In David Foster Wallace’s essay “The Depressed Person,” he writes of the thoughts and struggles of someone who is deeply emotionally damaged and struggles to properly interact with people in everyday society. She is so incredibly self-conscious that it inhibits her from getting to know anyone or spending time with people she already knew as her self-doubt makes her believe she is not good enough and is constantly being judged. This feeling of constantly being judged places stresses on the relationships that are meant to relieve her inhibitions. These stresses are acutely aware to her which means she is self-conscious of the fact she is a burden on her “Support System” (Wallace 58) makes it so she interacts with them, not as a normal person complaining about their issues, but someone who is overly apologetic for their flaws. These self-doubting tendencies make it so she is unable to truly recover from the emotional damage and scars she has been given in the past. Due to her parents splitting up and what she looks like it has caused her to be incredibly self-conscious of interacting with other people in public making it harder and harder for her to learn how to deal with her depression. After giving her the help she could and attempting to connect on an emotional level her therapist passes away from something that must be intentional she starts to call her friends more and more often, even during their work hours and in the dead of night, for emotional help even they knew they just viewed it as her whining. She constantly believes that her friends are living flawless amazing lives where nothing goes wrong as she never hears anything like that from them; they are only supportive to her and listen to her so she believes they are perfect, especially compared to her. She slowly follows the therapist’s advice and eventually asks her friend she trusts the most and views as her best friend to give her honest opinion of her. She wishes for her friend to “not pull any punches” (Wallace 64) and tell her the truth. This friend is terminally ill and going to die very soon, yet the Depressed Person still wants this info about herself. She wants to know the opinions of her dying friend on her. She wishes to still talk about herself which shows that she is a heartless, uncaring and self-obsessed person.
The title of Wallace’s essay “The Depressed Person” should be re-named to The Self-Obsessed Person. She believes from the beginning that everyones lives are flawless and amazing and that the people apart of them never face any heartache or struggles. Yet the issue is that she is too involved in her own issues and struggles to bother to find out if any of the members in her “Support System” (Wallace 58) are dealing with any tough times or major crisisses. She find out in the end, when asking her closest “friend” what she truly thinks of her, that her friend is going to die soon “The depressed person therefore urged her terminally ill friend to go on, to not hold back, to let her have it.” (Wallace 64) The Self-Obsessed person didn’t care that her friend was going through this unimaginably difficult situation, but even after finding this information out she still only wished to hear what her friend truly thought of her and how she viewed her as a person. This unhinged self-centeredness may come from the “lessons” her therapist taught her, but it is no excuse for how clearly self-indulgent she is as. Even after her therapist killed herself she still continued on with complaining, everyday and night, to her friends without ever thinking once to see what kind of situation these people were experiencing. She is a selfish and energy-stealing and her assumption that everyone else is better off than her, when in reality she never bothered to find out if they are or not, is the reason why she claims to be depressed. She only has perspective on her own issues and views them as the worst possible as she does not listen to others. She is a victim of her own self-pity and sympathy for herself as she has no other view of hardship and that’s why she believes she’s depressed, when in reality she is self-obsessed.