What it’s like to have depression when the whole world is feeling down

telegraph.co.uk:

depression used to mark me out as special; ‘special needs’ my waggish brothers would say. Today, happy pills seem as commonplace as masks. ‘Post-lockdown depression’, commentators have taken to calling it.

The same thing happened post-war, disproportionate as the analogy is. People rally in extremis; it’s in calamity’s wake that they go into a decline, adrenalin spent, dismal reality restored. ‘Any idiot can face a crisis,’ as Chekhov may or may not have written, ‘it’s day-to-day living that wears you out.’I lost two friends to suicide last spring, taking little fire crackers to the funeral of one, a single mother, to give to her 10-year-old twins.

The other, I remember as being the most stable, level-headed of women. Did the pandemic play a part in their demise? One feels that it cannot have helped.My own mood began to worry me at the end of the summer.

When I finally went to have my medication altered in October – dragging myself to my (excellent) GP with an agonising, tectonic slowness, ashamed, despite knowing that no shame should attach – she told me that the incidence of depression feels like an epidemic; another epidemic, one should say.Personally, I don’t know whether we are talking about collective depression here.