennonite Church: “Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.” The boy remembers that chorus well, and a feeling that comes along with it: a sort of yearning that he can’t quite identify, a desire for some kind of miraculous, transforming, otherly experience that he has no language for except the language of the church. What would it mean, to be melted, molded, filled, and used? To be taken out of his little self, away from the flat prairie and the farm and the small church and the small town?

Point 5

Numbers. At least 11 million people in the United States have an episode of depression each year, according to the Epidemiologic Catchment Area Survey. The total cost of the disorder has been estimated at $44 billion. Twenty-eight percent of that is the direct cost of medical, psychiatric, and drug treatment; 17% is the result of the more than 18,000 associated suicides (at least half of all people who commit suicide are severely depressed); and 55% ($24 billion) is due to absenteeism and lowered productivity among the 72% of depressed persons who are in the work force.[2]

Point 6

Definitions. What are we talking about? Professionals talk of two major types of depressive disorders, unipolar and bipolar. The unipolar disorders, which typically do not involve manic periods, include dysthymia (mild but persistent depression), adjustment disorder with depressed mood, and major depressive disorder. Bipolar disorders, which do include manic or hypomanic periods, are further divided into cyclothymia, bipolar I disorder, and bipolar II disorder. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM IV), the standard text of the psychiatric community, offers much more detail.

Here is a section of the description of bipolar II disorder, for example:

The essential feature of Bipolar II Disorder is a clinical course that is characterized by the occurrence of one or more Major Depressive Episodes accompanied by at least one Hypomanic Episode. Hypomanic Episodes should not be confused with the several days of euthymia that may follow remission of a Major Depressive Episode. In addition, the episodes are not better accounted for by Schizoaffective Disorder and are not superimposed on Schizophrenia, Schizophreniform Disorder, Delusional Disorder, or Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. . . .[3]

Even academics like me might find such language difficult to read, aloud or otherwise, without a good deal of pausing and knotting of brows. Yet like most professional discourse it sounds confident, rigorous, and definitive, and in the DSM IV it’s further supported by long, detailed lists. There are exactly nine symptoms of major depression, and patients are to be diagnosed with it if they meet “four criteria that apply to a set of nine symptoms, five or more of which must be observable for the same two-week period.”

One need not be a wild-eyed critic of the psychiatric enterprise to suspect that these attempts at classification are hardly airtight, that such language might prove difficult to correlate closely with actual human lives. Such critics are easy to find; one web site quotes L.J. Davis’s description of the DSM as “the only catalogue in the world that makes money” and accuses it of being “about as scientific and reliable as reading tea-leaves.”[4] Popular books and films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Listening to Prozac, and the work of critics like R.D. Laing and Seth Farber have cast doubt on our definitions of mental health and illness, and have argued that psychiatric “help” can be misguided and destructive even when well-intentioned. David Karp has recently critiqued the “medicalization” of mental illness and the use of disease models to address it.[5]

Even if we grant the overall good intentions of mental health practitioners, and the Mennonites among them in particular, it is a daunting task to make any scheme, no matter how carefully constructed, do justice to the innately subjective, individual, and often fiendishly complex welter of depressive disorders. I have heard plenty of horror stories, and just as many healing stories, about the mental health system. Providing genuine help to people with mental illness, I have come to believe, is one of the most innately difficult challenges that we face.

Point 7

Treatment options: a tangle of drugs and therapies and more radical procedures. Lithium and Prozac, Wellbutrin and Buspar, Xanax and Zoloft and Effexor. St. John’s Wort and banks of sun lamps. Biopsychological and psychodynamic and behavioral and cognitive-behavioral and interpersonal psychotherapeutic approaches. Hospitalization. Electroconvulsive shock therapy. Brain surgery.[6] So many ways and means, all of them sometimes useful, all of them sometimes no good at all. Chekhov’s words ring painfully true: “If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.”[7]

Point 8

Some things we do know. Though depression has no single origin and no single cure, though it exists in many forms and levels of severity, that it troubles and even destroys the lives of many good people is beyond question. While much about it remains obscure, collectively we have an enormous experience and a vast body of information on it. In fact we know a great deal, even if much of it is confusing and little is conclusive. My hope, then, is to use this space for some story-telling, discussion, and reflection on the subject of depression, and some particular Mennonite experiences of depression, but with no claim to being complete or definitive. I will offer some generalizations, but with a keen sense that what I know is still partial, tentative, and open to supplementation and correction.

