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Second-Person Narratives and the Depiction of Depression in A.M. Jenkins's Damage and Chris Lynch's Freewill
About a year ago, an adolescent who is very close to me swallowed a bottle full of pills. Thankfully, she lived and was able to begin treatment for depression-a disease that she has been battling, unbeknownst to me, for years. She isn't alone. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately four percent of adolescents suffer from major depression each year ("Let's Talk"). David Hartman, a Virginia psychiatrist, explains that depression in adolescence is brought on by "the moves from childhood to adolescence and adulthood" (Moore 154):
"Adolescence is so turbulent; everything seems exaggerated; the smallest things can become overwhelming. When a boyfriend and a girlfriend break up or when there's a bad report card which angers parents, some teens cannot cope" (Moore 155-156).
Parents and other adults who care about an adolescent suffering from depression may wonder what they can do to help. I knew to seek out medical help for my friend and to listen to her, but I wanted to do more than help her; I wanted to understand her. While reading about the symptoms associated with major depression and talking with my friend about her feelings was helpful in trying to understand what she was going through, I didn't feel like I could really comprehend this illness. Then I read a journal entry from one of my twelfth-grade creative writing students. Unlike a mere list of symptoms, his description helped me to grasp the feelings associated with depression and, in some sense, experience the disease myself:
The feeling of depression . . . The sinking feeling of the world becoming too much to handle. Like quicksand it pulls you down and down. The harder you try and fight the faster you sink and the harder it pulls. The feeling that makes you just want to lay in your bed and never get out. Don't want to watch TV, can't sleep, and my stomach is full but you still feel as though the black hole in you sucks everything inside of you into nothingness. You sit staring ... at nothing and everything all at the same time, but you stay silent as a mouse, because...