A reader asks Matt whether he believes artists are more prone to depression than non-artists.

Matt responds:

I don’t know if it’s an occupational hazard or not.

Sometimes I think artists can become depressed if they look at their work as an achievement only if somebody else says that it is.

But art isn’t like driving a taxi  or playing baseball, where people are keeping track of every mile you drive or every home run you hit.

As an artist, you make your own world of good and bad, some of it by your own appraisal of your work, some by paying attention or not paying attention to what the world thinks, some by looking at your checkbook if you sold a piece, some by reading a review of your work.  There are all different ways you can become very happy or very sad.

I imagine that there were many theses, comments, and possibilities expressed about the hula hoop when it first came on the scene.  Did it make the world any better or worse, or did it just make you move your ass around in a circle in a certain way?

I think you get depressed from time to time, and the key word in that phrase, as far as I’m concerned, is “you.”  “You” get depressed.  Nobody can get you depressed.

You look at a set of circumstances and think it’s the worst thing in the world; somebody else thinks it’s paradise.  We’re told depression may be chemical.  Our whole body is chemical.  Do we take happy pills, drugs, booze, and other artificial means toward curing depression and achieving happiness?

I’ve been to some of the most economically depressed places in the world, and met some of the happiest people there who I’ve ever known.  Some people would say they probably don’t know any better.  I say, I wish I didn’t know any better!

As William Butler Yeats said, “Being Irish, I have an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustains me through temporary periods of joy.”

Matt