One of the revelations of Carl Magnum Palm's 531 page opus Bright Lights, Dark Shadows is that Frida suffered from "depression" throughout much of her life, including at least major portions of the ABBA years. "Depression" has both a common and a clinical meaning. Palm is apparently using the term in its clinical sense:
In Frida's case, growing older didn't necessarily add to her sense of well-being, and at the time of the release of Arrival she was on her way out of a year-long depression.... Frida realized that she had to bite the bullet and seek psychiatric held if she was ever going to get to the bottom of what was troubling her." [pages 300-301].
Relevant quotes from Frida accompany these passages, although these do not explicitly admit to clinical depression as such.
In the US, psychiatric conditions are diagnosed and defined by reference to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (DSM IV). The European diagnostic criteria are set out in the ICD 10. Both manuals distinguish between severe and less severe forms of the condition. In both reference works, the less severe form of depression is named Dysthymia. The European criteria for dysthymia are:
F34.1 Dysthymia
A chronic depression of mood which does not currently fulfil the criteria for recurrent depressive disorder, mild or moderate severity, in terms of either severity or duration of individual episodes, although the criteria for mild depressive episode may have been fulfilled in the past, particularly at the onset of the disorder. The balance between individual phases of mild depression and intervening periods of comparative normality is very variable. Sufferers usually have periods of days or weeks when they describe themselves as well, but most of the time (often for months at a time) they feel tired and depressed; everything is an effort and nothing is enjoyed. They brood and complain, sleep badly and feel inadequate, but are usually able to cope with the basic demands of everyday life. Dysthymia therefore has much in common with the concepts of depressive neurosis and neurotic depression. If required, age of onset may be specified as early (in late teenage or the twenties) or late.
Diagnostic Guidelines
The essential feature is a very long-standing depression of mood which is never, or only very rarely, severe enough to fulfil the criteria for recurrent depressive disorder, mild or moderate severity. It usually begins early in adult life and lasts for at least several years, sometimes indefinitely. When the onset is later in life, the disorder is often the aftermath of a discrete depressive episode and associated with bereavement or other obvious stress.
Includes:
* depressive neurosis
* depressive personality disorder
* neurotic depression (with more than 2 years' duration)
* persistent anxiety depressionExcludes:
* anxiety depression (mild or not persistent)
* bereavement reaction, lasting less than 2 years (prolonged depressive reaction)
* residual schizophrenia
The specifics of Frida's ideation during her periods of depressed mood would be lost to memory, or protected by privilege in her psychiatrist's files. As fans, we have no entitlement to such information. But the smattering of specifics in Palm's book demonstrate similarity, if not congruency, with the diagnostic criteria stated:
"I felt as if I had to jump straight off a cliff in order not to choke." [quoting Frida at page 109]
With things at their worst, Frida even refused to get out of bed, sleeping her days away. She couldn't even handle the most mundane, everyday chores, and wanted only to escape from everything and everyone. [page 180]
In Palm's text, Frida's depression is often associated with her moodiness and lingering "insecurities," sometimes with very specific expression, such as stage fright. Certainly, on the biographical material provided, Frida's childhood and early professional experiences would have been capable of producing pervasive insecurity in anyone. These experiences include her status as a social outcast as the illegitimate offspring of a Nazi soldier, a form of rejection by her family when she is sent off with her grandmother into a different country and divided from her mother, ultimate abandonment by her mother's suicide, childhood poverty, professional frustrations as less talented but more engaging performers found greater musical success, and most corrosively of all, the choices toward her children which she herself had to make in order to pursue a career as a singer.
Any one of these stressors is powerful enough to throw a person into "depression" in the common sense, but in combination such a result seems almost inevitable. All this befalls a woman who also had to suffer the many lesser humiliations (such as, incredibly, being considered the "ugly one") of which we have known for years, as well as the pressure of public performance and stardom.
Many people suffer from dysthymia, and it is statistically more prevalent in women than men. Although we learn from Palm that Frida sought psychiatric intervention at least during the mid-70's, we do not know what help she sought thereafter. There are privacy issues here, and I do not fault CMP for not uncovering Frida's pharmacological history. Palm , in fact, grows inpatient with the lyrical substance of Djupa Andetag, declaring it conceptually dull and repetitive.
No one could begrudge Frida her inner harmony, but a whole album's worth of tributes to finding love and inner peace, with virtually every life-affirming lyric containing words like "soul", "power", "woman", "man", and "human being" didn't make for an especially varied listening experience. [page 510]
Sadly, the 1996 lyrics on Djupa Andetag were not the first claims by Frida to have found inner peace, or to have achieved equilibrium, or to have become "strong." The arc of Frida's life has been more like a sine curve. For every calm or happiness, there seem to have been near-biblical reversals. It is almost unimaginable, outside of fiction, that a person with her childhood should also suffer the early death of her husband Ruzzo, the accidental death of her daughter.
While effective therapies, including drug therapies, are available today, this was far less so when Frida was dealing with her divorces, ABBA, or the post-ABBA solo projects and personnae. Sympathetic to Frida, we hope that she obtained the help that was available, then and now.
What we as fans might elect to do, however, is to consider Frida's achievements in context. If dysthymic (or worse, suffering from major chronic depression) she had always to lead a complicated dual life: part of her energy always distracted or directed toward overcoming the daily effects of depression; whatever is leftover invested in the normal efforts of a mother, a pop superstar, a wife. Consider what it took, during her lean years as the songbird of Eskilstuna, to insist on entire professionalism while also dealing with feelings of personal inadequacy, poor sleep, reduced energy. We can only guess at the effect of the loss of love during the breakdown of her relationship with Benny, her public statements and the brave performance of "When All is Said and Done" notwithstanding. Evaluate now her courage, standing there on the rocks. It is also possible in this framework to recognize the effort required of Benny to sustain her during their years together.
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