Over seventeen million Americans, one in five individuals, suffer from depression. Editor Nell Casey, who is the recipient of a Carter Center mental health journalism fellowship, begins this edifying collection of essays with the following: "Writers, who know, through experience, depression in one or more of its diverse guises, describe the sadness and dread that are at its core; they write about how it is to feel the draining out of vital forces; how it is to exist with, and live around, the sleeplessness, the restlessness, the inertia, and the hopelessness. They describe the lingering influences of melancholia on their notions of self and work, and they portray the damage that their despair brings to the lives of others."
No anthology of this type would be complete without an excerpt from William Styron's Darkness Visible where he describes the lineaments of this dread disease. His wife Rose shares what it was like to live with this third partner in their relationship. Larry McMurtry discusses the melancholy that descended upon him after quadruple bypass surgery. Edward Hoagland makes a key point: "The worst thing about depression — the thing that makes people phobic about it — is that it's a foretaste of death. It's a trip to the country of nothingness."
David Karp offers another invaluable image: "I see depression as akin to being tied down to a chair with restraints on my wrists." Donald Hall recounts the mood swings in his relationship with his wife Jane Kenyon, who used the phrase "unholy ghost" as a term for this terrible malaise. The book ends with Nell and Maud Casey's back-to-back essays about the latter's bipolar disorder. Unholy Ghost sheds the light of awareness and compassion on this terrible and widespread affliction.