Depression in the arts

Recently best selling author Marian Keyes opened up about depression in her latest newsletter. Marian wrote her last newsletter in January and told of a bout of "crippling depression" that had rendered her useless. The newest newsletter, her first since January, tells of a long depressive episode so horrendous that she had been "knocked sideways" by "an almost irresistible desire to be dead." Indeed Marian Keyes had not written since this depressive episode started and still cannot write. Her newsletter was all the more sad because she tried to rationalise her feelings and explain that she realised she was privileged and lucky and that journalists will probably think her selfish and stupid.

It has been well documented that writers are more prone to depression than the nation as a whole. I wonder whether people with depressive tendencies gravitate towards writing or whether the conditions needed to write; extended periods of solitude and reflection, exacerbate and cause depression?

Surely it is a mixture of both?

I don't tend towards melancholy when I write however I've always found it difficult finding the time so I do not have long periods of isolation that many writers do. Since leaving work three weeks ago, to start maternity leave, I have enjoyed the solitude that has allowed me to put pen to paper although I know this time is fleeting and soon the house will be filled with the coos and cries of a newborn. Perhaps if I were sat, day after day, with my thoughts for company this would be a very different blog. Even in this short period of time I have become more inward looking.

The list of writers touched with depression is impressive; Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Lord Byron and F. Scott Fitzgerald to name but a few. I wonder then, does depression aid the writing process? Is depression to a writer what drugs are to some rock stars - something that not only aids the writing process but that is a necessary part of it? This is not the case for Marian Keyes and I doubt the case for others. Indeed this time alone has taught me that I must interact with people to keep me sane, to keep the dark thoughts pushing the light ones away.