I inflict my degree on the fandom Part the First
Finally! We've reached the chapter I spent a week collecting references for! Thara Celehar is the most interesting portrayal of clinical depression I've ever seen in a fantasy novel so I'm going to be totally unbearable about him. And I want to go through how we meet him in detail because I'm going to come back to it.
Here's his first introduction:
But Maia had never seen a man who looked so ill and tired. He was slight-boned - in that way like Csoru - but with so little flesh over his bones that Maia could see every separate knob in his wrists. His eyes, in dark hollows of sleeplessness, were vivid blue; he had cut off the long braid his prelate's rank entitled him to, and his fine, milk-white curls were barely jaw length.
And this is Thara's internal commentary on the events from The Grief of Stones:
I had thought about suicide, after Evru's execution, after my disgrace Some days I thought about nothing else. It was probably the emperor who had saved my life, by giving me a purpose, a task, a question to answer.
The hair is the first thing that sticks out to me. Hair is important in the Ethuveraz. Elves communicate a huge amount of social information and social standing with their hair. There is no intimation of even the obscure little cults Celehar sometimes runs across in Cemeteries cut their hair as a funerary right. There's plenty of references to short hair styles, but having gone through the books twice, I'm pretty sure there are essentially no other examples of someone appearing in public with loose, unstyled hair. The exceptions are the times when Celehar has to go places after various ghosts and have messed his hair up, and condemned criminals immediately before they are executed.
So firstly, its overtly not normal at all for him to be showing up to an imperial audience with his hair like this. Secondly, I am really quite certain that having cut his hair off that way is, in context, self mutilation.
And yet, despite that, its the second thing that Maia notices about him. The first is how ill and emaciated he is. So, he's clearly lost a significant amount of weight.
Thara is much more severely depressed than is typically written in fiction (at least fiction that is not written about depression). I, at one point, worked on a research study involving people who were severely depressed and he presents much more like my (very heroic) research participants than any of people I've met in my day to day life who have been treated for depression. Although he is notably, too sick for my study.
To make this very concrete Thara, who is acutely and intensely suicidal, and emaciated, meets two of the common criteria used to determine when someone is too ill for conventional antidepressant therapy to be safe and pass them straight to faster acting interventional psychiatry treatments (three if you choose to read him as psychotic, which is not explicit, but I think is an available reading). We meet this character mid-medical emergency.
I find this interesting partly just because its so rare for people to write it into fantasy, but also because of the way it enforces how we read him. On the Doylist end of things you can't not have an impression of a character in a book, that's not how books work, so you inevitably form opinions about him that you carry into the next books even though, from a Watsonian perspective that makes about as much sense as basing your knowledge of what someone is like based on how they behaved immediately after being hit by a car.
Weiss, A. et al. Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists professional practice guidelines for the administration of electroconvulsive therapy. Aust N Z J Psychiatry53, 609–623 (2019).
2. Kellner, C. H. et al. Relief of Expressed Suicidal Intent by ECT: A Consortium for Research in ECT Study. AJP162, 977–982 (2005).
3. Depression in adults: treatment and management.
4. Thirthalli, J., Sinha, P. & Sreeraj, V. S. Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Use of Electroconvulsive Therapy. Indian Journal of Psychiatry65, 258–269 (2023).
5. Milev, R. V. et al. Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments (CANMAT) 2016 Clinical Guidelines for the Management of Adults with Major Depressive Disorder: Section 4. Neurostimulation Treatments. Can J Psychiatry61, 561–575 (2016).
6. Enns, M. W., Reiss, J. P. & Chan, P. Electroconvulsive Therapy.
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