My best friend is on her kitchen floor crying. 

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I go to her, kneel down.  "Tell me where it hurts." Not a question but a demand. The worried friend needs to know the source of the pain in order to address it.  Tell me how I can help you. 

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She shook her head.  I knew she wasn't saying "No, I won't tell you." She was saying "No, I can't." How do you explain a pain that is both everywhere and nowhere all at once? 

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Often a depressive will not accept that he needs help, or that he has a problem at all.  Like the alcoholic or the drug addict, admitting to having depression might feel like admitting to a flaw, something about your moral character that took a wrong turn somewhere down the line.  Meanwhile, they may suffer, or put on a happy face, or withdraw into their homes.

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For some, the real pain of depression is the absence of pain.  

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For some, their friends may not believe them when they say they are clinically depressed.  They always looked so happy.  

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For some, acceptance of their own depression will fluctuate, so that they are constantly wondering if there is indeed something wrong with them or if it is all in their head. 

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For some, depression will cause severe physical symptoms, like hair loss, weight loss or weight gain.  For others it will be invisible.  In both cases, though there may be evidence, there is not much to point to as proof that they have this illness.

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All of this is to say that depression is complex.  Each of the texts analyzed in the previous pages provided a representation of depression that succeeded in many ways, but was overall an incomplete portrait of the disease.  How do we remedy this? 

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The short answer is, I don't know.  

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The longer answer is, I'm not sure, but I have some ideas, all of which have been informed by the textual analyses you've read thus far.  Over the past few pages I have tried to make clear my response to certain representational decisions -- a "do" and "don't" list, if you will.  These are the things I believe are most pertinent for closing the gap:

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• First, we need more memoirs like Sally Brampton's, with vivid detail and painful honesty, but with the additional acknowledgment of all the complexities built in to the illness.  

• Second, we need representations that do not generalize the illness but that speak to a specific case and make clear that it is a specific case they are speaking about.

• Third, we need MORE: more movies, more books, (maybe not more ads...), and more talking; the more individual stories get shared on a large scale, the more the individuality and complexity of the illness will become recognizable, and the more the shameful element of the illness will begin to disappear.  

• Fourth, we need deeply personal accounts followed by deeply analytical analyses that do not run away from confusing aspects of depression but that run toward them: something Andrew Solomon-esque. 

• Fifth, we need to talk directly to people who know nothing about depression. This is the only way to close the gap.  If we can make the gap get smaller, it may be possible for our depressives to heal without the encumbering misunderstandings and shame built into their illness.  Let's try making the non-depressives our main audience and see what happens. 

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The origin of Hansen's Disease predates the Bible.  I'm sure if we looked hard enough we would find that the origin of depression does, too.  Which means that for thousands of years this gap has existed, growing wider and wider. I don't believe the perfect representation of depression is possible.  I don't even know if the gap can ever be closed, or if it's too wide to ever put back together.  But I do believe we can do better, and I think it's worth it to try.  

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