Depression

Thursday

Peregrine Worsthorne

Bourbon from Bush, envy from Nixon… and running into Herbert Hoover: encounters with eight presidents

From our UK edition

I feel a bit of a fraud writing about the ‘presidents I knew’, since journalists do not really get to know the great figures they interview or shake hands with. Indeed the relationship between journalist and great personage is about as false as any relationship can be, since each is trying to make use of the other. So in all likelihood my dreamed relationship with President Herbert Hoover — which began and ended in 1933 when I was aged 11 and only lasted for about a minute — came nearer to being a genuine human relationship than all the other journalistic ones later — which included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, LBJ, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Quite a mouthful. My Hoover story — to the best of my childish memory — happened like this.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The sofa that became a work of art

From our UK edition

Last week on Front Row (Radio 4) the singer Joyce DiDonato recalled the advice she gave the new graduates of the Juilliard School, just about to embark on their professional careers in music. It’s a hard life. They’re asked to be perfect, which of course is unattainable. She wanted to encourage them to keep going, to persist in pursuing their art, despite the inevitable phases of discouragement and disappointment. Because, she says, art has the power to build bridges across cultures, religions, political divides. ‘It teaches empathy.’ She was referring particularly to musical art, but what she was saying applies also to radio.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Radio 4 deserts the British bird. Shame on them!

From our UK edition

A strange coincidence on Saturday night to come back from the cinema, having seen a film about a woman fighting to save her job while suffering from depression and thoughts of putting an end to it all, only to switch on the radio and hear from people who have had suicidal thoughts themselves or who have suffered the peculiar, awful grief of losing someone to suicide. The film was affecting and sensitively done, but after listening to In Memoriam: Conversations on a Bench (Radio 4) I realised how different the impact of radio can be. It was not that the film had in any way glamorised depression, or turned us as viewers into voyeurs revelling in someone else’s misfortune.

Thursday

Anne Chisholm

Breakdowns, suicide attempts — and four great novels

From our UK edition

Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a number, as we all know, never went back. A few became household names — Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Clive James — and British cultural life owes them a great deal. Madeleine St John, the novelist and semi-reclusive eccentric who smoked herself to an early death in London in 2006, was one of them; but although eventually she made a  minor literary reputation for herself, writing four novels in her middle age of which the third, The Essence of the Thing, made the Booker shortlist in 1997, she has remained largely unknown here.

Thursday

William Leith

Sane New World, by Ruby Wax – a review

From our UK edition

Ruby Wax, who is best known as a comedian, dedicates this book ‘to my mind, which at one point left town’. She says: ‘I am one of the one in four who has mentally unravelled.’ She tells us what it’s like to fall apart, why she thinks so many people fall apart, and what you can do if you start to fall apart yourself. ‘The feeling is that of being a corpse,’ she says. It happens because our brains are not adapted to live in the relentless global village we’ve created. And: ‘YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND AND HOW YOU THINK.’ More on this last bit later.

Thursday

David Blackburn

‘Turboparalysis’ Revisited

From our UK edition

The word ‘turboparalysis’, coined by Michael Lind (who has a brilliant piece on the subject in the Spectator Christmas double issue), is paradoxical, even illogical. And yet it is clear, perfect for our times. Lind defines his term as: ‘a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and the wheels spin but the vehicle refuses to move.’ Turboparalysis is a new word; but its sense is familiar. We are often warned that we ‘risk repeating the mistakes of the 1930s’. Comparison between eras is always awkward.