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In a new article published in UK Guardian today, award winning writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes for the first time about her struggle with depression. (And you thought you were the only one?) Read below...
Sometimes it begins with a pimple. A large shiny spot appears on my forehead. Or it begins with a feeling of heaviness, and I long to wear only loose-fitting clothes. Then my mood plunges, my lower back aches, my insides turn liquid. Stomach cramps come in spasms so painful I sometimes cry out. I lose interest in the things I care about. My family become unbearable, my friends become strangers with dark intentions, and cashiers and waiters seem unforgivably rude.
A furious, righteous paranoia shrouds me: every human being with whom I interact is wrong, either insensitive or ill-willed. I eat mounds of food – I crave greasy stews and fried yams and dense chocolate truffles – or I have no appetite at all, both unusual for a careful, picky eater. My breasts are swollen and taut. Because they hurt, I wear my softest bras – “tender” seems a wrong word for the sharp discomfort. Sometimes they horrify me, so suddenly round, as though from science fiction, and sometimes their round perkiness pleases my vanity. At night, I lie sleepless, drenched in strange sweat; I can touch the wetness on my skin.
I am sitting in a doctor’s office in Maryland and reciting these symptoms. On the wall of the bright room, there is a diagram of a lean female, her ovaries and uterus illustrated in curling lines; it reminds me of old pictures of Eve in the garden with Adam. The doctor is a kind and blunt woman, bespectacled, but reading over her lenses the forms I have filled out. When she first asks why I have come to see her, I say, “Because my family thinks I need help.” Her reply is, “You must agree with them or you wouldn’t be here.” Later, it will strike me that this is a quality I admire most in women: a blunt kindness, a kind bluntness.
When she asks questions, I embellish my answers with careful detail – the bigger-sized bra I wear for a few days, the old frost-bitten ice cream I eat because I will eat anything. I make sure to link everything to my monthly cycle, to repeat that I always feel better when my period starts. I make fun of my irritability: everyone I meet is annoying until I suddenly realise that I am the only constant and the problem has to be me! It is, I tell her, as though a strangeness swoops down on me every month, better on some and worse on others. Nothing I say is untrue. But there are things I leave out. I am silent about the other strangeness that comes when it will and flattens my soul.
“It sounds like you have premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” she says.
It is what I want to hear. I am grateful because she has given me a name I find tolerable, an explanation I can hide behind: my body is a vat of capricious hormones and I am at their mercy.
But the doctor is not done. Her eyes are still and certain as she says, “But the more important thing is that you have underlying depression.” She speaks quietly, and I feel the room hold its breath. She speaks as if she knows that I already know this.
In truth, I am sitting opposite her in this examining room because my family is worried about the days and weeks when I am, as they say, “not myself”. For a long time, I have told them that I just happen to have hormonal issues, victim to those incomplete tortures that Nature saves for femaleness. “It can’t be just hormonal,” they say. “It just can’t.” Mine is a family full of sensible scientists – a statistician father, an engineer brother, a doctor sister. I am the different one, the one for whom books always were magical things. I have been writing stories since I was a child; I left medical school because I was writing poems in biology class. When my family says it is “not just hormonal”, I suspect they are saying that this malaise that makes me “not myself” has something to do with my being a writer.
Now, the doctor as
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