Clutching a Severely Depressed Person's Body Against Yours in Bed to Keep Them From Killing Themselves

This isn’t about anything happening now, I am not the depressed person, no one’s in crisis.

Well… here you are. You wanted unmediated experience. Now you got it.

It might be your sibling, your lover, your child, but it also might be somebody you don’t really know that well at all. That’s the nature of this type of moment - sometimes you are the only person at hand, even if neither of the two of you think that you are the right person for the job. Or, to put it another day, sometimes the best person is the one who is there. And sometimes the one whose depression you must attempt to mitigate for awhile is at that stage where they are truly and totally down in the hole, the only effort they can imagine expending is to walk as far as the bathroom to get a razor, and you shuffle through the drawer labeled “Stuff to Provide Immediate Help to the Severely Depressed” only to find that there is only one thing inside, an index card that reads, in prim and indifferent blue ballpoint, “Pull them into bed and hold their body against your body so that they feel your heart beating and are reminded that human touch is warm and human life goes on and also while you’re holding them in bed they can’t kill themselves.” So you do.

A little provocation about mental illness, far from mine alone but unpopular under current fashions, is the simple observation that people with psychiatric conditions are often, in effect, bad people. Not in the top-level holistic sense in which real compassion resides, no, I hope not. But in the actual, lived, day-to-day reality of human interaction, people suffering with mental health problems can be just awful to deal with. If you think that’s unkind for me to say, remember that I’m someone who has harassed and threatened and stalked multiple people in my life because my brain told me that they had rifled through my medicine cabinet or hacked my bank account or sewn razor blades into the soles of my shoes. Of course these days I find that it's controversial if I say “perhaps psychotic disorders sometimes make people somewhat unpleasant,” so. Here I’m talking more about, for example, pathological anxiety, which is something different from ordinary everyday human anxiety. An anxious person, a truly anxious person, can be the most selfish creature you’ve ever met. Because anxiety is a black hole; everything and everyone, in the mind of the severely anxious person, is less important than the object of the anxiety. Only the awful thing they have imagined truly exists. So too with depression. The severely depressed person tends to feel guilt and shame about everything except for what they should feel guilt and shame about, and so their emotional mechanism for accountability is all broken and distended. They do not have the energy necessary to feel bad for things they’ve done and they do not have the self-love necessary to hold themselves to standards. Accountability is, genuinely, too much to ask.

So now you’re in bed with a severely depressed person. They’re being crushed from above by an unbearable weight; if you’re an MFA professor who wants to scrawl “avoid cliche” next to that you can get fucked. They are being crushed and it is an unbearable weight. I find that a truly punishing depressive episode is at once fundamentally indescribable and yet fairly simple to explain. Let’s say that your brain or heart or soul or whatever is a pitcher, and at any given time it’s filled with a certain amount of happiness and self-worth and hope and love. Let’s say that, by some sad turn of events, your pitcher has been completely emptied out, so that the inside is parched and dry to the touch. Now, let’s say that even after all of those good feelings have been evacuated, life and your brain find a way to keep pouring, to keep pouring past empty, to just pour and pour out the self-love and desire to live that you already didn’t have until a kind of good-feelings antimatter fills the pitcher. And the antimatter gets into your blood and your brain and your heart and your lungs and your guts, and it gets into the people around you too until they don’t want to be around you anymore. Once you’ve been emptied out and filled back up with the bad stuff and found yourself incapable of asking for help because you don’t think you deserve any, you’re left to just slowly be crushed, this dull-but-sharp-but-dull ache of utter self-hatred and hopelessness pushing down on you until you feel like you physically can’t move.

But I’ve done an unpardonable writer crime, here - I’ve used the second person to refer to two different people, two different theoretical categories of people, although reader, both are you. I’d like to suggest that I did this for some clever reason, to let you know that I’ve been the clutcher and the clutched, but the truth is that it just happened that way. Besides, when I was suffering from crushing depressive periods in my teens and 20s, I never let anybody in on it. I never told anyone enough that they might have known that I needed them to come hold me in a bed that way. I never told this much to anyone. I never felt like I deserved it. I felt like I deserved to be just where I was, pissing myself in the fetal position on the carpet in a drab apartment alone.

