Recently, within a brief space of time, two startling incidents were reported in

the Dutch media. The first was the suicide of Joost Zwagerman, an author
celebrated because of his novels and poetry, but also due to his continuous
passionate written and oral defence of the power of art, especially as a regular
guest in the popular TV talkshow De wereld draait door.1 Besides that,
Zwagerman published in the last part of his writing career several essays on the
themes of depression and suicide. The context of this was highly personal: his
father had made an unsuccessful suicide attempt and one of his best friends,
also a writer, had struggled throughout his life with severe depression and
suicidal thoughts, until in the end he was formally allowed to carry out euthanasia
because of ‘unendurable mental and physical suffering’.

The second shocking occurrence reported in the autumn of 2015 was a

string of suicides in the Dutch ‘Bible Belt’ village of Wezep, where, in a space
of one year, five young people – one girl and four boys – took their own lives.
An article in the same newspaper that published Bakker’s text, appearing only
three weeks later, recounted how the mayor of the municipality of Wezep
called a halt to the silence surrounding the village suicides. The days our
community could look away are gone, stated the mayor. ‘What does it take to
be there for each other?’ he asked (NRC 5 October 2015). The community
needs to act boldly now: ‘a policy document is not going to improve this; all
Wezep has to be mobilized, has to take responsibility’. A ‘taskforce’ was set up
in Wezep, consisting of mothers of those who had committed suicide, some
other engaged village inhabitants, a vicar and a social worker. The idea was to
provide ‘vitamin A’, as the mayor called it, meaning the ‘a’ of attention. That is,
indeed, what children need, the mother of one of the suicide victims is quoted
in the article: ‘we have to put away our phones at the end of the day and ask
each other how the day was, we need to make things discussible’. Also in this
second article the word ‘taboo’ is used.

In emphasizing nerves and the whole body rather than just mood, we join
a worthy tradition of biological thinking in psychiatry, seeing so-called
mental illness as brain disease, not the kind of frank pathological brain lesions
studied by neurologists, but disorders of neural biology.

To the very last

day Zwagerman set his face against the death wish of his friend, in line with
the denunciation put forward in his writings of what he called ‘the done-withlife
school’. Shortly before his death he emphasized once again in an interview
that, although depression was familiar territory for himself as well, suicide had
always remained ‘a no-go area’. Nevertheless he finally went there.
A few days after Zwagerman’s death his friend Bram Bakker, psychiatrist and
writer, published an article in one of the leading Dutch newspapers with the
title ‘Nobody knows what came over Joost’ (NRC 12 September 2015). We
shouldn’t ask why he did it, Bakker states there, because what he did is incomprehensible.
What we need to do, the psychiatrist continues, is ‘come up with
something that makes depression more widely known’ because talking about
this ‘terrible disease’ is still too painful and too shameful. At the end of his
article Bakker therefore announces a Depression Gala, which would take place
on the next Blue Monday,2 first, to commemorate Joost Zwagerman and
others ‘who lost the battle against depression’ and, second, ‘to further emancipate
psychiatry’. Four months later, on 26 January 2016, the gala indeed was
held in a suburban theatre in Amsterdam. The double aim of the evening was
to help stop this disorder from being taboo and to raise funds for specific
depression initiatives. Legitimizing the paradoxical format of an entertaining
evening on a mental disorder, depression was put on a par with ‘other diseases’