Fighting Depression in Prison

“You awake?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Of course you are,” he says. “Come on, get up or we’ll miss it.”

The walk to the chow hall is grueling, every step like a step on a death march. The frigid air and icy rain bite at my flesh like a school of angry piranha, and my feet drag the tops of the sidewalk, heavy as bags of sand. I try remembering the last time I went to the chow hall to eat but can’t. But I know it’s been a week at least. And I’ve mostly been surviving on crackers and peanuts because they take such minimal effort to prepare and I don’t have to leave my bed to eat them.

Inside the chow hall, I sit next to my cellmate and look at the food on my tray in dread. It all looks inedible. Thick and clumpy oatmeal the consistency of mud. Boiled eggs. Charred sausage (the animal origin of which I can only speculate). The applesauce is the only thing halfway appealing, and that’s only because no chewing is involved. I eat the applesauce and push the oatmeal around on my tray with a spork, building little mounds and valleys out of it like a motocross track.

“Eat,” my cellmate commands, gesturing to my tray with his free hand. I take a bite of mystery sausage and it gets stuck in my throat like I just tried swallowing tree bark. I have to take a drink of milk to wash it down before I choke. The milk, however, is cold and creamy and tastes good. I drink the whole glass in two gulps and wish I had more. I don’t eat anything else and give the rest of my food away. My cellmate only stares at me and frowns in disapproval.

When we return to the cell, my cellmate grabs my soap dish and my towel, hands them to me, and says, “Get to it. No more of this moping around. You’re starting to make me depressed.”

I stare at him blankly, holding the hygiene items out in front of me like a soiled diaper. Then finally, with a look of exasperation on his face, he pushes me out of our cell door and into the dayroom towards the showers. In the shower, I struggle to find the motivation to wash myself. And I don’t even open my soap dish. I just stand under the faucet, letting the hot water splash my body as my stomach knots and loosens and knots again.

As I stand there, my mind keeps going back to how much I wish I was at home spending the holidays with my family, and how because of my addiction and selfishness I am incarcerated and unable to do that. I tell myself that maybe I should put in a medical request to see the psych doctor. In prison all mental health services are free, including meds. And I know that if I go to see the doctor he will definitely prescribe me medication once I tell him how I’ve been feeling. More than likely, I’ll have a whole regiment of pills at my disposal: one for my anxiety, one for my depression, one for my insomnia, one to combat mood swings, and one to increase my appetite – and all of them will have names with too many syllables to count and be guaranteed to sedate and numb and blur all my emotions until the only thing I feel is what I affectionately refer to as, “blah.”

Well, that’s how it usually goes anyway. And I don’t know if I am up for all that again. Because after years of battling mental illness I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me, at least feeling sad is feeling something, and something is much better than feeling nothing. So by the time I turn the water off, I’ve decided against seeing the doctor, because I know that once Christmas is over I’ll probably feel better.

Charles Davis was released from prison in July 2023 and is thriving on the outside.