Salinger's Letters Read Online Free

have an antidepressant effect, certain people, objects, colours, sounds. Most of the time you don’t know why.
    I am, and have always been, a large-scale consumer of medication and pills. I’ll try just about anything. I would visit people and go to the bathroom looking for the medicine chest. I would steal medication for arthritis, sleeping pills, painkillers, anti-epileptic drugs, stimulants, whatever. In my experience just about any pill has a mild antidepressant effect.
    I’ve tried all the hard drugs; they all have an antidepressant effect.
    Liquor is good for depression. So is rain, a good fight, coffee, cigarettes, and bad sex.
    Just about anything can have an antidepressant effect, but only on a superficial level. The depression always returns when the drug wears off.
    I’ve filled piles of yellowing notebooks with good advice over the years. I’ve collected advice from any number of sources. Useful advice can be found anywhere; user’s guides are particularly helpful. In a paint store I found a booklet on anti-rat pest control, figuring that rats were comparable to depression. That booklet was one of the most effective introductions to depression I’ve ever encountered.
    Nobody really knows what depression is or where it comes from. This is a fact that many people find difficult to accept. You have to write your own user’s guide. It’s hard, time-consuming work and will most likely end in failure and defeat.
    During one period of my life when I was particularly depressed I tried rat poison as an antidepressant. Afterwards I thought it might have been an unconscious wish to commit suicide. But the fact was that rat poison proved to be one of the most effective antidepressants I had ever tried. For days I walked around in a mild daze, close to feeling something approaching happiness or joy. I daily increased my dose of rat poison until I ended up collapsing in the street and was rushed to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. That was my last experiment with rat poison.
    Over the years I’ve been examined regularly to determine whether I’m autistic, schizophrenic, psychotic or paranoid. Every time the answer is the same: I just have ordinary, run-of-the-mill depression.
    When I was a child one of my therapists was an old lady who lived in an apartment on Valby Langgade, Mrs. Magnussen. She suffered from depression herself and experimented with alternative treatments. We played music together. Music had proved to have an excellent effect on certain forms of depression. On me it had the opposite effect; music, especially beautiful classical music, made me even sadder.
    Mrs. Magnussen tried to devise a therapy tailored to my case. She knew I was a compulsive talker without ever opening my mouth. She told me I should try letting the words come out. She didn’t have to say it twice. I opened my mouth and let everything I was saying to myself pour out. She listened patiently to all the murders, mutilations, blood and destruction that gushed from my lips. I could have kept it up for hours, days, weeks. Mrs. Magnussen was the only therapist who had seemed to like me.
    When I was in High School I was an in-patient at a psychiatric hospital on several occasions. They gave me antidepressants and talk therapy.
    Since nothing seemed to help, my parents tried a number of alternative therapies. There was primal scream therapy. I was supposed to yell as loud as I could while beating a pillow that I was supposed to imagine was my mother and father. But I’ve always been very fond of my parents and even though I tried hard to mobilise the hidden anger I was supposed to feel against them, I never could.
    There lived a woman in Birkerod who did fairytale therapy. Her name was Ulla Ladegaard, and I liked her from the start.
    She looked as though she had just stepped out of a fairy tale herself. She didn’t look like a witch, she looked like a princess. Even though she was old she