1: It was the spring of 2019. Author and columnist David Brooks‘s close friend Peter Marks was struggling with depression.
They had gathered for a weekend together. “My wife noticed a change immediately,” David recounts. “A light had gone out. There was a flatness in his voice, a stillness in his eyes.”
Pete told David what he already knew: “He wasn’t himself. He was doing what he loved most—playing basketball, swimming in the lake—but he couldn’t enjoy anything.”
Pete was concerned for his wife, his two boys, and himself. He asked for support and friendship.
“It was the first time I had seen such pain in him—what turned out to be severe depression,” David writes. “I was confronted with a question I was unprepared to answer: How do you serve a friend when they are hit with this illness?”
Things got worse the following year during the COVID-19 pandemic.
During phone conversations, “I made the mistake of trying to advise him about how he could recover from the illness,” David remembers.
“Years earlier, he had gone to Vietnam to perform eye surgeries for those who were too poor to afford them. I told him he should do that again, since he had found it so rewarding.
“I did not realize that it was energy and desire he lacked, not ideas about things to do,” he notes.
“It was only later that I read that when you give a depressed person advice on how they can better, there’s a good chance all you are doing is telling the person that you just don’t get it.”
David attempted to remind Pete of all the blessings in his life. Psychologists call this “positive reframing.” It didn’t work. “I’ve since read that this might make the sufferer feel even worse about themselves for not being able to enjoy all the things that are palpably enjoyable,” David observes.
Slowly, as time passed, David realized his job was not to try to cheer his friend up. It was “to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect, and love them; it’s to show them you haven’t given up on them, you haven’t walked away,” he writes.
2: Meanwhile, Pete was “analyzing the anguish,” David notes. “He was trying to figure it out. He was going to the best doctors. They were trying one approach after another.”
But it wasn’t working. The fog refused to lift.
Looking back now, David reflects: “I’m also haunted by the vast number of medications his doctors put him on. He always seemed to be getting on one or getting off another as he ran through various treatment regimes. His path through the mental healthcare system was filled with a scattershot array of different treatments and crushing disappointments.”
When the two friends talked, Pete struggled to articulate exactly how he felt. “Depression sucks,” he would say.
“But he tried not to burden me with the full horrors of what he was going through,” David writes. “There was a lot he didn’t tell me, at least until the end, or not at all.”
When Pete spoke about his illness, “it sometimes seemed as if there were two of him,” David recalls. “There was the one enveloped in pain and the one who was observing all this and could not understand what was happening. That second self was the Pete I spoke to for those three years.”
Later, Pete’s wife Jen reflected on the experience of this difficult time: “I was very aware this was not the real Pete,” she said. “I tried not to take things personally.”
On one level, Pete knew that his wife and boys loved him. He knew that his friends loved him. But “he still felt locked inside the lacerating self-obsession that was part of the illness,” David writes.
David longed to help his friend. As a writer, he had dedicated his life to words. Still, “I increasingly came up against the futility of words to help Pete in any meaningful way. The feeling of impotence was existential.”
So, “after a while, I just tried to be normal,” he writes. “I just tried to be the easygoing friend that I had always been to him and he had always been to me. I hoped this would slightly ease his sense of isolation.”
3: Pete’s depression ultimately took his life.
Sometimes, the best we can do is just be present with our friend.
“Writing about his own depression in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Ruoff mentioned that his brother sent him more than seven hundred postcards over the years, from all fifty states, Central America, Canada, and Asia,” David writes. “Those kinds of touches say: I’m with you. No response necessary.”
David writes, “I wish I had bombarded Pete with more small touches. Just little notes and emails to let him know how much he was on my mind.”
They had one last dinner together before Pete died. “[Pete’s wife] Jen and I tried to keep the conversation bouncing along,” David recalls. “But apparently, their car ride home was heart-rending. ‘How can I not be able to talk to my oldest friend?’ Pete asked. ‘Brooksie can talk to people. I can’t.'”
David writes: “Pete was always the braver of the two of us, the one who would go cliff diving or jump over bonfires without fear. And he was never more courageous than over his last three years. He fought with astonishing courage and steadfastness against a foe that would bring anybody to their knees.
“I don’t know what he was thinking on his final day, but I have read that depression makes it hard to imagine a time when things will ever be better. I have no evidence for this, but knowing Pete as I do, I strongly believe that he erroneously convinced himself that he was committing suicide to help his family and ease the hardship his illness had caused them.
“Living now in the wreckage, I can tell you if you ever find yourself having that thought, it is completely wrong.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Do I have any personal experience with severe depression, either with friends, family members, or perhaps myself? Is it possible to describe the experience?
Action: Discuss with my spouse or a close friend.