Review: My Depression: The Up and Down and Up of It

Depression is one of the most misunderstood diseases on the planet. On one hand, it goes misdiagnosed ALL the time, and this has a lot to do with drug commercials. Ads come on and ask if you’re sad, and BOOM you start thinking you’re depressed even without proper medical evaluation. On the other hand, it’s a very over-diagnosed disease because doctors everywhere are doing their best to hit their quotas so that those same companies that finance those drug commercials, continue fund the medical practices that make sure they stay in business.

There’s also the misconception that depression is all about sadness with the popular response after someone takes their own life being, ”But he/she seemed so happy, there were no signs.” My Depression: The Up and Down and Up of It does a candid Schoolhouse Rock way of showing people what signs of depression really could be. Bitterness, anger, solace, all caused by chemical imbalances in the brain that scientists say could be hereditary i.e. you could be depressed and it have nothing to do with you or your surroundings.

To help tell our tale, the brilliant Sigourney Weaver voices the conscious of ‘Liz’ with other, but much smaller, contributions coming from Steve Buscemi and Fred Armisen. As a matter of fact, if you had left off Steve and Fred’s names from the credits, I would not have even noticed that they were in the documentary, but Sigourney’s presence was felt throughout. If Sig is the protagonist of the story, then the black cloud handing over Liz’s head is by far the antagonist, and probably one you can’t simply defeat with a magic saying or sword play. Rather, the doc exemplifies three principles in fighting depression : 1) Awareness 2) Diagnosis 3) Treatment.

The major drawback of the special is that I felt we spent 25 minutes of the run time talking about how bad depression is, and not enough time talking about treatments and stabilizing once you are on treatment. It could be the latter would be varied dependent on the individual, but if that’s the case I would’ve liked to learn more about Liz. What were HER experiences in getting to a place where she can say, ”I’m out of my depression.” Does a doctor tell you that you are out or do you have to know? The presentation left a lot of questions, but overall you get about as concise of a depiction of the hell that is depression without the bad-acting live action takes that you would get elsewhere. My Depression: The Up and Down and Up of It should be required reading for any psych major in school and for anyone who feels they are alone in dealing with this terrible illness.

Score