Walker Percy and Depression

A few ground rules here before I start:  I will not be arguing brain chemistry here.  I have known several well-meaning Christians who poo-pooed the use of drugs for psychological problems because they thought the root cause was spiritual.  I have even heard of others saying that the use of anti-depressants or similar drugs to be evidence of a lack of faith in God to heal.  I really have very little to say to such people (if you can't say something nice...), but that they need to at the very least be more loving and not use illness, like Job's friends, as an opportunity for questioning others' relationship with God.  On the other hand I'm not content to simply chalk it up to chemistry, suggest medication, and call it a day, anymore than I am willing to reduce love to that chemical reaction that occurs in one's brain in the presence of certain other persons.  Something more is going on in both cases.  There is a reason there are so many different schools of psychiatry each roughly as effective or not as the others- man is complex and our knowledge of him is perhaps more limited than in any other sphere, except for our knowledge of God; it is impossible to measure distances in the Infinite.

Lengthy disclaimer now out of the way, I would like to talk about one of my favorite novelists/essayists, Walker Percy.  He eventually settled in Covington, right near my hometown and lived and wrote there until his death in 1990.  A brief background is probably in order, Percy was raised by an uncle, also an author, after the suicide of his father and the death of his mother in a car wreck (which WP seemed to think may also have been a suicide).  He then went to UNC, studied medicine, and interned at Bellvue in New York where he caught tuberculosis.  His medical career was of course over and while convalescing and reading philosophy in a sanatorium, Percy made two important decisions: he decided to become a writer and he joined the Catholic Church.

Percy drew on his medical background to inform his writing, as he sought to write the diagnostic novel, a book that pointed to the disease of modern society.  He noted how the illness as the doctor sees it is in fact the body's response to the latent disease; for example, an infection does not cause a fever or runny nose, the body responds by raising it's temperature and secreting mucus in an attempt to fight off the disease.  Thus Percy argued modern depression, malaise, and alienation were not themselves diseases to be treated as such, but signified that something was deeply wrong with man, or society, or man as he finds himself in society.

The problem then is not as simple as "getting over it" or taking increasingly more pills in an effort to cope (not that medication or treatment is bad), but addressing the problems that cause this response of displacement.  In fact as Percy says in the book I'm reading now (the satirical, fake self-help book Lost in the Cosmos), something is probably wrong if you are not at least the slightest bit depressed by modern living.  Recognizing then by our own response to modern life that something in fact is wrong, that there is a sort endemic disease in man, what is our response? To point to a cure.

The problem is of course we ourselves bear the disease; we are part of the problem.  Like Percy as he worked in the sanatorium  as a doctor-patient while recovering, even as we work to alleviate the problem we ourselves carry the contagion that is its source.  So we ourselves cannot be the cure, we would have, in the end, to destroy ourselves to destroy the disease.  But if someone was able to grapple with our disease, bear it, and defeat it, then He would be inoculated, He could cure.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
                                   T.S. Eliot- The Four Quartets, East Coker