Further plotting

No one who has battled a serious depressive episode, or walked along with someone who has, would question that depression is a real and sometimes devastating disorder. My nosing around suggests that few of us do not have, at the least, a good friend or relative who has struggled with major depression. Yet depression remains under-reported, often misdiagnosed, dismissed as mere gloominess or attitude, and treated casually or not at all. These days we may accept intellectually what we hear from mental health authorities – that severe depression is largely a problem of brain chemistry, an organic illness no less than chicken pox or measles. But old fears and stereotypes are not easily dislodged. Isn’t it very different to hear that an acquaintance or a relative has, say, diabetes, than to hear they are in a major depression? Indeed, we may never hear about the depression at all, or hear only a rumor. If we do learn of it, do we send a card? Hallmark has a huge selection but how many of them seem apropos? Do we make a visit to the psych ward? It’s a less cheery place than obstetrics, maybe even scarier than Intensive Care. And when we next see the person, do we ask how they’re doing, or assume that because they’re out in public they must be “over it”?

When I started telling people I was writing about depression, the first question was usually whether I meant the time period or the other thing. The next reaction was almost always a kind of knowing nod, a recognition, and some kind of story about a relative, a friend, or a neighbor. One person said briskly, “Oh, they cure that with drugs these days” – but only one. Another told of a relative who would plant a huge garden every spring in her manic phase, then spend most of the rest of the year in bed. Another mentioned the phrase “Mennonite Melancholia.” A pastor told me that depression is the most common problem she sees in her pastoral counseling work. Many had a feeling that their particular group – Mennonites, Irish, academics, farmers, students, whatever – is especially prone to depression, and offered theories about what made that so. The more I explored, however, the more I came to think that just about every group in modern America has its share, or more than its share, of melancholics, each with its own particular sense of why the gloomy tunnels of melancholy should be so familiar.

Some of the talk was guarded, as well it might be – was I just fishing for secrets that shouldn’t be told? But much of it came with a sense of relief, an eagerness to let hidden things into the air. People told me about their relatives, their spouses, their parishioners, sometimes – always a little restrained, and rightly so – about themselves. Everyone had a story.[8]

Depression is probably as old as civilization and maybe older. The Greeks knew it well: the term “melancholy” goes back at least to Hippocrates, who attributed the worry and gloom associated with the condition to a surplus of “melankholia,” or “black bile.” As early as Aristotle another enduring theme emerges: that melancholy is curiously connected to certain types of accomplishment. “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics, or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics?” he asks in “Problematica.” The Hebrews knew their own black spells; we have only to read Job, or Ecclesiastes, or Psalms such as Ps. 22: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”

It seems clear that David the poet-king knew what another poet, Nerval, would centuries later call “the black sun of melancholy.” Perhaps because so many poets and artists seem to encounter depression, there is no shortage of vivid, compelling, fascinating accounts of it.[9] Many of the greatest poems have their deepest roots in melancholy, and so of course do the lesser ones. There are plentiful memoirs and first-person accounts, and even a sub-genre of academic or scholarly works by authors whose interest in the subject is more than professional. One of the earliest of these, Robert Burton’s voluminous Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), still makes for fascinating and worthwhile reading. It is an immense, baggy compendium of verse, quotation, ancient lore, opinion, hearsay, and the best scientific information available at the time. While the science sounds ludicrous today, much of the description still rings true. Here is Burton on the seductive attractions of melancholy:

[M]ost pleasant it is at first, to such as are melancholy given, to lie in bed whole days, and keep their chambers, to walk alone in some solitary Grove, betwixt Wood and Water, by a Brook side, to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject . . . . A most incomparable delight it is so to melancholize, & build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts . . . . until at last the scene is turned upon a sudden, by some bad object, and they, being now habituated to such vain meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can ruminate of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, clownish timidity, discontent, cares, and weariness of life surprise them in a moment, and they can think of nothing else; continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of Melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls . . .[10]

We need to make an important though difficult distinction here. A “melancholy” sense of the trials and burdens of existence – which indeed is hardly unrealistic and which, as Burton notes, has its charms as well as its terrors – is (I suspect) a feeling that most of us know. There is a poetic melancholy that I know well, a sadness that has scope and dimension and meaning, and out of it comes art that struggles with the deepest mysteries of love and loss and death. But this melancholy, while far from “happiness,” is fundamentally different from the pernicious, overwhelming, life-sapping depression that its victims speak of with the most earnest horror.

As an example of “poetic” melancholy, Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” is heart-wrenching:

She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to Poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Aye, in the very temple of delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.[11]

There is a real sadness here, surely – one driven by awareness of death and the fleeting nature of life. Yet there is a strange delight in the lines as well, in the savor of the language, in the way it bursts on the tongue like the grape of Joy. When Keats writes in “Ode to a Nightingale” that he “has been half in love with easeful death” – both poems were written while he was nursing his brother Tom, near death from tuberculosis – we sense that he is not about to fall all the way in love with death, that the poem is itself an act of resistance as well as recognition.

