The Depressed Person

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Despite overwhelming feelings of reluctance on the part of the depressed person, the therapist had strongly supported her in taking the risk of sharing with members of her Support System an important emotional realization she (i.e., the depressed person) had achieved during an Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekend which the therapist had supported her in taking the risk of enrolling in and giving herself openmindedly over to the experience of. In the I.-e.-F.E.T. Retreat Weekend's Small-Group Drama- Therapy Room, other members of her small group had role-played the depressed person's parents and the parents' significant others and attorneys and myriad other emotionally painful figures from her childhood, and had slowly encircled the depressed person, moving in steadily together so that she could not escape, and had (i.e., the small group had) dramatically recited specially prepared lines designed to evoke and reawaken trauma, which had almost immediately evoked in the depressed person a surge of agonizing emotional memories and had resulted in the emergence of the depressed person's Inner Child and a cathartic tantrum in which she had struck repeatedly at a stack of velour cushions with a bat of polystyrene foam and had shrieked obscenities and had reexperienced long-pent-up wounds and repressed feelings, the most important of which being a deep vestigial rage over the fact that Walter D. ("Walt") Ghent Jr. had been able to bill her parents $130 an hour plus expenses for playing the role of mediator and absorber of shit while she had had to perform essentially the same coprophagous services on a more or less daily basis for free, for nothing, services which were not only grossly unfair and inappropriate for a child to feel required to perform but which her parents had then turned around and tried to make her, the depressed person herself, as a child, feel guilty about the staggering cost of Walter D. Ghent Jr., as if the cost and hassle were her fault and undertaken only on her spoiled little fat-thighed pig-nosed shiteating behalf instead of simply because of her fucking parents' utterly fucking sick inability to communicate directly and share honestly and work through their own sick issues with each other.

An extract from The Depressed Person, a short story published in The Atlantic in 1998 by David Foster Wallace, who knew a thing or two about depression.

What's comical about it is the way it's written in the cold, sterile prose of a case history, while describing the most monstrous and heart-rending story of the suffering of a young girl who isn't even allowed a name, while the therapist's is mentioned several times in one sentence (but what a sentence). She's apparently the only one in the whole story who experiences any empathy: she at least realises her problems are a pain in the neck for the people around her, all of whom are oblivious to her cares except where they are themselves inconvenienced.

The style reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, which also relates the most unimaginable horrors in denatured prose

The DFW story is available online.

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