Of Silver and Serotonin: Thinking Through Depression, Inheritance, and Illness Narratives

Of Silver and Serotonin:

Thinking Through Depression, Inheritance, and Illness Narratives

In 1989 President George H. W. Bush and the U.S. Congress declared the 1990s the "decade of the brain," suggesting that the phenomenal breakthroughs in brain research held the key to new discoveries in medicine and science that would forever alter our worlds.¹ In the same decade, Sharon O'Brien, a professor of English and American studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, suffered a recurrence of major depression, an illness she had experienced before but without such severity or duration. Eventually it was diagnosed as TRD, treatment resistant depression. The decade of the brain had taught her that depression was an inherited biological disease, rooted in the corporeal brain rather than the immaterial mind, treatable with medications that restore the neural pathways, and thus one's state of mind, to health.² Instead, she experienced intense anguish, frustration, shame, and the stigma of mental illness.

The failure of O'Brien's brain to respond to psychopharmacology led her away from questions of biology and genetic inheritance to questions of the self, family, and cultural inheritance. It led her from Pennsylvania and her day-to-day academic job to a year-long return to Massachusetts, where she had grown up, and a profound questioning of her identity. O'Brien doubted her self-worth; she mistrusted her ability and will to succeed in an academic world in which she had previously excelled; and she asked what those expectations had meant to her family and culture and how they might be causally related to her depression. To write, and right, her experience of depression she chose to investigate her inheritance—from material items such as the set of monogrammed family silver referred to in the book's title, to an emotional legacy of depression rooted in cultural histories of loss and fear. She discovered an inheritance, not in genetics and neurological pathways, but instead in the passageways of immigrants from Ireland to America, from millwork to academia, and from poverty of means to the emotional impoverishment that underlies depression.

The Family Silver tells a poignant story of O'Brien's movement toward "finding a new story for my life" that could explain the deviation from a past that had warranted success but now, "shipwrecked" by depression, imperiled her survival in the present and any certainty about the future (257, 22). The author veers away from standard medical narratives and personal recovery stories, refusing to be a "case history" contained by medical or popular chronicles of disease, diagnosis, and drug-induced cure. In doing so, O'Brien's memoir exemplifies a genre of "illness narratives" often located within the field of disability studies. I argue that by using chronic depression to probe relationships among illness, culture, and history, The Family Silver makes the case for why disability studies and American studies are overlapping fields and sometimes one and the same. Furthermore, O'Brien's capacity to address simultaneously moral and analytical concerns muddies the line, productively and provocatively, between scholarly enterprise and storytelling.

O'Brien begins her exploration with her mother's side of the family. Her tale of depression opens at her grandfather's door. The son of poor Irish immigrants, Daniel Quinlan created as much separation from a past of poverty and illiteracy as he could, using a well-worn if somewhat disreputable path of ethnic upward mobility, the vaudeville stage. Through his earnings as a traveling actor, "Handsome Dan" created a household in Elmira, New York, that met all the standards of Victorian respectability. His wife worked only in the home, his six daughters received college educations, and he purchased all the outward signs of wealth, including twenty place settings, eighteen pieces each, of repoussé silver purchased, he claimed (falsely), from...