The difference between such melancholy and the darker, more pernicious state of the worst depression becomes clearer if we consider one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets”:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.[12]

When I think of my great-grandpa Henry Stalter losing his son and his wife in his forties, renting out his land, retiring to his garden and his prize Buff Orpington hens, I get melancholic. But that’s no proof that Henry himself underwent more than the normal human grief over his losses, much less that he was what we would call depressed. Farmers worked hard in those days and often retired early, though seldom quite as young as he did. And in his forty years of retirement, from what his children and grandchildren remember, he was not miserable or withdrawn. He had a twinkle in his eye and a lively interest in the world. You didn’t want to interrupt him when the market reports came on the radio at noon, and he was not easily convinced of the merits of chemical fertilizer and indoor plumbing, but he always had a hug and some candy for the young ones.[13] If he was depressed, he seems to have hidden it well – itself, of course, not an unprecedented thing for an American Mennonite man to do.

It is generally agreed that the tendency to depression does run in families, for reasons that are probably partly genetic and partly not.[14]  Henry Stalter’s daughter Ella Kathryn was born on March 15, 1901 on the family farm just north of Meadows, where her grandfather Chris Stalter had broken the virgin prairie after emigrating from the family estate in south Germany. She lived all her life within ten miles of that farm, playing a traditional, quiet, vigorous part in her church and community. She married Arthur Henry Ringenberg, who went to the Flanagan Mennonite Church just down the road, on Sept. 19, 1923 “at a pretty home wedding in the home of the bride’s father, Henry Stalter.”[15] They had three children: Merna, Vernon, and finally Arlene, my mother, who has lived her adult life just three-fourths of a mile down the road from the farm where she was born.

Art and Ella had a modest life but a steady one. The land was good and the farm supported them well even through the Depression. Art’s father Chris came out to help with the garden and the farm work for many years, and besides the field crops (corn, soybeans, oats, and hay) and sheep, chickens, and cattle, they raised vegetables and kept a fair-sized orchard – apples, peaches, plums, apricots, pears, and cherries – with blackberries, raspberries, grapes, and strawberries to boot. They worked hard but so did everyone else they knew, at least those who prospered. There was time to make car trips to the west and to Florida, bringing back stories and souvenirs – a shell with a light inside, a plaster fawn. They were active in the Waldo Mennonite Church, where Art was a trustee and on various committees, but neither sought to be a public figure. In the mid-fifties they turned the farm over to their son Vernon and built a new brick house in Flanagan, five miles away. From all that I know, their years together were quiet and good ones, and that is how they should be remembered.

Yet I can’t quite let them rest there. One further story comes from a photograph included in Willard Smith’s Mennonites in Illinois. Among the illustrations is a full-page photo of six men in hats and coats or insulated overalls standing behind a table piled with quilts and comforters. The caption reads: “Illinois Mennonite Relief Sale Committee in 1960 at Congerville, Illinois, with (left to right): Ralph Vercler, John Roth, Charles Hoffman, Clarence Yordy, Kenneth Burkey, Homer Springer. Presumably the men themselves did not make the quilts.”[16]

I had looked at this photo several times, since Homer is my great-uncle – his wife Ada was Ella’s sister, and he took over Henry Stalter’s farm after their marriage. Homer seems to be wishing this were over so he could go back to setting up tables and moving chairs. In the background, unmentioned in the caption, is a chain-link fence and behind it a row of scarved heads. Six women, looking in the general direction of the camera but clearly not part of the “official” shot – and one of them is Ella Ringenberg. I didn’t even notice those women until I was looking at the photo with my mother; she spotted her mother at once and seemed tickled to find her there. Ella is wearing a light-colored coat and a scarf knotted under her chin. She has glasses, and her graying hair shows above her forehead; in 1960 she would have been 59. She seems to be looking just over the cameraman’s left shoulder, although something in her stance and her still, somber face makes me think that she had seen the camera and knew she would be in the picture, if only in the background.

The gender-political ironies here don’t need much laboring. Almost certainly Ella Ringenberg and the rest of the women behind the fence, or others like them, had made the quilts – which are actually, at least the ones in the picture, mostly knotted comforters. I doubt that these women spent much time complaining to each other or anyone else about being relegated to the background once again. I suspect that they were mostly used to it and that many of them accepted such status as the natural order. But as I studied Ella’s face in this photo I found myself believing, or perhaps just wanting to believe, that she felt something at this moment – a little tug against the busy, ordered surface of her days, an intimation that in another world she might have lived another, perhaps larger life.

That year, 1960, was the year Ella’s husband Art died, in December; it was a cancer – stomach or pancreas – that came on fast. His obituary says he had been ill for three months, so in March they probably had no idea that anything was wrong. They had spent much of the winter in Florida, as they had since their retirement. He was 63.

