DEPRESSION IN LITERATURE
Reflection
While examining these four books about depression (“Girl, Interrupted” “The Me Nobody Knew” “The Red Tree” “Why Are You So Sad?”), it became clear to me that the topic of depression can be approached in many different ways. Two of these books were autobiographical, whereas the other ones were not specifically about the author’s time spent with their own depression. However, all the books that were written, had an insider perspective in some way about the understandings of depression. Even in, “The Red Tree,” the author had admitted in interviews about feeling depressed. As for, “Why Are You So Sad?”, the author is trained to work with people, specifically parents, who are depressed, and has had practice doing so. In the books that I encountered during this project, the idea of being an insider made the books much more accessible to the reader. Considering depression is something that is emotional, an unauthentic source may not be as able to depict the thoughts and feelings that go along with the depression as well, making the text less effective.
Two of the texts (“The Red Tree” and “Girl, Interrupted”) did not preach about finding help or bettering yourself as a reader. The other two on the list did. “Why Are You So Sad?” fell under this category, but it fit because the intent of the book is to help children that are living with depressed parents. As for, “The Me Nobody Knew,” it too tried to help the reader and became more of a comment on society and self-worth at the end. It also included a list of resources for the reader. Both of these books explicitly reached out to try and lend a helping hand to the reader.
Overall, I think the most fitting text at any age level to deal with depression is, “The Red Tree.” This book does not make the story of depression a personal one and says less than all the other books. Rather, it uses feelings and pictures that show these feelings to accurately get its message of depression and how it feels to the reader. Also, its ending is one that is positive, even after all of the negative scenes, and there is hope shown in every picture, represented by a leaf.
In the end, all of these books showed the main character, and all characters with depression (except for Daisy in “Girl, Interrupted”) as surviving depression. They all gave an accurate representation without exaggerating aspects of depression. Besides the lack of diversity seen within this topic, it appears there are good sources of literature out there for those that are curious about depression or suffering from it, to read.
This, however, wasn’t the case in “Girl, Interrupted” and “The Red Tree.” In these books, both characters, both real and imaginary, are there to tell a story about living with depression and could offer assistance to the reader, if they were suffering from depression, by showing them that the main characters had encounters with depression and ended up living out their lives.
In all four books the reader can be aided, but in different capacities. This is something that was interesting about the text as a whole, all of the books helped provide an insight into depression, as well as offer a helping hand to readers that may be experiencing depression, just in different ways.
When examining these texts, I realized they were all published within nine years of each other. However, “Girl, Interrupted” is an account of a story that took place primarily in 1968 and 1969. As far as recent literature on the topic of depression goes for both Young Adult and Children’s literature, there are books still being published to this day about this topic, it just happens that the books I chose were not across a larger period of time.
One thing I did find interesting when reading these books was the lack of diversity present. In all four books, the main character was Caucasian and there were not any prominent or memorable roles in any of the books that included minorities. I found this a little concerning, considering all people can go through depression and that was not accurately depicted within these books. On an individual basis, I do not feel that this is cause to be alarmed by any of these books, but rather I found the lack of diversity concerning when examining all the texts.
of the texts as a set.
