Nope, Franzen's being an ass.

I dunno--I take it to mean that you can't really understand depression unless you've lived with it, or at least been close to someone who has. To call it a "chemical imbalance" may be true in a literal sense, but it doesn't begin to describe what it's like to live, day in and day out, as a depressed person, or to live with someone who is.

Yeah, DFW definitely had severe clinical depression. Other ways of looking at depression tend to seductively romanticize it, which is what I see Franzen's comment as doing.

I see mrmoonpie's argument that "chemical imbalance" may be used to minimize the experience of depression, as well. When all is said and done, though, I think more harm is done by casting depression in more magical, mystical terms than it deserves than by understanding it as an illness produced by a brain not functioning optimally.

Wallace wasn't really being held down by life events or particular issues or whatever

We can't really know this.

Franzen's being an ass.

Seconded.

DarkForest, why can't we know this? We have a *lot* of details about him, including his inner life, from letters, notes, writings, Franzen, his wife, parents, etc. etc. And that his depression was ravaging him for *decades*. That when he went of his meds he killed himself. It's not hard to put the bits together here.. I mean if it was an issue why didn't he try to fix the issue rather than attempt electroconvulsive therapy?

I'm kinda regretting posting this because I've taken out a small phrase from a very powerful and loving elegy but it's genuinely just something I was pondering..

I agree with Firas here; his lifetime struggles with depression without a specific trigger (though sometimes complicated by addiction) are really well documented by himself and others.

It's just an opinion, probably an under-informed one in DFW's case, though I have read some about him (there was a new yorker article a while ago). I just don't think we can really know much about what another person is really experiencing. If he kept extensive personal notes, then that helps. I haven't read what was in these notes. Going off the a/d that he'd been on for 20 years was certainly a big factor in his end, so in that sense, it could be put down to chemical imablance.

The whole 'chemical imbalance' thing bothers me because it is just another pigeon hole. The sometimes-effectiveness of CBT doesn't fit well in the chemical imbalance model.

why didn't he try to fix the issue

It seems to me, just an opinion again, that not all issues can be faced or fixed by mere mortals.

Excuse my ramblings, or ignore them. I probably shouldn't be here. Just my 2 cents as a long term depression sufferer.

Oh, no. I appreciate what you're saying.

Our brains are weird things... they shape the way we see things but are also shaped by the things we've seen. Bad regulation of chemicals might be equally as powerful as behavioral habits (including cognitive behaviors). We don't know yet, and it may not be true for everyone that has depression, but if it's true for any particular person then that's making the difference for them. For example, in this study adding CBT to medication reduced relapse rates by 22 percent. For each individual in the study, that's not a 22 percent difference, that's a 100 percent difference from their point of view.

We're getting more and more evidence that depression (and other mental illnesses) are like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, and so on. They are part inherited, part affected by environment, and part affected by personal actions, and that the proportion of the whole that's made up by each part isn't the same for everyone.

Given the evidence, we can't continue to believe that depression is a simple phenomenon caused by a single factor. If Franzen honestly cares about the human condition then he has to look honestly at this. He was being a jerk. Sometimes you can think your way out of depression, and sometimes you can't. He doesn't have the right to judge people on how they are trying to survive and live their own lives. There are people out there on medication because they never want their families to experience what Wallace's family is experiencing.

Very well put, halonine.

He's not being an ass, Franzen. He's just trying to get a handle on his friend's death. He actually says he sees it's partly true, that it was a chemical imbalance. I think maybe he just doesn't like the thought of Wallace (or anybody) reduced to a set of chemicals. I think, perhaps, Franzen, like a lot of people, didn't fully understand the physical nature of depression, the importance of those chemicals. He seems to have thought in the speech that going off the meds meant Wallace was trying to grow as a person. I don't think he understood that for some folks the meds are absolutely necessary and life-sustaining and it's no mark of weakness or immaturity to take them, any more than insulin or heart meds. They simply allow one's brain to function better. But I don't fault Franzen for not knowing that. Clearly, from his description of Wallace's condition at the end, Wallace should have been (or still have been) in the hospital. Sometimes, though, nothing works.

Thank you for the link, though. I envy their friendship.

It's a pretty complex obituary. They knew each other better than I knew either of them. But this quote from Franzen strikes me as spectacularly lousy advice:

I said that people like us are so afraid to relinquish control that sometimes the only way we can force ourselves to open up and change is to bring ourselves to an access of misery and the brink of self-destruction. I said he’d undertaken his change in medication because he wanted to grow up and have a better life. I said I thought his best writing was ahead of him. And he said: “I like that story. Could you do me a favor and call me up every four or five days and tell me another story like it?”

Franzen played into a classic depressive narrative that DFW was increasingly living - amplifying the myth that taking anti-depressants is preventing a depressed person from being their 'true self' and that the chaos of misery and depression is a necessary prerequisite for creative vitality.