I agree: his is not a very useful comparison. I think David Foster Wallace gives the most accurate comparison I've read, and I always want to show it to those lucky souls who have never had to deal with this type of depression:
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
I had a blog post sitting in my drafts folder about Aaron Swartz and David Foster Wallace. It was waiting to make it perfect, but I don't think it ever will be. Thanks for this post, causing me to tidy it up and publish it.
I picked Infinite Jest up again about a month ago and had been wading through a lot of articles on DFW as a way of trying to understand his suicide. So that was the context in which Aaron's death came to me. I also saw the connection in Quinn's post and it had me wondering. Thanks for completing the post.
One thing people don't realise is that depression screws with your perception of the value of things, maybe a little, maybe a lot. Trying to logically balance things like a mathematical equation is not a useful way of looking at things when discussing depression.
The major characteristic of severe clinical depression is that it takes away enjoyment from all manner of activities that used to be enjoyable. People who haven't experienced it or who have never been close to someone in the depths of depression are unlikely to be able to comprehend it.
> I think David Foster Wallace gives the most accurate comparison I've read
I first bought a David Foster Wallace book last spring, I was on a lunch break, had entered a book-store, when I read on one of his books' back-covers that it had been written by a brilliant guy who had committed suicide. I wasn't thinking about suicide back then, I think I never did, I was just going through depression and I wanted to genuinely see what made people more depressed than me go the whole way. Suffice is to say that I was feeling like I knew the guy when reading his words, especially when he wrote about depression, like I seem to know and be familiar with all the people who describe what depression feels like.
And to go back to Jeff Atwood's piece, until you haven't experienced depression you cannot really understand what goes through a person's mind in moments like those, and even less so are you entitled to "accuse" the said person for "calling it quits" or whatever. Like I said, I never thought about suicide, but even in my mild depression I sort of could see the black light at the end of the tunnel and people who used to be like me not that long ago just giving it up and deciding to let go.
I like DFW's quote. I also like a point made by Nick Hornby in 'A long way down' that sometimes it is not because they don't want to live anymore, its because they want to live so much, but are being prevented from living by things beyond their control.
Yeah, my impression is it can (wrongly) seem like a rational choice among all the options. A friend of a friend recently jumped off the Bay Bridge. Before he did it, he explained that his schizophrenia meds made him mentally dull, bloated and unable to hold a job. In his mind, he was facing a life where either he constantly heard voices or couldn't live on his own, move out of his parents' house and so on. I hope researchers manage to solve this soon without the blunt hammer of current meds.
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.