Depression

Imagine sitting alone in a café every night, drinking. You don’t want to go home because you have no one there to be around you and make your house feel less empty. All that is inside your house is furniture. Nighttime in your house is dark and all you see is the shadows of the moving trees coming through the windows. When you are inside the café, you have a feeling of warmth and you know someone is near you, even though the one waiter doesn’t want you there and would rather be at home, so he kicks you out. Just like what happened in the short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” by Ernest Hemingway. Loneliness is capable of causing feelings of depression in older people as their life begins to change.

In the short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” there is an old man who is trying to escape despair. It's not surprising that older people get depressed because “depression affects more than 6.5 million of the 35 million Americans age 65 years or older. Depression in older persons is closely associated with dependency and disability and causes great suffering for the individual and the family.”[1] This old man is supposedly 80 years old and he has nothing to live for anymore. The old man is deaf, which made it hard for him to communicate with others and brought him further away from the world, than he already was. Depression is "one of the conditions most commonly associated with suicide in older adults”. [2]The old man had attempted suicide, but was saved by his niece, who feared for his soul. His niece wasn’t ready to lose him, even though he was depressed and just wanted to be relieved of the world around him. He just had no reason to live anymore.

Just like the old man, my grandma was depressed. A few years ago my grandma had the flu, which made her very weak. One day she fell and was unable to get up. Soon after, she needed hip surgery and, after my grandma recovered, she was never the same. My grandma was not able to drive and do things on her own anymore, so she was forced to rely on my family to help her. For almost a year, she didn’t want to do much and really was hard to speak to. Now my grandma has started to realize that she needs help at times, but there are things she can still do on her own.

Feelings of depression and loneliness can result from the changing of their lives. If an elderly person is depressed, it usually means they have lost what they truly are inside and are living all alone with no one around to get them up in the morning. Like the older waiter, we need to keep the cafés open for business, so people alone can have somebody around them and a clean well lighted place to relax.


[1] http://www.nami.org
[2] http://www.nimh.nih.gov