Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash
Recently, David Letterman sat down for an intimate interview with Matt Berninger, the lead singer of my favorite band, The National. If you’re unfamiliar with The National’s music, you’re definitely not a sad dad with a degree in English Literature and an Ohio driver’s license. I might liken The National to Modest Mouse, if the mouse went on to invent new time signatures and become Pretentious Mouse; or The Shins, after The Person has run back-to-back ultramarathons and is in a great deal of pain; or like Cat Stevens, for reasons only Spotify algorithms can explain. In any case, the vibe is indie math rock meets “the blues,” by which I mean actual clinical depression. And I should know, because I’m a psychiatrist. In the interview, Letterman and Berninger talk about their shared struggles with depression. Letterman admires a lyric: Sit in the backyard in my pharmacy slippers / at least I’m not on the roof anymore.
As it turns out, Berninger was referring to the slippers he’d purchased when he picked up his antidepressant medication at the pharmacy. That medication had most likely been prescribed by someone a lot like me, at least in terms of professional training and expertise. Letterman eats the image up. I, on the other hand, find it deeply unsettling, for reasons I had yet to unpack.
The National’s lyrics are poetic and deliberately vague. In many of his songs, Berninger seems to pluck a phrase out of mid-air, and (whether it has anything to do with the title or content of the song whatsoever) makes space to repeat it, over and over, mesmerizing you to the brink of feeling both haunted and understood.
I don’t wanna get over you.
I can’t explain it, any other, any other way.
All the very best of us string ourselves up for love.
I didn’t appreciate the meaning of that last one, which is from a song called “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” until I saw The National perform the song live as an encore at Hill Auditorium. We sang a capella as Berninger pantomimed the lyrics to assist us. All the very best of us, string ourselves up for love: Berninger forms a pantomime noose, tosses the rope up toward the huge chandelier. My jaw drops open. Hands to my heart. Shared sorrow. His mind has been to the same dark, terrible place mine has visited. I don’t blame you for losing your mind for a little while, he tells me, in a different song. So did I.
I had a severe post-partum depression in the summer of 2013, after my younger son was born. That was around the time The National released their album Trouble Will Find Me. Every song hit me straight in the feels and filled me with sorrow. And yet, I kept listening. And it wasn’t because of my masochistic tendency to torture myself. It was because those songs made me realize that if someone wrote them, they must have at one time felt the same kind of pain I was feeling in that moment, which meant: I was not alone. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that Trouble Will Find Me is one of the reasons I’m still alive today.
Years later, I read a poem by Andrea Gibson called “The Nutritionist.” It was about various treatments they’d received for their depression, and how none of them had provided much relief, with the exception of one: finding the words. Creating art straight from heartbreak, stringing lines together that would swing like vines to someone else who needed to hear them. This is the verse that described with heartbreaking precision what The National’s music has meant to me:
The trauma said don’t write this poem
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones
My bones said “Tyler Clementi dove into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.”
My bones said “write the poem.”
It was Matt Berninger’s bones whispering “write the song” that kept me off the George Washington Bridge that year. He has no way of knowing this, of course, but his pain has created a safe haven for me to feel, and heal, my own. Clearly, I would not wish depression on him (or anyone else), simply because their suffering makes someone else feel less alone. But it’s the reason that I bristled at the idea of someone like me prescribing Matt Berninger antidepressant medication: I can’t be the only one who needs the art he creates from his depression to help treat my own.
I know a euthymic Matt Berninger can still bring it, and the distance from depression to recovery is lined with gems of wisdom. Recovery itself is grist for the songwriting mill, inspiration for more repetitive phrases in more haunting music. I imagine most writers with depression need just enough distance from their sorrow to be “with it,” rather than “in it,” in order to create from it.
Many of my clients are artists, and when they ask if antidepressant medication will “numb them out,” I answer honestly: maybe. Some choose to stop medication and feel their feels, whatever they may be. They are equally as courageous as those who stay in treatment. I see my role as offering options, and trying to stay present and available as a safe haven for my clients, where if they are sure of only one thing, it is that they are not alone. And when I need a haven like that myself, I nestle a bud into my ear, and listen to the blooming of the vines.
Remember when you lost your shit and drove the car into the garden? You got out and said “I’m sorry” to the vines, and no one saw you.
There comes a time in a person’s mental health recovery where they can begin to feel gratitude for what their adversity has taught them. It is an altruistic sort of healing, to paint our pain on a canvas of words and hold it up for all to see. But in this way, we write to let go, little by little. We write to break free, not with a grenade but a pickaxe, our words like pebbles falling, slipping out of Andy Dufresne’s pants in Shawshank. Our words like vines growing — from soil sifted from gravel spoilage, our soul lifted from razed ruins. Our words, not waste but refuse, refusing to look away but also looking up, looking down, looking all around at our misery’s comforting company.
Lindsay-Rose Dunstan, MD (she/they) is a queer psychiatrist, prison/police abolitionist, and founder of Uncaged Minds, a psychoeducational resource for those with neurodivergent conditions and marginalized identities. Her work has been published in leftist and mental health journals, poetry anthologies, and Slate Magazine. She lives in Detroit with her partner (bassist for the band Panda House!), three sons, and five cats.