Depression, when it’s clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in
families, and it’s known to respond to medication and to counseling.
However truly you believe there’s a sickness to existence that can never be
cured, if you’re depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just
don’t want to feel bad anymore.
The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by
darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in
the possibility of a cure…
-Jonathan Franzen
