In the short story “the outsider” by HP Lovecraft it tells of a man, a prisoner without time or memory of a kind of closed tower. He does not remember how long he has been there, how he ended up there, or why, he only perceives the distance of his situation from what it once was.
One day he decides to study that desperate situation better, as if awakening from a deep sleep, and he discovers that there seems to be a light above, perhaps a window. So after several attempts she manages to climb along the walls and with difficulty reaches that opening, which is actually a window. Outside and dark, he doesn’t distinguish anything, and the man gropes for a hold to go down the outer wall. To his surprise he finds a floor, made of earth, and realizes that it did not come out from the top of a tower, but from the top of a well, dug under the floor of a house. Always amazed, he then gains the ground and enters the house: while walking he comes across a terrifying figure, by which he feels intrigued, and which he tries to touch by extending his hands. In this way,
The similarity to depression is quite simple. A deep well in which one is prisoner, far from the normality of the world that continues to live. The effort to do normal things is immense, like climbing to the top of a tall tower. Touching the ground means, for a depressed person, going up from a ditch in which he is stuck. Because then the depressed person doesn’t do it anyway, because he doesn’t make an effort
The depressive attitude does not favor the ascent, but rather tends to reach depths such as not to see even the light anymore. The depressed often feels calmer thinking that the world no longer exists, and wants nothing more from him, rather than feeling called to participate in a life that feels heavy, foreign and painful. Family members and friends often insist that the depressed person quit, react and so on, but it is common experience that the depressed person, if forced “by force” to deal with the world that arouses anxiety and fear, reacts in a depressive way, and on the contrary, he may feel desperate in the face of the image of his misfortune and his “strangeness” to the world. As well as the protagonist, who after having climbed the tower / well, finds himself in front of the mirror and sees himself as monstrous,
The cure must not retrace the mistake of climbing the tower. The therapy makes the person grow, so that instead of having to climb the well he can simply get up to touch the top and get out without too much effort. By doing so, it is also avoided that, after so much effort, there is then the trauma of a monstrous self-image returned from the environment. The depressed person treated will be able to get out because the depth will disappear, and he will see a normal image of himself. These are not the prerequisites for getting out of depression, because there is no way to make a depressed person feel out of the well or to make him feel a welcoming world full of good reflexes. Instead, they are the effects of a cure, which cancels the depressive illusion of the well from within.
