In looking back over my writing I don’t see depression showing up directly as a subject for social consciousness. More subtly, I have a horror story that play upon the distortion of reality that happens when someone is depressed. And how sometimes we are willing to take the vision over reality. The story is about a woman who is a suicide survivor who is taunted by a demon pretending to be her deceased daughter. In this story she is lured into repeating the action she thought she’d risen above.
As a writer, I think that we all probably have certain themes that show up repeatedly in our work. For me, the issue has been to get enough distance from the original pain so that I can use the experience objectively as an artist.
On a more personal level, I find that dealing with pain and depression is a balancing act. I think we live in a society that is on some level afraid to truly experience pain. I think that positive thinking has its place but sometimes people police themselves to the point where they whip themselves for not being more positive, falling into a negative spiral instead of addressing the original injury. Experiencing the negative, understanding it and then letting it go works for me, although sometimes the understanding comes slow. But I can’t move people so feel pain through my writing if I’m unwilling to feel it myself. So journaling also helps me because when I’m in a dark place my first instinct is to write about it so that I remember how this feels so that I can use it.