Ella Ringenberg herself died three years later, not a happy woman. She grieved, as anyone would, for her husband, but she had more trouble emerging from her grief than some. It seems evident that she slipped into what we would call depression, though clinical precision is not possible now. The family knew that she was lonely and unhappy – her children all lived within a few miles, and they were in contact almost daily – and tried to help. My cousins and I often took turns staying overnight with Grandma during those years, visits that our parents presented to us not as duties but as a sort of puzzling treat, something we were supposed to enjoy, though I found them more different than exciting. My grandmother was a quiet woman always, and my ten-year-old notions of fun didn’t much overlap with hers. I remember her flat voice reading to me from Little Golden Books when I was quite young, and I remember lying awake at night in the north bedroom with my grandfather’s nightshirt tangled awkwardly around my small legs, trying to sleep in that oddly bright and occasionally noisy space. There were no cars or lights in the country. But in the morning there was breakfast, and a quarter to put in my pocket as I went off to school.

Ella’s pastor at the time, Jack Stalter, also knew of her troubles. He told me, “When your grandpa died, it was hard on your grandma. . . . I remember we encouraged her to go see this counselor at Mennonite Hospital. And she went once, and she wouldn’t go back any more. And I can understand that.

She wasn’t of the nature for people to ask her a lot of questions and all that kind of stuff. She wouldn’t enjoy that.”[17]

I know exactly what Jack means about this kind of quiet, although I didn’t quite realize how reticent my family can be until I married into one whose members habitually discuss the most intimate topics in extensive and sometimes obsessive detail. In John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers he reflects on a similar reserve in his family, especially between him and his brother Robby:

Neither of us had learned very much about sharing our feelings with family members. At home it had been assumed that each family member possessed deep, powerful feelings and that very little or nothing at all needed to be said about these feelings . . . .

Privacy was a bridge between you and the rest of the family. But you had to learn to control the traffic.[18]

When I talked about this passage with a class, some students were baffled by it. But I felt a deep resonance with Wideman’s words. They have little to do with love or its absence; he is concerned with what we say and don’t say to each other, and especially with the detailed discussion of the emotional and psychological dimensions of our lives. In some ways I think Ella’s family – my family – fits the stereotypes of the reserved, phlegmatic Swiss Mennonites almost too well. We tend to assume that because we do care for each other, we don’t need to talk about it much, and that things are generally all right as long as we can’t find much to say about them. If things are not all right, we have little practice at the kind of discourse that we need.

I doubt it was just my family. Jack Stalter said of Henry, Ella, and Art that “they had a faith that you just didn’t move. Those older people – they had a faith that carried them through. They had a world view and a patience with the way things are . . . .” On one hand, I trust Jack’s judgment and admire the faith he describes. On the other, I can’t help but think that their silence and patience sometimes masked distress they found no good way to reveal. They were not people trained in, or comfortable with, expressing themselves very fully or clearly, especially about their feelings. Their community with its long tradition of quiet, almost wordless faith, did not encourage questions or even much discussion of loss, grief, and doubt. Somehow I associate that faith with the low voice I remember, with the figure in the background of the Relief Sale photo. Would it have changed my grandmother’s life to have grown up with more permission to speak loudly, to be angry, to claim her griefs?

Many believe that losses, especially of parents, and “incomplete mourning” are common sources of depression. It’s tempting to suggest that the roots of Ella’s struggle are here as well. As a teen she lost a brother and then, barely out of her teens, her mother. She had lived all her life in a culture where an undemonstrative, stoic demeanor was the norm. If she was expected to grieve only briefly and moderately for her mother, to accept the ways of God with little outward show and to return quickly to the daily rounds, who can say what went on in her heart? Who can say what lingered within her for years, perhaps shadowed even to her, to emerge when she was confronted with yet another early loss?

Mennonites have no corner on reticence, of course, and in the nearly forty years since Ella’s illness some things have changed both in the church and in the wider culture. The increasingly educated and sophisticated Mennonite mainstream is more willing to seek and accept counseling and other aid, and under the direction of Mennonite Mental Health Services (MMHS) a number of mental health facilities have been established in communities across the United States with concentrations of Mennonites.[19] The MMHS institutions have their roots in the World War II experience of conscientious objectors in state mental health facilities, and represent a significant effort toward more humane and Christian care for those with mental illness who are close enough to use their services. Still, as Ella’s story and many others demonstrate, such efforts can hardly be said to have solved the ongoing problem of depression and other mental illness among Mennonites or in the wider culture. Many Mennonites remain too far from the institutions, are too reluctant to seek treatment, or find that their conditions resist even the best available care.

