Depression as clinical, killing pain — the Kate Gompert / anhedonia register
echoes
From: The Depressed Person
- Early text: depression that "rendered the depressed person’s
every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth" [the treatment ¶]; the
honest verdict framed as "an almost literal matter of life and death"
[close]; the therapist's death — "an “accidentally” toxic combination of
caffeine and homeopathic appetite suppressant" which "only a person in very
deep denial indeed could fail to see must have been, on some level,
intentional" [the death ¶].
- IJ echo: IJ's clinical-depression substrate — Kate Gompert's testimony
that depression is a specific, physical, killing condition (the novel's
anhedonia-vs-psychotic-depression essay; digest scene 135), and the
novel's refusal to treat despair as a mood. The story gives the same
condition a whole close-third interior, with the same coexistence of
unbearable pain and an inability to make it register on anyone else.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation (oeuvre-scoped)