Beauty and good grooming can do much more than to lift spirits; they can also be vital steps in treating depression. I am gaunt from eating little and badly for weeks on end, and, though one friend had joked that I was lucky to have the kind of depression that made me emaciated rather than the kind that made me fat, I have a drawn skeletal quality that is scary to behold. My clothes hang on me like sacks.
I am hollow-eyed from sleeping badly. My fingernails are bitten and ragged. My skin is pasty and slightly broken out. While researching and promoting a book on depression, I met with hundreds of depressed people, and I learned to recognize as tokens of the depressive fellowship their dullness of features, their desolate unkemptness, that closed expression of people caught outside time.
People with depression often describe battling against the odds to keep up basic self-grooming activities, the first marks of a functional person. Depression steals the pride that keeps people looking bright and fresh and lively.
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and a really depressed person finds every move and every action acutely effortful and painful. The daily rituals of cleanliness begin to seem like insurmountable obstacles.
To brush all your teeth. To wash both your hands. To wash your face. To turn on the water. To turn off the water. To get a towel. To brush your hair. To shave or put on makeup. The whole thing seems like such a litany of exertion. But once I started getting better, grooming was, along with exercise, the best way to propel myself forward. How you look is also a measure of your self-respect, and a diminishment of self-respect is often both a symptom and a cause of depression.