Yearning, loss and silence

To begin to understand why depression remains such a persistent reality, we must explore at least briefly the most significant theories about depression and melancholy. In his ground-breaking essay “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud argues that those two states are closely related; the key difference he sees is the loss of self-esteem in melancholy. If the work of mourning is to withdraw libido from attachment to the loved one, to learn to live without him or her, then melancholy may also involve loss of a love-object, though sometimes an unconscious one. “In grief,” Freud says, “the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholy it is the ego itself [which becomes poor and empty] . . . .”[20]

And yet, Freud came to believe, the melancholic grappling with loss is more than an aberration to be avoided or cured; it may be a basic element of self-formation. In The Ego and the Id he suggests that the process by which “an object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego . . . has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego.”[21] In a recent essay on the psychological novel Nightwood, Victoria Smith extends this argument that melancholy may be useful, even necessary; she claims that “[m]elancholia is a tool that sculpts the ego in moving back and forth between the psyche and culture.”[22] And Julia Kristeva, a leading contemporary psychoanalytic theorist who has also struggled personally with melancholy, writes with wrenching ambivalence of her experience of deep depression: “My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister. . . . Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.[23]

“Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche.” A strong claim, and one that may seem at odds with some of this essay and with the general run of both North American and Mennonite society. Surely, in our sometimes obsessive pursuit of happiness, many North Americans have sought to push melancholy as far away as possible. Just as surely, in our sometimes obsessive pursuit of community and discipleship, Mennonites have often sought to dismiss melancholy as mere selfish indulgence, expecting that will and faith alone should allow us to overcome or simply ignore it.

Both my research and my experience suggest that there is no life without loss, and that Freud and Kristeva are right that some degree of melancholy as a means of confronting that reality may be more or less indispensable. If so, to deny or trivialize the reality of depression, to fail to generate ways of coping with our inescapable melancholy, and to confuse truly dangerous depression with its lesser relatives may all prove dangerous. The work is not easy or simple.

Depression is often characterized as a “woman’s disease”; some studies indicate that unipolar disorders are diagnosed roughly twice as often in women as in men.[24] However, as Terrence Real and others have argued, male depression may often be masked or hidden by other symptoms and behaviors, including alcohol and drug use. In addition, Real claims, “We tend not to recognize depression in men because the disorder itself is seen as unmanly. Depression carries, to many, a double stain – the stigma of mental illness and also the stigma of ‘feminine’ emotionality.”[25] Thus many men endure “covert depression” that is never recognized or identified as such.

The deep and complex relations between melancholy and religion have been probed in several recent books. Donald Capps’s Men, Religion, and Melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson explores the personal lives of those four great students of the psychology of religion. Capps concludes that “something deeply psychological lies behind religious melancholy”:

[T]he psychological precursor to the adult’s religious experience of forsakenness is the experience of separation from one’s mother, because this is the moment when the child first experiences what it means to be a “dispirited soul,” to “feel bereft,” in one’s “heart.”[26]

The sense of being “forsaken,” outside God’s love, is surely at the heart of religious melancholy, whatever its sources. Strong feelings of isolation and loss are almost universal in depression. On this subject Kristeva writes that “The depressed person has the impression of having been deprived of an unnameable, supreme good, of something unrepresentable, that perhaps only devouring might represent, or an invocation might point out, but no word could signify.”[27] When I read this passage I was immediately caught by the word “invocation” and taken back to the one I remember best from my youth: “Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. . . . ” Within those words, surely, is a yearning for exactly the sort of direct union, or reunion, that Kristeva describes.

The church can create a space for the corporate expression of such yearning – but what if it remains subjectively only a yearning without satisfaction? If we learn that we should feel God’s presence powerfully, even constantly, but do not, then what? In Freda Zehr’s account of a conservative Mennonite childhood, her sense of guilt, unworthiness, and exclusion clearly is not associated with loss of a loved one, but with a heavy, clumsy authority that imposes its will largely through guilt and negative rules:

(No ball games, no radio, no associating with non Mennonites, plain clothes, cape dresses, black stockings, endless lists of rules – this is wrong, that is wrong, even my unbidden, unconscious thoughts were wrong.) . . . it left me severely depressed with obsessive and compulsive thoughts of fear and worthlessness. . . . I did not feel love, but rather I felt judgment and criticism from those in authority over my spiritual life. Hence I did not feel love for or from God. A heavy sense of guilt hung over me [. . .] no matter how many trips I made to the altar of those tent revivals in the “Big Valley” each summer. . . [28]

