Doomsday

An expert on mood disorders from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the co-author of one of the most read textbooks in the field, Manic Depressive Illness, Kay Redfield Jamison, once detailed her experiences with and expertise in bipolar affective disorder (subtype I), and suicide in an interview with Charlie Rose. When asked about her suicide attempt, Jamison told Rose that in an episode of severe clinical depression, “the first thing that hits you is hopelessness.”
After having read many books about the personal experiences of those with psychiatric illnesses and suicidal tendencies, and having known many who have gone through spectrum of mood disorders, I wondered what a world without any hope—without even the hope of suicide for a dignified death—would look like for its inhabitants. A complete loss of hope in the absence of any real cause seemed like a very interesting Doomsday scenario.
Furthermore, clinical depression has the ability to isolate one from the rest of the world. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-IV-TR, in order to be diagnosed with having had an episode of Major Depression, one must exhibit five or more of nine symptoms within a two-week period.
The symptoms are (1) persistent depressed mood by subjective report or observation by others, (2) diminished interest or pleasure in all or almost all activities, (3) significant weight loss or weight gain, (4) insomnia or hypersomnia, (5) fatigue or loss of energy, (6) psychomotor agitation or retardation, (7) feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt, (8) diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, and (9) recurrent thoughts of suicide with or without a specific plan of execution.
Of these symptoms, those such as a diminished interest or pleasure in all things, fatigue, the constant feeling of worthlessness, and hypersomnia all cause one to withdraw into one’s self and away from the rest of society.
In fact, anecdotally, those who have recurrent episodes of depression, as is characteristic of bipolar affective disorder and major depressive disorder, begin to notice that one of the first signs that one is beginning his or her descent into another episode is that one begins to withdraw socially. Thus, very much like the members of a destructive cult, one no longer has objective, third person voices to counteract the negative and, sometimes, delusional thoughts that accompany depression. For this reason, I chose to put Pratiksha in a world where nothing else is affected except for her psyche and its ability to perceive the reality of the world around it.
Pratiksha senses that her own world is ending and the primary cause for this is the constant hopelessness that she seems to face even though there is no reason, at least no reason apparent to the reader, for this. Everything seems dead to her.
Although one usually imagines an apocalypse as something that affects many, it may not necessarily have to in order for it to be called an apocalypse. As Elizabeth Rosen mentioned in her description of the “post-modern” apocalypse, apocalypses that fit her “post-modern” category are not necessarily about the end of the world but the end of a world.
Even though this is not necessarily a post-modern apocalyptic story, this is the story of the end of a world, the world one particular individual.