Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge
Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge
Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge
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ed and refused to do anything. This is what is termed in<br />
contemporary psychology as a nervous breakdown. My<br />
mother was distressed and ultimately sought medical<br />
experts to help and my aunt was immediately identified as<br />
suicidal and hospitalized in the local psych ward. Despite<br />
all the progress of modern medicine and study of the<br />
human mind, specific labels are actually hard to pin down.<br />
The experts labeled her as depressed and began the first of<br />
a series of drug treatments to "bring her up." This period<br />
ended with my aunt's first suicide attempt.<br />
She had been released from the hospital and was<br />
struggling through her days at home alone. She continued<br />
to try working part-time for her boss's former legal partner.<br />
One day at lunch, she drove her car out to the west side of<br />
town and rolled it "accidentally" in a single car accident.<br />
The roads were clear. There was no black ice and, more<br />
significantly, according to the patrol officer, there were no<br />
skid marks. My aunt was once again hospitalized.<br />
Mood, in all of the depressive states associated with<br />
manic-depressive illness, is identified as bleak, pessimistic<br />
and despairing. A deep sense of futility is often<br />
accompanied, if not preceded by the belief that the ability to<br />
experience pleasure is permanently gone. There is a general<br />
impairment of feeling. Suicidal thinking and behavior are<br />
not uncommon.<br />
In the silence of the winter, midday, there is little sense<br />
of time. The sun is lost behind a pale white-grey sky. There<br />
is light, but it seems sourceless. There are no apparent<br />
shadows. Under the frosty impure and swollen creek ice, I<br />
can see the black earth. The creek is only a half a foot deep<br />
here so, even though it is only early December, it is frozen<br />
solid through. Dark branches loom overhead, reaching,<br />
stretching, framework forming a canopy high over my<br />
head. The snap of a twig echoes throughout the woods. But<br />
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