Others I have spoken with describe similar feelings of depression, selfdoubt, and even self-loathing associated with rigid power structures and sermons heavy on guilt but short on redemption. If one origin of depression is in a sense of disconnection and loss, then it seems clear that another may be a sense of inadequacy imposed by a church that seems to demand perfection of its members and even of its children. In Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America, Julius Rubin notes that an earnest quest for spiritual experience can yield to a melancholy sense of isolation. He cites a recent survey which found that “a religious life founded upon the immediacy of the indwelling spirit (spirituality or God’s presence in one’s heart) also produced problems of ‘dispirited souls’ and those who feel bereft of God in their hearts.”[29]

Mennonite religious practice varies widely, and so does the level and type of authority exerted within congregations. Many pastors and church leaders are keenly aware of the issues I have been tracing here, and deal as sensitively and constructively as they are able with mental health issues in their congregations. Some are well-meaning but lack the training or resources to meet the challenge of ministering to the depressed. I suspect that others would still argue that preserving the community or leading souls to salvation is more important than humanistic notions like “mental health” anyway. I make no blanket accusations here. But I believe we must recognize the damage, however unwitting, that our patterns of worship and discipline can inflict on vulnerable hearts and minds – and that many who are burdened with depression and other mental illnesses will and should seek help within their congregations. We must be prepared to provide such help.

There is no one origin of depression, religious or otherwise. Childhood trauma is often a factor, but not always, and as we have just seen, such trauma can come from loss of a loved one, especially a mother, but also from mistreatment and abuse by family members or other authority figures. The whirlpool of changes and pressures adolescence often brings can generate depression that is sometimes misread as merely “a stage.” In adults, job stress, family pressures, childbirth, and other life changes can all trigger depressive episodes, with or without strong underlying factors. The physical decline and loss of loved ones that come with aging may yield depression among the elderly. Similar complexity also holds regarding physical and biological factors. Brain chemistry typically changes in severe depression, but just why and how those changes happen – or even whether they are causes or effects – is still not fully understood. A careful search for understanding of causes may be crucial to individual cases of depression, but here I can only consider more generally how we talk (and don’t talk) about depression and other mental illnesses, and how we can help each other as much as possible.[30]

Among all my confusions about this subject, I will say a few things assertively. First, we need ways of speaking of such inner states, in all their complexity and difficulty, that will be heard and recognized. The greatest danger of depression is that there is often no way out of it from the inside. Some kind of help is necessary, but the first step is to emerge somehow from the silence in which it seems impossible even to communicate the reality of one’s situation to another.

The theme of silence, and of the near-impossibility of adequately communicating the feel of the disease to those who have not experienced it, has turned up over and over in my research. Depression is often a profoundly alienating experience, inflicting a pain that even its most articulate victims struggle to describe accurately. Novelist William Styron, whose Darkness Visible is one of the most eloquent memoirs of depression, writes that “if the pain [of depression] were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict . . . some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking.”[31] Mennonite poet and editor Victor Jerrett Enns offers this effort: “From personal experience I believe depression (particularly unipolar, severe, clinical depression) silences my ability to imagine, to create, to communicate and to care. When people ask what it feels like to be clinically depressed, I often refer to how boring it is. There seems to be so little ‘content’ or ‘experience,’ even of the imagination, in a severe depression.”[32]

The difficulty of describing the pain of depression may be intensified by traditional Mennonite reticence and by our general social reluctance to talk too much about our deepest feelings. Depression at its most pernicious involves most acutely the near-total loss of energy and hope – in change, in getting better, even in the possibility of meaningful communication. At such an extreme it has almost nothing to do with the creative, even energizing melancholy of which Kristeva speaks. If it persists for long, almost inevitably the sufferer begins to suspect that life itself is not worth living, and that ending it will at least mean the cessation of pain.

As many as one out of five cases of severe depression ends in suicide. The willingness to deliberately end one’s life is surely the most alien and alienating element of depression, the most difficult for those who have never been stricken by it to understand. The public reaction to the 1987 suicide of author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi drew a strong response from William Styron, whose own depression brought him to the brink of suicide as well. Styron believes that depressives contemplate suicide “[not] because of any frailty, and rarely out of impulse, but because they are in the grip of an illness that causes almost unimaginable pain. . . . In the popular mind, suicide is usually the work of a coward or sometimes, paradoxically, a deed of great courage, but it is neither; the torment that precipitates the act makes it often one of blind necessity.” He insists that we see suicide in new terms: “[Levi] succumbed to a disease that proved to be malignant, and not a shred of moral blame should be attached to the manner of his passing.”[33]

Such an understanding, however, does not change the need to fight the disease’s malignancy. A second point I think crucial, then, is that healing is possible, and even likely. Most people do recover from even the most severe depression, especially if they get good help, though many continue to struggle with it periodically. In this process the rebirth of hope is the most essential step. Again, Styron is eloquent:

those who are suffering a siege, perhaps for the first time, [must] be told – be convinced, rather – that the illness will run its course and that they will pull through. . . . It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life’s worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense of their own worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides.[34]