But I was saying: here you are. You are here, and the severely depressed person is here. And maybe you’re actually imminently afraid that the severely depressed person is going to try to kill themselves. More likely you’re simply aware that they’ve become so hollowed out that if no one reaches for them, right then and there, they’ll slip their bonds and get gently blown off of the floor like a piece of thin and blotted paper and be taken up into the HVAC system, sliding into the ductwork just so, like a vending machine accepting a bill, never to be see again. Or maybe you just want to help, the way human beings do. So you grab them and you answer their unanswerable questions with murmurs and affirmation and whether you love them or you don’t you say “I love you.” At other times it might be romantic love or fraternal love or parental love or no love at all but in this moment the love you’re sharing is the love inherent to the simple human hymn, “may we all survive may we all survive may we all survive.” The only other thing you can think to do is to clutch, to keep them near you, to try and hold the life in them. If that’s an absurd thing to try to do, well, you do it anyway.

Here you are. Here you are. The severely depressed person is being lapped by waves of despair. MFA instructor frowns again. Can you keep their head above water? Can you tread water for them, eggbeater eggbeater eggbeater? Of course not. But what else are any of us going to do? There’s something pleasant, about lying in bed alone with another person without a hint of sex, and a bed is a warm and comfortable place, the sheets are soft as you count the severely depressed person’s heaving breaths. “I wonder what’s the threadcount,” you think idly, as you and the severely depressed person try to negotiate between the two of you a way that they might live through the night. Your few words to each other are clumsy. Neither of you can say just what it is that you’re up to. Artaud said that we must be transformed, as in flames, and on that bed you are undergoing a seminar in transformation.

Here you are. The severely depressed person has helped you experience something we very rarely do: they have exposed you to the end of the idea, as the organizing principle of human life. The death of the idea. They have shown you the limits of the word in an era in which the word is thought to have no limits. They have led you past knowing, past cleverness, past the dim hubris of homo sapiens. You have become a caveman, a hunter gatherer, a child of Eden, pressed up against this trembling person who is, somehow, truly your responsibility. You cannot think your way out of this. You can’t because they can’t. Their minds are powerless in the face of the black dog and so nothing you can say to them can make them better but you say everything you can imagine anyway, like a frustrated fisherman trying ever lure in his tacklebox. I know people love to dismiss the “chemical imbalance,” but then that never meant what people think it does, and anyway, depression is in the muscles and the sinews and the bones, stitched up into the viscera, observable via x-ray. And here in the land of the corporeal self, the material architecture of the human person, the idea has no purchase. It is mute. If you asked me to pick one job that will never be taken by the machines, it’s “Senior Vice President for Clutching the Body of the Severely Depressed Person in Bed to Keep Them From Killing Themselves and Customer Satisfaction.” This only we can do. Your golden retriever might comfort you, but your golden retriever can’t hold you like this, and not only because he doesn’t have opposable thumbs. He can’t clutch you this way because he cannot know what it all means, for a being that exists to wish to cease to exist, a being for whom nothing seems more impossible than to just keep on existing, day after grinding day, searching around the pitch black room of the severely depressed heart, on hands and knees, looking for hope like a set of keys dropped in the dark.

All you can do is hold on. So you hold on. And you feel this person’s life slipping away into the shadowy fold of nature where the depressed soul goes to suffer, where everything is soft and black and slow and quiet and punishing, punishing, punishing. But you think maybe you can pull a little of it back. Maybe you can hold a little of it in. You’re not under any illusions, here. You know how depression works. But there’s not much else to do but keep holding on. Sometimes they talk to you. Maybe they confess. Perhaps they cry. Mostly they hurt in a way that you can feel with each breath; these breaths slightly shudder the bed and create the only sense of movement in the still afternoon light of their messy bedroom, where you have come to clutch their bodies to keep them from killing themselves. They would be so thankful to you, if the poison in their psyche had left any room to feel thanks. They would be so grateful to you, for trying to save their life, if they thought their life was something to save.

You hold on. You do not know what else to do. In the quiet the severely depressed person lies as motionless as the floorboards. They barely even fidget. You hold on. Perhaps they will be prescribed antidepressants, and perhaps they will take them, and perhaps they will work. Perhaps they will get cognitive behavioral therapy, if it hasn’t yet been banned, and perhaps it will matter. Perhaps whatever shadowy dark unknown secret inscrutable mysterious cycle of neurochemistry and of time will simple click the mechanism of their illness forward one turn and it will get a little bit better, and then a little bit better, and then a little bit better after that. Perhaps. Neither of you know. Neither of you get to say. But still you hold on. Their backbone presses against your sternum. The bed is too warm to hold so much pain. You have secured them like a mountaineer clutching the rope that saves not someone else’s life, but his own. Because you know that, if you let go, they may be the one to die, but you will be the one to fall.