Codex Sincerus

On Depression

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Suicide, however, is not one philosophical problem. Where Camus succeeds in The Myth of Sisyphus is in deconstructing the question of suicide from the point of view of the mentally sound: that is to say, as an existential matter. It is extremely unfortunate that, of the people who take suicide as a serious answer to life, those who do so of sound mind make up the vast minority. For those people, Camus presents not a sliver of help.

Thinking deeply about suicide as a potential act one may commit is overwhelmingly done by the clinically depressed. It usually stems from a deep dissatisfaction with either oneself, one’s life, or a mixture thereof. Where that dissatisfaction stems from can be biological, environmental, or a mixture thereof. Most of the time, solve the depression and you solve the question of suicide.

The problem with clinical depression is that it fundamentally distorts one’s judgement. Cleverly, it does so in a way that provides a certain amount of certainty, which is, in a sadomasochistic twist of the allegorical knife, rather comforting. Exiting depression requires a confluence of extremely challenging factors: one must want help; one must be willing to help oneself; and one must openly invite uncertainty back into their life. These three factors are fundamentally hampered by only one thing: depression. Depression fosters hopelessness, and a hopeless person often finds the notion of getting help to be futile. Depression fosters anhedonia, anhedonia fosters a lack of motivation, and a lack of motivation tends to make one not especially wish to put time, effort, and energy into helping oneself. Remember that these also compound: not only does one feel hopeless about help, but one feels both hopeless and unmotivated about helping oneself. Depression fosters anxiety, and the anxious person wants nothing less in the world than more uncertainty.

To make headway on any of these factors is complex and challenging. Unfortunately, imagining Sisyphus happy does not assist us in this respect. What also does not assist us is suicide. The promise of suicide is quite straightforward: it is certain that the suffering will end. The promise of getting help is, on the other hand, nonexistent: you cannot make promises once you introduce a lack of certainty. Every depressive is acutely aware of one thing: treatment for depression varies in success. The extent doesn’t matter, of course, because any uncertainty is already worse than a solution that, if carried out correctly, works every single time. No chance of failure, no difficulty with choices, no regrets, no embarrassments, no feeding that devil in one’s brain desperate to point and laugh and say “I told you so” when things go wrong. That is what certainty - and, by extension, suicide - gives the depressive.

And do not make the mistake of thinking that the depressive cares for your arguments about reasons to go on living - those reasons are precisely what is dulled by depression in the first place. People cannot comprehend what a lack of pleasure truly feels like unless they have first-hand experience, and it is from this ignorance that people spout such nonsense to the depressive about what their future might hold. For to them, they are still in that future, and will experience no joy of it, just as they experience no joy of the present. Tell the depressive about appreciating life enough, and you may even make them feel guilty for not being able to and instead wishing for their own death, which is adding fuel to an already raging inferno.

What the depressive must come to understand deeply is threefold:

If these three statements can be honestly metabolised, the depressive has a schematic laid out before them for life: get treated, and at the point of remission, reassess. This helps to navigate the concerns above: one must want help; one must be willing to help oneself; and one must openly invite uncertainty back into their life. It gives the depressive a mental catch: they want to die, they know they can’t make that decision properly, so they must seek treatment to get themselves to a position where they can make that decision properly. And thus, the desire to kill oneself becomes precisely the reason to try and rid oneself of depression.

This does not make the journey easy. Nor is it a guarantee of success. It provides an anchor one can lean against, a certainty that, come the end of one’s depression, one will finally allow oneself to commit suicide. Each day, however, will still be a struggle, for the challenge of depression still awaits. Once that challenge is overcome, then Camus may have his seat at the discussion - for at that point, suicide is existential, not a danger of clinically impaired judgement.