[The following is an excerpt from BS2: An Autobiography, copyright 2021.]

I first became aware of [the black dog term] when reading about Winston Churchill, but it goes back even further to Samuel Johnson, and probably even further than that. 

The black dog is a metaphor for depression. It is apropos because it is more than just a feeling. It has a life of its own. It has a presence. It can sneak up on you. It can watch from a distance or walk in your way. It can bite. It can track your every move. It comes and goes; but it is always black and always seems to come back.

My black dog arrived about the same time as my teenage hormones kicked in. It showed up while I was attending junior high school. It tended to be worse during the holidays. It was accompanied by a debilitating nervousness – that would now probably be labeled as social anxiety. I was scared in crowds. I was terrified to talk in class, to make a speech. At its peak, I was scared to go to Mass and sit in a barber’s chair. ...

The Hilarious World of Depression

I recently finished reading a book by comedian John Moe, entitled The Hilarious World of Depression. It seemed like a good selection – to find out what is hilarious about depression. The book, which I recommend to you, was primarily about his own bouts of depression, but he also wrote about how depression impacted the lives of other comedians. As his condition became more widely known (e.g., via his podcast with the same name as the book), other comedians shared their stories (and some hilarity) with John.

Anyway, as I was reading through his book, I started to share a kinship with John Moe for the reasons noted below. Our bonding started slowly but kept building as I read on. His book resonated within me.

First, John was a Moe. One of my cousins married a Moe – maybe a relative.

Then, the title of the second chapter of his book, “Junior High School and Depression Being Somehow Connected.” There it was on page 27, “These middle grades ... mark the emergence of an awareness that, hey, I’m going to be an adult at some point here.” There it was – I had that feeling too – the gravy train that I was on was going to end some day and I feared that change.

On page 7, John wrote, “I got hit by a car on the way to school in the seventh grade.” Aha! – we both had been hit by cars during junior high. How many people can say that? John went on to question whether that event had screwed up his head – maybe some concussion related trauma. I had never associated my depression with my car incident [and sore head], but who knows for sure. 

Doctor Daniel G. Amen devotes a chapter in his book, The End of Mental Illness, to the links between head trauma and mental illness. On page 165, he notes, “When people ask me what the single most important lesson I’ve learned from looking at more than 170,000 brain scans is, I reply, ‘Mild traumatic brain injury is a major cause of psychiatric problems, and very few people know it.’ ... I’m constantly amazed at how many people think their injuries were too insignificant to mention.” ...

And lastly, the coup de grâce, John and I both found Steven Spielberg’s directional debut, a 1971 made-for-TV movie titled Duel, to be profound.

The Black Dog or Big Black Truck?

Duel had a simple plot. A man, played by Dennis Weaver, was driving down a remote Mojave Desert highway, in a red Plymouth Valiant (the make of car that I owned in 1971), when a dilapidated tanker truck, for no apparent reason, begins to pick on him. The truck, a Peterbilt 281 with dirty, wiper-marked windows, was relentless. Spielberg directed the action, such that the driver was never seen. It was not a personal thing. It was just a mean and dark – let us say black – truck. For the next hour or so (longer in the subsequent theatrical release than the initial TV-movie), the truck followed, chased, relentlessly harassed, and tried to kill a nice man, who was just going about his life. ...

What I think appealed to John Moe and me, back in 1971, was more subliminal. I think the big bad truck was equivalent to my black dog. At times it was behind me. At times it tried to overwhelm me. At times it was waiting around the corner for me. At times things were speeding out of control. There was not a lot of dialogue in the film; there was nothing to say; the danger was in the action. Per Spielberg, the truck was the fear of the unknown. If you ever want to try to understand how depression feels, watch Duel. ...

Lastly, as regards the black dog, some historians believe that the black dog enabled Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln to govern during tough times. The suffering that they endured when the dog was around allowed them to contend with the suffering that they saw and contributed to during the war(s). So, some good can come from it. As the Japanese would say (chapter 12), Shikata Ga Nai.