By ELIZABETH LOLARGA
WITH upbeat tunes like “Feels So Good” and “What a Wonderful World” played at the launch of Margarita Go-Singco Holmes’ Down to 1: Depression Stories, a guest wondered aloud if the condition discussed in the book is being trivialized.
Perhaps, that is the program’s point: the beast called depression can be understood and licked. What comes after is a realization that life can be given another chance.
Holmes, a clinical psychologist who has been identified with bestsellers on Filipino sexuality, summed up the condition, with help from her colleagues at the University of the Philippines psychology department, in this spoofy song to the tune of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicion”:
“Every time I wake up, I wonder what my life is good for / Every time I wake up, I wonder why there isn’t more / Why should this be so painful to me, the ex life of the party / Starting to think ‘Oh, what’s the use?’ Am I really hopeless and what’s more, just crazy / Depression torments my heart / Depression tears me apart / Depression, what can I do?”
Karina Bolasco of Anvil Publishing, the book’s publisher, said it took them 10 years to put together Down to 1 as they wanted to show that far from being “a happy smiling, singing people,” many Filipinos suffer from clinical depression.
But, she added, these Filipinos are “conveniently dismissed as genetically crazy. Have you ever noticed how parents always try to trace the family origins of anybody a son or daughter is likely to marry? First, the place of origin to establish regional traits, then the family of origin, to make sure walang lahing sira-ulo (there is no history of insanity).”
The title refers to a depressed person’s severe feelings of aloneness, even of abandonment–that no friend, partner or any other being could possibly understand what he or she is going through. Three of the 10 storytellers in the book went onstage to describe depression as a “condition too painful to bring on the table.” It is one where one feels “faith vanishing in the desert” and “looking into the abyss and knowing you don’t want to go there.”
Called the FCD 10 (formerly or currently depressed), psychology professor Kay Añonuevo, bankers Roman Azanza and Jeremy Baer, film director Peque Gallaga, writers Alya Honasan and Babeth Lolarga, restaurateur Nina Poblador, TV director Lore Reyes, author Mike Santos and fashion designer Patis Tesoro openly and bravely reveal what it’s like to be, or to have been, depressed. Some detail their suicide attempts, their medication, what helped and what didn’t in getting them out of the condition that is beyond what Bolasco called “the blues that affect most people in the course of normal life.”
Holmes, who acknowledges suffering from the condition periodically, guides the timorous reader looking for help through a simple test. The score can be interpreted to find out if one is within the mild or severe clinical range of depression.
In her forthright manner, she demolishes commonly held beliefs and myths about suicide. To the quasi myth that “no one but God decides when your time is up ,” she writes, “This is claptrap because many don’t believe in God, even more don’t believe in a God that insists one suffers needlessly.”
Best is her definition of depression: a thief that “takes away your joy, sense of wonder, the taste of your favorite food, even the smell of freshly washed hair…Most painfully, depressions steal you away from yourself. For many, one of the worst things they fear is whether their real selves will ever come back.”
The FCD 10’s first-person tales of surviving depression resonate long after one has put down the book. Añonuevo states with the force of truth: “While sadness is ordinary, not wanting to live isn’t!”
With admirable candor, the British Baer, Holmes’s husband, talks about the anti-depressant Prozac, how it reduced his libido (down to one from a high of making love 52 times a week) and how he and his doctor arrived at a combination of medications that is satisfactory to him.
Still on medication, Honasan musters her strength when she hears of people calling her “unstable” because she was on Prozac. She writes, “I don’t hang around them anymore. Experiences like this can teach you a lot about who you should keep in your life.”
Tesoro writes candidly about her addiction to Valium to control her rages and how she overcame it. “I got worse and worse, but when I wanted to throw that pair of scissors, not just to vent but hoping it might hit its mark, I stopped all my medication cold turkey.” Today, if she takes medication, she only has half a pill and has calmed herself through gardening and walking the land.
If anything, Down to 1 assures the suffering that they are not alone.
