Sisyphus at Bay

A SEASON IN HELL by PERCY KNAUTH 111 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

Whether they call it the blues, a case of the hoo-ha's or "free-floating angst," nearly everyone has wrestled with depression. Cures are various, and likely to be temporary: a cold shower, a new hat, pills, a chat with a doctor or a friend, or simply repeating to oneself that "tomorrow is another day." Many people push a burden of inexplicable sadrtess through half a lifetime like Sisyphus with his famous stone, and try to believe that they are happy just the same. But when Author Percy Knauth fell into a depression, none of these things worked.

Knauth is a veteran correspondent, editor and writer (the New York Times, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED). Returning from Europe a few years ago, he seemed, at 57, to be sitting on top of the world; he had a wife, a young family and a brightlooking future as a freelancer on a series of long-term projects. Yet he kept awakening (if he managed to sleep at all) with a sense of impending doom.

All day nameless dread dogged him so closely that he could not work. Finally, his anguish became so acute that he decided to kill himself. So relieved was he by suicide's promise of deliverance that he broke down and wept, waking his sleeping wife, who learned for the first time how close to the edge he had gone and who helped start him on the road to recovery.

This book is a brief account of what happened before and after that moment. It suffers slightly from overwriting. But Knauth can be forgiven his occasional excesses because he confronts accurately and candidly a highly personal sickness that is too little understood, and writes informatively about its treatment. Word for word, A Season in Hell is one of the best--and most encouraging--books on mental illness yet written.

Acute or clinical depression, which is characterized by dejection, fearfulness and, as the medical dictionaries phrase it, "an absence of hope," differs from garden-variety glumness as, say, double pneumonia differs from sniffles. It is not a new ailment; doctors have known about it for centuries. But medicine has only recently learned how to treat it Merely telling a patient that his fears are groundless does no good at all. Conventional psychoanalysis is equally ineffective in most cases; Knauth visited a Freudian therapist for six months without exorcising any of his personal demons.

Chemical Imbalance. A new class of drugs does seem to help. Doctors, as Knauth reports, have found that many depressed people have abnormally low levels of certain brain chemicals. Whether this imbalance is a cause of depression or one of its effects remains to be determined. What is known is that it can be corrected in some cases with drugs known as MAO inhibitors, which affect brain chemistry, not the progress of the People's Revolution in China. Two weeks after he started taking MAO inhibitors, Knauth was able to function again. He took up his old editorial projects, wrote this book and became a crusader for the National Mental Health Association.

Despite earnest post hoc attempts at self-analysis (including a painful probe of his failed first marriage) Knauth still cannot say for sure what originally caused his descent into depression. Nor can he claim to be cured; just as a diabetic takes insulin, Knauth may have to take his medicine for melancholia for the rest of his life. The prospect does not seem to bother him. Unlike many victims of depression, who do succeed in killing themselves, Knauth has survived. And, as A Season in Hell dramatically demonstrates, he has used his own experience to encourage others to survive too. qed Peter Stoler

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