The Down and Out King - 28

WILLIAM

You ax me to sing, so of course I shall,

I’ll sing you the fate of the poor Yorkhouse gal,

Who twin-sister vos to the ill-fated child,

Who in the soup-kettle you know vos biled.

From the time she heard of her brother’s decease,

The poor creter know’d not one moment of peace,

But vent out of her mind, and then rav’d & swore,

Not vonce in her life would she gollop soup more.

Christmas is now over, and a very pleasant it was for all. I just wish we could do that sort of thing more often - and have suggested to the Saunders family that doing a similar thing at Easter would brighten up our lives considerably. If we saved half of the money provided for the event, then we could produce two good events - not quite as grand as this one, perhaps, but good enough to make people feel better more often than once a year.

I sent my daughters and son cards for Christmas, but again heard from none of them. I wonder if they are ashamed of me. Sam said perhaps they had not received the cards I wrote, as they may have moved to new locations. I had not thought of that, but now I prefer to have that explanation rather than that they have no care for me.

I have had fewer episodes of my dark depression since I have been here. You would have thought that living here would be more of a cause of depression, but that is not the case. I suppose it is partly because I have no real responsibility here, and yet I can do the job that I know well how to do, and get satisfaction from it. Also having such a good friend as Sam has made a world of difference to me. I had expected that he would have chosen to leave by this time, but he is still here and as long as that is the case, I am happy to stay here too.

The treatment for depression, according to the medical man I have seen here, is a “rest cure” which consists of absolute bed rest for several weeks. Neurasthenia (which is the grand name he gave my
illness) is regarded as an exhaustion disease. When an individual “who is driven to think, to work to strive for success presses himself and his life force to the limit, he eventually exhausts his currents.” I was only in bed for a week on each of the occasions that I had a recurrence of the problem, and that is certainly less than it was when I was still living at home with my family.

Depression is a common side effect of neurasthenia, but my doctor was clear that my depression was not the same as that seen in another psychiatric depression disorders called melancholia. The nature of the depression varies considerably from the two disorders.

He said that tests used to assess degree of depression invariably include in them items relating to fatigue, loss of libido, sleep disruption and loss of appetite, all of which are frequent primary results, not causes, of depression.

Because fatigue is a symptom of many illnesses and disorders with a wide variety of cause, this symptom of depression, however prominent, can never in itself be diagnostic. Resting could be quite useless for psychoneurotic depression fatigue, which does indeed require a very different kind of therapy.

He tells me that my sort of depression tends to occur in epidemic-like episodes, and should subside after some years. I can only hope that this is the case for me.