Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Today we continue our exploration of famous people who, despite experiencing depression, managed to achieve an outstanding level of respect. In the recent past, the experiences of Joni Mitchell (see HERE), U.S. Grant (see HERE), Leo Tolstoy (see HERE), and Abraham Lincoln (see HERE) led us along their personal journey. We now turn to the master of all psychologists, William James, to be our guide.

Since we hear often enough from the pharmaceutical industry, with its enormous promotion machine, that it is crucial for people who have challenging experiences with depression to consume antidepressant pills, I have tried to offer a balance by providing examples of admired people who, in various ways, managed without them. For some, like Lincoln and Joni, their suffering never completely went away, but they, in a sense, made friends with it. They did so by coming to understand that experiencing challenges more deeply than people with a happy-go-lucky temperament has the potential to provide a motivating force to bring forth valued achievements. As Joni so beautifully expressed this, 

“Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl…. Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, then the angels fly off, too. There is the possibility, in the mire, of an epiphany.”

Other people’s experience with depression takes a somewhat different course. At a certain point they find that their base notes of life are the result of living wrongly. Upon improving what they were doing and/or the situation that they were living in, they came to an understanding that the energy their depression provided for making changes led to a better life. Leo Tolstoy provided us the most vivid example. His depression stimulated a gnawing questioning that eventually led to one insight after another. His trouble had not been with life in general, not with the common life of common people, but with the life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life that he had personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. By spending more time in nature and in a supportive community, “things cleared up within me and about me better than ever, and the light has never wholly died away.”  According to Tolstoy, his suicidal feelings disappeared, and he went on to live a productive life until he passed away at the age of 82 of natural causes.

William James’s story is more in line with this second type of depression experience, in that he, like Tolstoy, found that by making certain changes in how he was living and the situation in which he was living, his experiences of dealing with depression decreased to a point that he felt he was getting more out of life. I briefly reviewed these changes in an earlier post titled, “William James’s Personal Bout with a “’Mental Disorder’” (see HERE). I decided to delve a little deeper into this case because I happen to be reading The Letters of William James and came upon some additional information that I believe is worth reflection.

The Most Vivid Description of William James’s Experience with Depression

William James’s son, Henry, described his father’s struggle when he was in his 20s as follows:

William James’s father, Henry, on left, and young Will on right

“It was during this period that such doubts [about morality, his impotence to make any significant change, and the apparent meaningless of his life] invaded his consciousness in a way that was personal and intimate and, for the time being, oppressive. He was tormented by misgivings which almost paralyzed his naturally buoyant spirit. Bad health, a feeling of the purposelessness of his own particular existence, his philosophical doubts and his constant preoccupation with them, all these combined to plunge him into a state of morbid depression…. He even had an experience of that kind of melancholy which takes the form of panic fear.” 

William James, himself, described this fear in vivid detail:

“Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in a twilight, to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of darkness, a horrible fear of existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on the benches, or rather shelves, against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them, inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other.

William in his early 20’s

“That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid in my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.

“In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of my life.”

Wow! That’s a pretty vivid description!

In that description, when William says that his disturbing experience gradually faded, from his letters it is clear to see that he continued to suffer through deep melancholy for a few years. Some of them included suicidal thoughts.

It is of special interest that William tells us that his experience “has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since.” For those of us who value people who can sympathize with those having such feelings, we see that something positive came out of William’s own experience. This theme that depression is often a tool to create something of value, runs throughout William’s writings for the rest of his life.

What Led to the Fading of William James’s Experience with Depression?

Initially, William, upon having his fearful experience believed that all mental health concerns now referred to as mental disorders are required to have a physical basis and that there was nothing anyone can willfully do about them. Today, short of taking a pill, many of today’s psychiatrists are promoting a similar view. Thus, their basic position is that these concerns are due to something within the patient’s physical makeup. This misses the overwhelming evidence that how people construe their past and current experiences, and their current social and work situations, are often the central causative factors.

Once William came to understand this, it provided the hope and motivation to do some things differently. As he explained to his father,

“Bless my soul, what a difference between me as I am now and as I was last spring at this time! Then so hypochondriacal, and now with my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It is the difference between death and life.”

One thing that he had decided to do was to spend more time than he had been on focussing on some uplifting life experiences. For example, he began to read poems by William Wordsworth. Consider Wordsworth’s poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

For William, the delight that Wordsworth had for the beauty of nature was catching, and William began to spend more time in nature, especially in the Keene Valley area of the Adirondack Mountains. Also, of enormous help, was to find the right type of work for his temperament, as we see from a letter he wrote to his brother, the gifted novelist Henry James:

“The appointment to teach physiology is a perfect God-sent to me just now, an external motive to work, which yet does not strain me–a dealing with men instead of my mind, and a diversion from those introspective studies which bred a sort of philosophical hypochondria in me of late and which it will certainly do me good to drop…. It is a noble thing for one’s spirit to have responsible work to do.

On Left, Henry James, the novelist and brother to William

I enjoy my revived physiological reading greatly, and have in a corporeal sense been better for the past four or five weeks than I have been at all since you left…. I find the work very interesting and stimulating…. The authority is at first very flattering to one. So far, I seem to have succeeded in interesting them [his students], for they are admirably attentive, and I hear expressions of satisfaction on their part.”

Thus, finding something to do that was meaningful to him and placing him in an environment where those around him valued what he was contributing, played a huge part in improving how he was feeling.

Alice Gibbens

But there was an additional factor that perhaps made the shift in his life ever more extraordinary–his marriage to Alice Gibbens. As William explained this to his friend, Josiah Royce, “I have found in marriage a calm and repose I never knew before, and only wish I had done the thing ten years earlier.”

William’s son, Henry, describes the important support that his mother provided to his father, as follows:

“His wife, who entered into all of his plans and undertakings with unfailing understanding and high spirit, stood guard over his library door, protected him from interruptions and distractions, managed the household and the children and the family business, helped him to order his day and to see and entertain his friends at convenient times…and encouraged him to all his major undertakings, with a sustaining skill and cheer which need not be described to anyone who knew his household.”

Professor William James

There are, of course, numerous other aspects of William’s life that played a part in the lifting of his general spirits, some of which I cover in earlier posts. For remarkable suggestions for helping people who are considering suicide, consider taking a look at my post, “Is Life Worth Living? A William James Perspective” (see HERE).  But, for now, I leave the reader here hoping today’s post will serve to make the nature of depression at least a little more comprehensible.

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on.  This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence.  To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

DepressionmelancholyWilliam James