Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance Book

This book resonated deeply for me as an ex-academic who grew up with high expectations for academic success and struggled with depression of varying severity from my early teens to present. I always knew the ideas of success and class mobility I grew up with were intimately tied to my depression but O'Brien is the first to validate this connection so clearly. The only other memoir I know of that considers the classed dynamics of depression in America (and which includes an analysis of race as well) is Ann Cvetkovich's Depression: A Public Feeling, which cites O'Brien's book and is also excellent.

I loved O'Brien's exploration of her inheritance of depression through her family's history of famine, poverty, immigration, upward class mobility, and then her father's fall from grace. I loved the book's richly rendered detail: how she lets us into poignant moments in her unfolding of this history. Her writing wraps you up, a blanket of pictures and emotion. I empathized with her story, so much so that I found it difficult to persist with the book, and as a result, it's taken me over a year to finish it. It took me back to the hardest days of my life, and what they felt like.

I appreciated O'Brien's nuance in refusing to choose between biological and biographical roots of depression; however, her stark defense of the biomedical model and medication in her chapters "Depressives in the Lounge" and "Recovery Stories," seemed at odds with her lyrical, beautiful writing in her accounts of her history, her family's history, and their ties to her depression. Her insistence that medication is crucial for the treatment of depression also seemed at odds with her repeated admissions that the medication isn't working or hasn't worked for her. She never claims a recovery narrative as most memoirs of depression do. She rather seems to imply that medication takes the edge off the depression, so to speak, but she never says this directly.

It also struck me as odd that as far as she reports, in none of her encounters with other "unipolar" and "bipolar" compatriots does she meet anyone more critical of psychiatry, anyone who's experienced horrendous and even life-threatening medication side-effects, as so many have, including myself. It's not that I feel terribly invested in whether she takes meds or not. I am willing to believe they help some people, including O'Brien, despite the fact that she never specifies in what ways they are helping her. It's just that I would have liked to see more of the nuance she brings to the rest of the book applied to her uncritical celebration of medication, which she recommends for all depression sufferers under the reasoning that she's combating a "fierce cultural resistance to medication" (265). In my experience there is much more resistance to a depressed person not taking medication, though admittedly this may be a more recent development in our culture of "mental health awareness."

Despite this one criticism, The Family Silver is a book that touched me deeply and I am sure to read passages of it over and over again.