Where the Roots Reach for Water
Gonzalez-Crussi, F.
THE ABYSS OF SADNESS Where the Roots Reach for Water A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia feffery Smith North Point Press, $24, 297 pp. F. Gonzalez-Crussi At first, this book gives you...
...After all, is this not "The Age of Prozac," as the author reminds us...
...This is depression or melancholia, powerfully depicted by Jeffery Smith in Where the Roots Reach for Water...
...Immediacy of experience, combined with a detached objectivity that years of engagement in his habitual occupation have bred in his outlook, and, no doubt, a gift for forceful, at times lyrical expression, lend to the pages of Where the Roots Reach for Water a unique appeal...
...The writer then returns to his personal anguish...
...Having clarified that depression is more—much more—than neural circuitry in disarray, Smith's survey is not confined to the medical level...
...Smith has obviously engaged in much reflection on this malady, "the most existential illness we know...
...In his quest, he is led to discover the Christian mystics, and concludes that "theologizing" depression may be a way "of making something out of this negative force," a rare chance to remake the self or to reach a new equilibrium...
...After childbirth, one in a thousand women will experience serious (requiring hospitalization or posing a real threat to themselves and to their infants) post-partum depression—to say nothing of the millions of persons who abuse alcohol or drugs, and who, though clearly depressive, escape this diagnostic label in epidemiologic studies...
...its immensity oppresses, its fathomless depth drowns the mind...
...Perhaps it is a flash of true perception...
...This desolation and loneliness, this feeling of abandonment by God and man, this "profusion of unsought trials and griefs," is it utterly senseless...
...The narrative is vivid, it is insightful, and it has an unmistakable ring of authenticity...
...What meaning can this recurrent state of mind possibly have...
...In official circles, the 1990s were hailed as the "Decade of the Brain," when unprecedented advances in the behavioral sciences and in neuro-biology allowed the discovery of brain receptors specific for various neuro-transmitters and psychotropic drugs...
...His latest book is There Is a World Elsewhere...
...Alas, in these progressive times an older Commonweal 1O October 22,1999 discovery also held on steadfast, namely, that no therapeutic agent is without untoward effects, and that sometimes the remedy turns out to be, as people say, worse than the disease...
...It suffocates and constricts, and reason is powerless against its progress...
...Tortured" may be taken here in both literal and figurative senses: an agonizing digging into a personal hell, and an investigation made of many strands that intertwine...
...Like death, of which it may be a premonition, it is a strong inducement to reflect on the meaning of individual existence...
...F. Gonzalez-Crussi At first, this book gives you the impression that you are perusing merely an autobiographical account of psychological depression...
...All this is aptly embodied in the image of tree roots that reach for water, which Smith describes so well: "long tongues [that] tangle and twine and branch toward water...
...It cannot be willed away...
...Depression, as understood clinically, is a major health problem...
...The reader is likely to be rewarded who follows this writer in his assiduous canvassing of many levels of understanding, from biological to spiritual, of his topic...
...a moment's realization, usually denial, that the world of reality is illumined by a black sun...
...now he experiences the evolution of the disease as a victim...
...Thus, his quest may seem tangled, but it is purposeful...
...It is telling of our mechanistic bias, that we counter the charges of this monster with barrages of psychotropic drugs...
...This undesirable issue is engagingly portrayed by Smith as well, as he recounts a frightening episode of paralysis, the unanticipated side-effect of his intense antidepressive medication...
...The approach is circuitous: now a biological disquisition, now a fragment of personal experience, then a historical review or a learned note, and back again to autobiography...
...Hell-bent they are, but for good reason [...] all these shapes they take as they reach into the unknown, accomplish their end: to draw life from the dirt...
...You read on, and you discover that there is more here than a strictly clinical description: human suffering, in the raw, is laid bare...
...The aching heart floats disabled in a choppy, dark sea of hopelessness...
...His background has allowed him no little familiarity with the pangs, and Commonweal 21 October 22,1999 the unpredictability, of mental illness...
...A psychiatric case manager, he is witness to his own mind's progressive debilitation...
...It bubbles up from the deep, no one knows exactly whence, and, incomprehensible, unopposable force that it is, overwhelms the susceptible consciousness without any possibility of appeal...
...It is a tortured search for meaning in hopelessness...
...F. Gonzalez-Crussi is head of the department of pathology at Children's Memorial Hospital of Chicago...
...Through the use of an effective, elegant prose, maneuvered with such deftness as leads us to expect much from this writer in the future, he unveils for us a complexity that goes far beyond the realm of biological disease...
...Nor is this pure metaphor: The magnitude of the distress is oceanic...
...It may be one of the necessary modes of human existence, one of the obligatory paths that all must tread, some for a short span, others more or less permanently, straying deeper and deeper into darkness...
...In the United States, 7 percent of women and about 2.6 percent of men will suffer one major episode of depression during their lifetime...
...And this leads to a short excursus on the pharmacology of the psycho-therapeutic armamentarium currently in use...
...Depression is "the ailment of our time, germane even for those who don't have it," an expert is quoted as saying...
Vol. 126 • October 1999 • No. 18
