David Brooks: 'I learned that those of us lucky enough never to have experienced serious depression cannot understand what it is like just by extrapolating from our own periods of sadness.'
At camp, David Brooks gave Peter Marks a lift. How do you serve a friend struggling with mental illness?If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go toMy friendship with Peter Marks was created around play. Starting at age 11, we played basketball, softball, capture the flag, rugby. We teased each other, pulled pranks, made fun of each other’s dance moves and pretty much everything else.
I remember once, in a fit of high silliness, he started skipping around the dining hall, singing, and leaping higher and higher with each skip. He tried to skip right out of the room, but there was a door frame, probably about 7 feet tall, and Pete slammed into the top of the frame and fell flat on his back. The rest of us, being 16-year-old junior counselors, found this utterly hilarious. Pete, also being 16, found this utterly hilarious, too.
He seemed, outwardly, like the person in my circle least likely to be afflicted by a devastating depression, with a cheerful disposition, a happy marriage, a rewarding career and two truly wonderful sons, Owen and James. But he was carrying more childhood trauma than I knew, and depression eventually overwhelmed him.
Novelist William Styron wrote brilliantly about his own depression in “Darkness Visible.” He wrote that “the madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero.” He continued: “I experienced a curious inner convulsion that I can describe only as despair beyond despair.
Time and again Pete would talk about his great fear that he would someday lose his skill as a surgeon, that he would cease to be a healer, that he would lose his identity and self. While I’ve devoted my life to words, I increasingly felt the futility of words to help Pete in any meaningful way. The feeling of impotence was existential.
Still the clouds refused to lift. Jen had some wise words when I asked her what she learned being around him during those years. The years went by and medications and treatment programs continued to fail. Pete and Jen began to realize how little the medical community knows about what will work. They also began to realize that mental health care is shockingly siloed. Pete saw outstanding doctors who devoted themselves to him, but they work only within their specific treatment silo. When one treatment didn’t work, Pete would get shuttled off to some other silo to begin again.
Pete and his family joined us for Thanksgiving in 2021. By this point I was just trying to be as I always had been toward him, in hopes that he might be able to be as he always had been toward me. We all played basketball and board games and enjoyed the weekend. I felt some hope. But Pete appears in one of the photos that were taken that weekend, sitting on the couch, still-faced, enveloped in shadow.
We had dinner a few days before he died. Jen and I tried to keep the conversation bouncing along. But, apparently, their car ride home was heart-rending. “How can I not be able to talk to my oldest friend?” Pete asked. “Brooksie can talk to people. I can’t.” If I’m ever in a similar situation again, I’ll know that you don’t have to try to coax somebody out of depression. It’s enough to show that you are trying to understand what this troubled soul is enduring. It’s enough to create an atmosphere in which the sufferer can share her experience. It’s enough to offer him or her the comfort of being seen.
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