My desire to write about melancholy may seem like a surprising choice for people who are already alive, productive, having positive experiences, and living their lives happily. However, we know that at least one in 4-5 people may experience periods that meet the criteria for depression at least once in their lives. Maybe you have lived, maybe you will live, and maybe you are among the lucky group who have never even passed by. But depression exists, it is real and it is a very painful mental state for those who experience it. Contrary to the history of defining melancholia as a condition rather than a phenomenon, melancholic conditions are evaluated and treated factually in modern psychiatry. Explaining what melancholy is; I list some valuable sources at the end of the article for the curious reader, which positions them mythologically, historically, culturally, psychoanalytically and politically. However, for this article, I prefer to discuss melancholy with a focus on individual and cultural experiences.
To begin with, there is a palliative aspect in the widespread use of what we call melancholia in society, contrary to medical criteria. There is no doubt that a darkness is perceived in melancholia, but there is a slight "blue" atmosphere attributed to the state of being melancholic. The reason I say blue is that melancholic periods are called "blues" in English. Social perception apparently distinguishes the blue tone in the darkness and adds a naive and sensitive quality to melancholic people. Just like the sensitive minority who becomes melancholic but marginalized in the face of social events. However, in psychiatry, the situation is exactly the opposite. Melancholic depression is used for the most treatment-resistant and serious depressions. Perhaps this desire to turn blue among the public provides hope for others who are suffering. Those who love sad songs, those who shed a tear in a romantic movie, those who withdraw from people in depressive times, and even those who wear the famous depression cardigan and die under the covers are called melancholic.
What does a melancholic person experience? Is there a chance to frame what you are going through as we see it from the outside? If you have experienced melancholy or been around someone who has, it is hard to believe this. Melancholy is, above all, the darkness of what is lost. Whatever is lost - lover, job, love, reputation, spouse, friend, self-worth - even if it is gone, its shadow remains. It depends on a person's life. Sometimes a person searches without even knowing what he has lost. He looks after the departing ship, looks at the empty walls and ceilings. Melancholy is a great deprivation. Most of the time, people neither want to see nor hear a person. But he also experiences the need to cling, to intertwine, to find balm for his wounds in its most intense form. His body collapses with the aftershocks of the earthquake experienced by the soul; he becomes tired, sleepless, has no appetite, and writhes in physical pain. He is neither satisfied with his past nor with his future, which he looks at with despair. The pain experienced at that moment seems endless and every pain of that moment will continue in the same way. All physical and spiritual sighs echo in the emptiness of the lost. However, how weak the melancholic person's voice is. It is a lonely, unfortunate, silent, breathless spot in the huge world. Melancholy is a state of sighing, sighing and a scream that cannot be heard from outside.
Therefore, melancholy means being left outside. It is a solitary madness. Even though some periods are experienced en masse. It is the state of being outside the circle. The melancholic cannot digest and tolerate what is happening around him. Because melancholy is not a blindness but a clear encounter with reality. You look at the family you live in, yourself, the culture and order you live in, in a more uncensored way. Because all your defense mechanisms that color a sad black-and-white scenario have collapsed. You start thinking about your old friend with whom you are very angry, about your family's mistakes and failures towards you. People remember their captivity over and over again when they are in a cage. How difficult it becomes to think, communicate, produce and tolerate. Melancholy is inertia and is as unfair as it gets. That's why everything that is unfair is noticed and internally rebelled against. But the accounts kept in black-covered notebooks are very difficult to question, and the rebellion curls up and lies right above the heart. In melancholy, all the burdens of life are thrown into a sack and one tries to carry them without knowing the direction. Melancholic's desire for death is not only because of suffering from the pain of loss, but also because of not being able to get rid of what they lost and want to be relieved. Some of you may have watched Lars von Trier's movie Melanchlolia. In the film, melancholy is depicted in a magnificent pattern with all its images. Maybe that terrible, agonizing depression can only come when everything ends forever. It is possible, but one's own death may not cool that envy and anger.
Although melancholy is a state of individual disintegration, it is not limited to one's own unique center. As soon as the melancholic person takes his head out of the sand, he looks around, albeit barely. He wants to see order, labor, justice, equality. Wanting to believe that the world is a fair place is not a luxury but a necessity. From our own country's perspective, it is a need that has never been met. That's why boxes of psychiatric drugs are prescribed. In fact, people lose their humanity as they are repeatedly exposed to the impossibility of living humanely. Sometimes what is lost in melancholy is "being able to exist humanely". You ask us mental health professionals many times, "As long as the country is like this, won't your work increase?" I don't know to what extent our work increases, but we lose our "humanity" with our patients to that extent. The solution is noticing, the solution is honing our voice. I always say this about melancholy: fortunately, it is not an endless period, it is a period with a definite beginning and end. Likewise, this nightmare is not eternal for the geography we live in. We just need to put some blue brush strokes on the pitch black melancholy...
Recommended Reading:*
Mourning and Melancholy, Sigmund Freud
Melancholy, Serol Teber
Depression, Mourning and Melancholy, Darien Leader
Melancholy is a Woman, Dörther Bindert
Kara Güneş-Depression and Melancholy, Julia Kristeva
Karaduygun- Sema Kaygusuz
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