Yet once a correct diagnosis leads to a medication that actually works, Martha discovers when you’re no longer sick, how simply you can get things done, how easy it is to function when you’re not being overwrought by the ‘menace and intent’ imbued in everything around her.

But there is enormous relief in realising that not everyone feels things with the same intensity, that just ‘being a person’ takes more out of some people than others. But this is the nature of depression – over the course of a lifetime it makes those around you start to question if you ‘just like being like this.’ This is why peoplebecome driven to take their own lives – when they start believing their own thoughts telling them that this is just who they are and will always be, at the realisation that those around them are being subsumed by their sadness, by the words of those who are too quick tell you to just grow up and remind you that ‘doesn’t everyone’ feel this way, that it’s just life. Yes her anguish is relentless, and she retreats back into illness for ‘no reason, or a reason that seems too small’ throughout the novel. I related too much to some of Martha’s ‘tendencies’ – how depressing she finds hotel restaurants, her refusal to buy a book because of not wanting to own something with a cover that shade of yellow – how disconcerting she found the idea of wanting to buy something from Accessorize – of someone longing for something ‘so simple it could be outlined in pencil.’ I had to put it down at times due to the waves of emotions that confused me having not cried for some time since I switched to an SSRI that actually works. I was left with the same ‘inexplicable’ grief the narrator feels when she sees adults eating ice cream in public. To me, each small excerpt of this story reads like poetry – the end lines of each poignant and pithy paragraph resonate on an emotional level you can’t quite place as a result of the way she writes about the small details and interactions of this character and her family. Similar two star reviews on Amazon have complained that Meg Mason’s third novel, Sorrow and Bliss reads like a psychiatric assessment but as a psychiatrist I have to disagree. Why do people who give 1 star Amazon reviews for books that feature a depressed narrator always complain primarily about them being self-indulgent?

The sorrow and the bliss