It is tempting but often false to believe that depression is a matter of will power and mental attitude, that people can just “snap out of it” if they really want to, if they know we’re “there for them,” if they just adjust their behavior, their diet, or their attitude. These beliefs are just about as useful in cases of severe depression as expecting someone with a broken leg or tuberculosis to simply “snap out of it.” Jane Kenyon’s acute, deeply felt poem “Having it Out with Melancholy” includes an equally pernicious Christian variation: “You wouldn’t be so depressed / if you really believed in God.”[35] Faith can be crucial in recovery from depression, but to blame depression on a lack of faith is both unhelpful and ignorant.

Finally, the severely depressed need to get help that is professional and sustained. Breaking the silence is a start, but often only a start. The treatment options I mentioned earlier, imperfect as they are, are far better than in the past. There are many things that can be done but only if those in need find their way – and are guided or pushed, if necessary – to the best treatment available. None of us can help everyone but we must do all we can to see that no one goes into the darkness alone.

It is a serious matter to bring someone back . . .

Ella Stalter Ringenberg died on a spring day in 1963, not quite a month past her sixty-second birthday. That I should be speaking of her must seem strange to her, if she is listening. She was not a woman to seek out or to welcome attention. I believe she lived with the idea that she should, must, be satisfied with things as they were, and that this belief served her quite well for a long time, and then not so well. We will not know what thoughts she had those last weeks and days of her life, what demons she struggled with or what prayers she raised. Even the circumstances of her passing are not clear, and I will say no more about them. I know that I have transgressed already on her privacy and that of her family, and I hope to be forgiven for putting into cold print these fragments of her story.

Let her rest in peace now. But let her also not be forgotten. Let us remember that she needed a kind of help that even those who knew and loved her, who were close by and tried their best, could not figure out how to give her. Let us not blame them. But let us learn to do better.

The little brick house is still there on Main Street, though Art’s nightshirts have not hung in its closets for a long time now, and Ella has long since stopped reading books and passing out quarters to the grandchildren who spend quiet nights with her. Their own children are already nearly grown. Her murmuring voice still lingers in my memory, losing a few wisps of substance each day; it is even and low, with a burr that only hints at what might be happening within as she reads someone else’s words to the skinny, slightly uneasy little boy on her lap. There is love in the voice for me, and if there is not quite enough love there to stretch over herself, how can a child be expected to know that?

Hope is not a luxury. It is as necessary as water, air, or food. It can be nurtured and encouraged if it cannot be created from nothing. I am not talking about foolish optimism or silly promises that everything will be just fine. The hope I mean is inextricable from those other great, difficult necessities that Paul spoke of: faith and love. This hope is perhaps austere, obviously complicated; certainly it contains a full awareness that none of our lives will or should be free from pain and trouble and loss. But it is a hope that we can live, act, speak, love, and worship; and that we can serve our brothers and sisters as we receive their service to us, and in so doing find meaning in the midst of all our troubles.

In a quite real sense depression is a land of the dead. Like that other great and mysterious land – that which lies beyond true, physical death – it is a murky, frightening realm. But it is one that we must dare to enter, if we are to live up to our promise to bear each others’ burdens. It is a serious matter to bring someone back from the dead lands of depression, too serious and difficult for any one of us to accomplish on our own. But it is work that urgently needs doing. The night may be long and dark, but we have the promise that joy cometh in the morning.[36]

Notes

[1] New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950.

[2] “How Much Does Depression Cost Society?” The Harvard Mental Health Letter (Oct. 1994). <http://www.mentalhealth.com/mag1/p5h-dp01.html> 12 August 1998.

[3] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 359.

[4] “Manufacturing Madness: Destroying Sanity,” Psychiatry Manipulating Creativity (Citizens Commission on Human Rights, 1997). <http://www.cchr.org/art/eng/page12.htm> 12 August 1998.

[5] Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac: The Landmark Book About Antidepressants and the Remaking of the Self (New York: Penguin, 2nd ed. 1997); R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York: Pantheon, 1960); Seth Farber, Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels: The Revolt Against the Mental Health System (Chicago: Open Court, 1993); David A. Karp, Speaking of Madness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meanings of Illness (New York: Oxford, 1996).

[6] For a survey of these and other treatment options, see Arthur Schwartz and Ruth Schwartz, Depression Theories and Treatments: Psychological, Biological, and Social Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

[7] The Cherry Orchard, Act One, in Literature: An Introduction to Reading, ed. Lee Jacobus (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 1208. There is general consensus among researchers that major depression is a physical disorder in which brain chemistry malfunctions. Research has focused on the role of neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine and serotonin, and most drugs currently in use seem to work by regulating levels of those chemicals (see Schwartz and Schwartz, 64ff.). Researchers struggle to observe and measure subtle processes within the brain without invasive procedures, and their work remains speculative and incomplete.

