JK Rowling, Depression Survivor

JK Rowling experienced depression in 1994, during a time she was struggling to make ends meet for herself and her infant daughter. Her experience with depression made a lasting impact on her and inspired the Dementors that first appear in Prisoner of Azkaban. On depression, Rowling said, "It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad."

“I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never,” she said in an interview with Adeel Amini, 22, for a student magazine at Edinburgh University. “What’s to be ashamed of? I went through a really rough time and I am quite proud that I got out of that.”

Rowling says that she probably experienced depression as a college student but didn't know how to recognize it's symptoms. Talking with Adeel Amini about the rise in the numbers of university students with depression, Rowling said:

"I definitely had leanings towards depression from an early age but it's an extremely hard condition to recognize in yourself. What's sad in a way is that the thing that made me go for help, the thing that made me face that this was not a normal state that I was in, was probably my daughter, and a lot of people your age, very young adults would not have that. She was like a touchstone in a sense, she was something that earthed me, grounded me, and I thought 'This isn't right, this can't be right, she can not grow up with me in this state."

Like many depression survivors, getting help was not as easy as walking into her doctor's office. Rowling said her usual GP was away, and the replacement doctor sent her away. “She said, ‘If you ever feel a bit low, come and speak to the practice nurse’ and dismissed me.”

Rowling notes, “We’re talking suicidal thoughts here, we’re not talking ‘I’m a little bit miserable’.Two weeks later she had a phone call from her regular GP who had looked back over the notes. She called Rowling back in for counseling. “She absolutely saved me because I don’t think I would have had the guts to go and do it twice.”

What would Rowling's life have been like if she didn't seek help for her depression? Would she have had the energy and concentration necessary to write the Harry Potter books? We can not know because we can't rewrite someone's biography. But we can certainly say that she was brave and courageous to seek help, and those same qualities are reflected in the Harry Potter characters she gave to the world, the same characters so many have come to love.