Good Things That Come With Depression

Depression is a serious illness with serious consequences such as economic loss, social withdrawal, academic impairment and so on. However, serious depression comes with a certain wisdom about the human condition and human beings' limitless capacity for suffering. It is a form of transcendence. When one is depressed one experiences the Whole of existence, what the Greeks called phusis. One sees through the thinly veiled abyss of the media and of contemporary 'public' life. In my case, I could never have written my philosophical pieces without depression: Perception and Knowledge, Time and Moment, Lathoron, On Truth and so on. Arguably, with depression comes a certain increased awareness of history, if history is understood as spiritual progression, because one experiences one's body as historical. With depression also comes an increased sensitivity to the uniqueness of things, especially of beautiful things. One does not take things for granted in other words. Of course what I write is true of my depression and probably not that of others. But melancholia is a definite source of philosophy and often finds expression in the works of great poets, thinkers and composers. It is an ancient emotion, an occurrence in the human psyche that will never go away completely. There will always be depressed people and, with them, a dark perception of the world but not necessarily a bad one. Depressed people owe it to themselves to survive because theirs is a noble life, spent in communion with the Whole, even if it is delusional and self-defeating. For depression is a profound emotion, and that produndity has its place in an otherwise non profound world. Of course this is my opinion. At any rate fighting depression as I do has made me wise beyond my years in that I can detect those thoughts which bring over a precipice, those tendencies which are life-denying and dangerous, those habits which are self-destructive. It is, in short, an exercise in self-knowledge though indubitably a very unpleasant one.