Depression

Depression is the state Helen Macdonald comes to recognize after her father's death, as bereavement unsettles her sense of time, meaning, and ordinary life. It is not presented as a single episode with a clean boundary: grief first appears as sleeplessness and estrangement, then as anger, impaired concentration, and fear that she cannot manage. The account follows her from private confusion to asking for help, while showing that treatment and recovery proceed alongside, rather than simply replacing, the work of training Mabel the goshawk.

Onset amid bereavement

After the funeral, Helen returns to Cambridge but cannot sleep. She drives repeatedly and watches familiar activities continue around her without feeling that they make sense. For weeks, she experiences herself as intensely burdened and detached from the everyday world. The disjunction between the apparent continuity of life and her inability to re-enter it becomes an early measure of her distress.

She initially interprets her altered perceptions as a kind of madness, while also distinguishing them from the acute psychosis she has witnessed in other people. Coincidences and memories acquire disproportionate significance; she believes her horoscope and experiences déjà vu. Time seems less like a one-way sequence than a medium in which recollections and new events run into each other. At moments on trains or in cafés, she feels that her father may be nearby. These experiences comfort her, but also show how bereavement is reorganizing her perception.

Helen tries to make the process intelligible through books on grief and bereavement. She reads accounts that arrange grief into stages and worries about where she belongs in that scheme. The effort to classify her feelings offers a temporary structure, but the emotions do not match the categories she has read about. Her attempt to turn grief into an orderly process therefore reveals how little control she feels she has over it.

Distress in daily life

As the season changes, Helen briefly believes she is recovering. The return of light and swifts around her Cambridge home seems to accompany a gradual return to life. But that impression is overturned when she falls in love with a man who withdraws after recognizing how distressed she is. His disappearance intensifies her sense of loss; she later cannot bring his face to mind, yet keeps a red dress she will not wear again. The episode makes clear that grief has left her vulnerable to further attachment and further loss.

The strain also surfaces in the journal she keeps after Mabel arrives. Its clipped records of weather, food, weight, wind, and flights begin as practical observations of the hawk. Gradually, the entries include Helen's headache, difficulty getting out, dread of seeing people, and frustration over what she believes she is doing wrong. Mabel's responses vary from flight to flight, and Helen treats each uncertain return or overshoot as evidence that she herself may be the problem. The record thus registers not only falconry but a narrowing, self-accusing frame of mind.

Anger, too, begins to exceed its immediate causes. During a café meeting with a former research colleague, Helen struggles to speak and becomes absorbed in watching a bank employee remove a skylark sticker from a window. She feels intense anger at the destruction of the bird image, then becomes angry with her companion despite recognizing that he has done nothing to provoke her. She apologizes and leaves. The incident shows how distress can make an ordinary encounter difficult to sustain and how emotion attaches itself to an image that seems to concentrate a broader sense of loss.

Helen also repeatedly damages her father's car through minor driving accidents, explaining that she can no longer keep the car's dimensions clearly in mind. Other everyday mishaps add to her awareness of impaired coordination. By contrast, she is not clumsy when handling Mabel: the hawk's presence makes her acutely aware of her own physical boundaries. She finds relief in the afternoon flights, even though Mabel's attempts to leave can make her want to weep. The difference between these two settings is significant: ordinary life feels difficult to navigate, while the precise demands of handling the hawk temporarily give her a stable sense of self.

Naming the problem

After a morning that brings back a memory of her father and a brief sense that the world may still contain beauty, Helen tells Stuart that she is not coping well and thinks she may be depressed. Stuart places her distress in the context of her father's death and reassures her that she is doing well with the goshawk. He points out that Mabel is close to flying free. His response does not erase Helen's difficulties: she has not told him about unpaid bills, letters from the bank, sleepless nights, or mornings spent in tears. But speaking aloud gives him a partial view of what she is facing.

Later, Helen describes waking with a brief interval before despair returns. Her dreams include winter shore flats with migrant birds unable to continue south, falling trees, and small boats overturning in frozen seas. She understands these as signs that she no longer trusts anyone or anything, and recognizes the strain of living without that trust. Her account does not reduce the depression to one symbol; instead, it connects recurring dreams with an explicit awareness of isolation.

Concerned by her own condition, she visits a doctor. She explains that her father has died and that she has no job, income, or house. Once she begins describing what has happened, she finds it difficult to stop. The doctor gives her a multiple-choice questionnaire, which she completes with anxiety that she may be answering incorrectly. His assurance that help is available brings her to tears. Their encounter marks a change from private interpretation toward accepting care: the doctor discusses antidepressants, their side effects, and how they work, using diagrams to explain the treatment.

Treatment and gradual change

Helen agrees to try SSRIs and leaves with the medication in a small paper bag. She doubts that medicine can alter the world as she experiences it, and worries that it might cloud her thinking or change her so much that Mabel will no longer fly to her. The first effects include pronounced tiredness and a painful, empty-headed feeling; she also fails to sleep that night. Despite these fears and discomforts, she continues flying the hawk. The treatment therefore enters a life already structured by falconry without immediately resolving its demands.

As winter deepens, Helen begins to notice small changes. She watches the morning sky for its own appearance rather than only calculating wind, direction, and the chance of rain. She calls old friends, makes plans, looks for a house to rent, and receives a visit from her mother. At a follow-up appointment, the doctor explains that the blurred tiredness is a side effect expected to pass. These actions suggest improvement in practical and social terms, but the narrative describes it as gradual rather than complete.

The developing distance between Helen and Mabel also changes how she understands their relationship. She comes to see that the hawk's world and her own are not interchangeable, even though she had once felt the two were closely joined. That recognition accompanies a broader return of balance: depression is neither cured by the hawk nor simply ended by medication. Instead, the account traces a movement toward renewed trust, connection, and future planning while retaining the loss that began the crisis.