Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I remember thinking even as I was having this experience that I’d tell the story for the rest of my life. A detailed version went into The Noonday Demon, but when it came time to recount the experience for the storytelling organization the Moth, I had to condense it and make it punchier. A transcript of the live version was included in the group’s first anthology, The Moth, then picked up by Esquire. There’s more information in the original, but the thrust and context of the experience are here. I’ve cleaned up some of the phrasing from the oral version. Though Esquire ran the piece only in 2014, I’ve placed it here in the book in keeping with the time I visited Senegal in 2000.

I’m not depressed now—but I was depressed for a long time. I lived with blinding depression and had long stretches when everything seemed hopeless and pointless, when returning calls from friends seemed like more than I could do, when getting up and going out into the world seemed painful, when I was completely crippled by anxiety.

When I finally got better and started writing about recovery, I became interested in all the different treatments for depression. Having started as a kind of medical conservative, thinking that only a couple of things worked—medication, electroconvulsive therapy, and certain talk therapies—I gradually changed my mind. I realized that if you have brain cancer and you decide that standing on your head and gargling for half an hour every day makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but the likelihood is that you still have brain cancer, and without other treatment you’re still going to die from it. But if you have depression and you say that standing on your head and gargling for half an hour makes you feel better, then you are cured—because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel great, then you’re no longer depressed.

So I began to open up to alternative treatments. I researched everything from experimental brain surgeries to hypnotic regimens. People wrote to me constantly because I had been publishing on this subject. One woman wrote that she had tried medication, therapy, electroshock treatments, and a variety of other approaches and had finally found what worked for her. She wanted me to tell the world about it. It was “making little things from yarn,” and she sent me numerous examples, as well as a photograph of herself in a room with two thousand identical teddy bears. Not that obsessive-compulsive disorder is the same as depression, but, hey—she’d been miserable before and she was pretty happy now.

As I was doing this work, I also became interested in the idea that depression has pitched up not only in the modern, industrialized West, as people tended to assume, but also across cultures, and across time. So when one of my dearest friends, David Hecht, who was living for a little while in Senegal, asked, “Do you know about the tribal rituals that are used for the treatment of depression here?” I said, “No, I don’t—but I would like to.” And he said, “Well, if you come for a visit, we could help you do some research.”

So I set off for Senegal, where I met David’s then-girlfriend-now-ex-wife, Hélène. She had a cousin whose mother was a friend of someone who went to school with the daughter of a person who actually practiced the n’deup, the ritual David had mentioned, so she arranged for me to go and interview this woman. I went off to a small town about two hours outside Dakar and was introduced to an extraordinary, old, large priestess wrapped in miles and miles of African fabric printed with pictures of eyes. She was Madame Diouf. We spoke for about an hour, and she told me all about the n’deup. At the end of our interview, feeling rather daring, I said, “Listen, I don’t know whether this is something you would even consider, but would it be possible for me to attend an n’deup?”

And she said, “Well, I’ve never had a toubab”—the local word for “foreigner”—“attend one of these before, but you’ve come through friends. Yes, the next time I perform an n’deup, you may be present.”

And I said, “That’s fantastic. When are you next going to be doing an n’deup?”

“Oh, it’ll be sometime in the next six months.”

“Six months is quite a long time for me to stay here in this town, waiting for you to do one,” I remarked. “Maybe we could expedite one for somebody, move it forward? I’ll pitch in.”

“No, it really doesn’t work that way,” she said with a tone of mild apology.

“Well, I guess I won’t be able to see an n’deup, then, but even so this conversation has been so interesting and so helpful to me. I’m a little sad about leaving here not actually getting to see one, but I thank you.”

“Well, I’m glad that you could come. I’m glad it was helpful . . . but there is one other thing. I hope you don’t mind my saying this.”

“No, what? What is it?”

“You don’t look that great yourself. Are you suffering from depression?”