[8] I would like to thank those who spoke with or wrote to me as I researched this essay for their advice, insights, stories, and counsel on a wide range of matters. I fear this list is not complete but it must include Dennis Stoesz, John Sharp, Elizabeth Kelly, John Martin, Ruth Krall, Beth Martin Birkey, Ervin Beck, Scott Holland, Julia Kasdorf, Lisa Robeson, Jerry Kennell, Bill and Gayle Trollinger, Dorothy Nickel Friesen, Victor Vogt, Viola and Allen Horst, Gayle Gerber Koontz, Ted Koontz, Victor Jerrett Enns, Freda Zehr, Phyllis Bixler, G.C. Waldrep, Jack and Marcella Stalter, Arlene and Roger Gundy, Jan (Gundy) Yoder, Marlyce (Martens) Gundy, and Ada (Stalter) Springer. It was Steve Estes who told me of a relative who spoke of the disease of “Mennonite Melancholia.” (Please note that this is NOT a list of depression sufferers.)

[9] See Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993), on the links between manic-depressive illness and poets and artists. Among many first-person accounts of depression and manic depression, see Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of My Moods and Madness (New York: Vintage, 1995); Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface (New York: Harper Collins, 1994); Andrew Solomon, “Anatomy of Melancholia,” The New Yorker (12 Jan. 1998):44-61; and William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Vintage, 1990). See Jane Kenyon’s Constance (St. Paul: Graywolf, 1993) for a recent book of poems dealing extensively and lyrically with depression.

[10] Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith, (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1927), 214-15.

[11] John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy,” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd ed. Ed. Alexander W. Allison, et al. (New York: Norton, 1983), 662-63.

[12] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “[I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day].” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd ed., 859.

[13] Merna Sutter and Arlene Gundy, personal interview, Flanagan, Illinois, 7 June 1996.

[14] See David L. Pauls, Lois A. Morton, Janice A. Egeland, “Risks of Affective Illness Among First-Degree Relatives of Bipolar I Old-Order Amish Probands,” Archives of General Psychiatry 49 (Sept. 1992): 703-708, for a study of bipolar disorders among the Amish which concludes that “children of bipolar probands [individuals] in the Amish community are at a significantly higher risk for illness than [those individuals’] parents or siblings” (707). The authors suggest that both genetic and nongenetic risk factors may be at work.

[15] “Stalter-Ringenberg,” Flanagan Home Times, Sept. 1923.

[16] Willard Smith, Mennonites in Illinois (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1983), 481.

[17] Personal interview, Flanagan, Illinois, 28 July 1998.

[18] John Henry Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (New York: Penguin, 1984), 78-79.

[19] For a history of these institutions see Vernon H. Neufeld, ed., If We Can Love: The Mennonite Mental Health Story (Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press), 1983.

[20] “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1914-1916), 245.

[21]The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 18.

[22] Victoria L. Smith, “A Story beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood,” PMLA 114. 2 (1999): 196.

[23] Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 4.

[24] See Schwartz and Schwartz, 312.

[25] Terrence Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression (New York: Simon and Schuster Fireside, 1997), 22.

[26] Donald Capps, Men, Religion, and Melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 8.

[27] Kristeva, 13, emphasis hers.

[28] Freda Zehr, 21 Oct 1998, e-mail on www.mennolink.org. Used by permission of the author.

[29] Julius H. Rubin, Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 238.

[30] Kathleen Kern’s When It Hurts to Live: Devotions for Difficult Times (Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1994), one of the first books by a Mennonite to address depression in the context of faith, wisely counsels both faith and patience: “arriving at the simple solution to our depression can be maddeningly complex. . . . [We] find [our]selves unraveling a complex web of family history, stress, emotional disturbances and physical ailments.” In No Longer Alone: Mental Health and the Church (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1995), John Toews and Eleanor Loewen offer a broader perspective on faith and mental health in a brief account meant, like Kern’s, for study in Sunday School classes. Their chapter on depression — titled “My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?” — is sympathetic and knowledgeable. Neither book is meant to “cure” depression, but each may be useful starting points in understanding the condition.

[31] William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Vintage, 1990), 17.

[32] Victor Jerrett Enns, personal e-mail, 5 May 1998.

[33] “Why Primo Levi Need Not Have Died,” New York Times (19 Dec. 1986), 17.

[34] Styron, 76

[35] Kenyon, 22.

[36] My thanks to Walter Sawatzky for suggesting this final image.