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One of my favorite author's, Amy Hempel, was recently at Bryn Mawr. (I highly recommend her work.) In the "The Man in Bogota" q narrator watches on TV as someone is about to jump off a ledge, and wishes she could tell this jumper a story ... of a wealthy man who was kidnapped and held hostage for months. His captors had to keep him alive and so, in the process, he lost weight, ate healthy food, quit smoking. When he was released his doctor examined him and said "that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man." Hempel goes on ...

"Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge-story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good."

It is in this way that I see the positives in depression (or schizofrenia or bipolar disorder). In the sense that we know very little about the workings of anything, about what leads to what, about what makes a life good, about what that even means. Because how do we know what makes us who we are, or what takes us where we're going?

But, at the same time, I don't think this negates the need for treatment, or even the idea of "cure" or of "disorder." That something is negative doesn't mean it is bad, and I truly appreciate what Lisa is saying, and I don't disagree with it. Still, I can reconcile the idea of finding meaning and value in depression while at the same time working to eradicate depression. I think that some of these disorders have positive and negative effects on the brain -- or that "positive" symptomologies are clustered with "negative" ones. The fact that people with bipolar disorder are more likely to be creative *doesn't* mean that bipolar disorder makes them creative (and, in fact, family members without the bipolar symptomology -- so, without a ten-to-twenty-fold increased risk of suicide, for example -- are also more creative) nor does it mean that treating the symptoms (see right above, for one) takes that creativity right. Some studies have shown that, when treated properly, people maintain the creativity without the mania/depression. 

What about when when a mental problem CAN be treated with a pill ... Like certain presentations of syphillis, for example? That pill ( not just *like* an antibiotic for a mental disorder, but *in fact* an antibiotic for that disorder) will remove the associated symptoms. So should it not be taken? And if it should be taken, why again can't a similar pill, a pill that helps a person escape from debilitating depression or anxiety or mania. I am not manic, but can still experience highs and lows. It is reductive and silly to say that a pill to cure depression means a pill that erases all variance in human emotion. 

I am not saying that pills work. I know people who have tried many therapies and medications, only to find that meditation does a much better job of alleviating severe emotional pain than anything else. I know others who have spent tens of years trying everything possible, still waiting for something to lighten the pain (or dying before a cure was found -- some by natural causes, some by their own hand). I am not saying a pill is what is right for everyone, or that they work. But I do think everyone deserves to "settle for something that isn't as wonderful as happiness but also isn't as terrible as depression" -- and then to go from there to something that is, like most of our lives, at least sometimes just that kind of wonderful.