Abstainer depression

Abstainer depression is the despair that can accompany a vampire’s refusal to drink human or vampire blood. The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition) describes it as a common danger of abstention, linking it to both physiological changes and self-loathing. Rowan’s experience gives that account a personal shape: an unsuccessful attempt to die, a moment of relief when he understands why it failed, and a later movement toward the blood he has tried to reject.

Definition and Causes

The handbook presents abstainer depression as more than a passing sadness. It says that, without a regular supply of blood, brain chemistry can be seriously affected: serotonin may fall and cortisol may rise during crises, making rash action more likely. It also identifies a psychological burden alongside these changes. Abstainers know what they are and hate the instincts they refuse to follow; that awareness can make their self-image painful rather than reassuring.

This account establishes a paradox at the center of the condition. Refusing to act on predatory instincts does not necessarily quiet them or make abstainers feel at peace with themselves. The handbook contrasts them with vampires who continue drinking: addiction may blind those vampires to the monster within, while abstainers’ restraint leaves them conscious of it. Abstention is therefore a moral practice with a psychological cost, not a simple return to human emotional life.

Rowan’s Suicidal Crisis

Rowan’s crisis becomes concrete when he takes a whole packet of ibuprofen and waits in a churchyard, hidden behind a yew tree. Half an hour later, he feels much as he did before, except that his headache has gone. He imagines life as an interminable sentence lasting roughly two hundred years and wonders whether a vampire can die by suicide. The mismatch between his desperation and the limited effect of the tablets makes his predicament feel more inescapable: he wants an ending, but the ordinary means he has tried have not provided one.

On his way home, Rowan sees Eve getting off a bus. He realizes he can no longer avoid being seen, and the encounter gives the crisis an immediate relational counterweight. Later, in his bedroom, he consults the handbook’s section on suicide. It explains that abstainers do not die as easily as humans and that pharmaceutical substances would have to be taken in far greater quantities; its example is an average vampire needing approximately three hundred 400-milligram acetaminophen tablets. Rowan has taken ibuprofen, and the passage does not give a specific explanation of what happened to him. It does, however, make clear why a familiar human method cannot be assumed to work for a vampire.

Relief, Attachment, and the Limits of the Handbook

The handbook does not simply condemn people who consider ending their lives. It acknowledges that abstainers may reach that point, including when they fear returning to murderous habits, before setting out the practical obstacles to suicide. Rowan closes the book strangely relieved. The thought of never seeing Eve again horrifies him even more than the prospect of continuing to live. His attachment does not resolve the conditions behind his despair, but it interrupts the conclusion he had been moving toward.

The scene also places Rowan’s crisis within the ordinary sounds of his family home. His mother works a blender downstairs, his father uses a rowing machine in the spare bedroom, and Clara and Will laugh together to loud guitars. Rowan lets the sounds blur and focuses on his sister’s laugh. The relief is specific and provisional: the book gives him information, Eve gives him a reason to recoil from death, and Clara’s laughter holds his attention within the family’s shared life. None of these details establishes that his depression has ended.

Blood, Craving, and Recurrence

The handbook’s warning that blood magnifies cravings, rather than satisfying them, complicates the possibility of blood as a remedy. Rowan later sits with a bottle of vampire blood and considers whether he can take only a small amount. When Clara’s footsteps approach, he hides it under his bed beside an old papier-mâché puppet of Saturn eating his children, made during a village-hall arts-and-crafts activity. The concealed bottle places temptation alongside an object from Rowan’s childhood, while the puppet’s subject echoes, in miniature, the violence that abstainer discipline asks him to refuse.

The temptation returns in connection with remembered bullying. Rowan recalls Harper pinning him to the ground at school while other boys, including Toby, laughed. At the time, he had wanted to sink into the earth and not come back up. Later, he picks up the bottle and drinks, directing the act toward Harper in his thoughts. The blood brings immediate relief: his worries and tension recede, his familiar aches disappear, and he feels awake. The short-term change is powerful, but it sits against the handbook’s explicit warning that blood intensifies craving. The episode therefore reads not as a cure for depression, but as a turn from abstention toward an intoxicating relief that may strengthen the desire to repeat it.

Significance

Rowan’s depression exposes the limits of treating abstention as a purely ethical choice. His refusal to drink coexists with painful self-knowledge, a sense of being trapped in a life that may last centuries, and an inability to rely on ordinary human expectations about death. The handbook offers practical knowledge without removing those pressures; Eve and Clara offer points of attachment without supplying a lasting resolution.

The progression from the churchyard to the bedroom, and later to the hidden bottle, links suicidal despair to the cycle of craving and relief. Rowan first seeks a way to stop living, then finds a reason to remain, and later turns to blood after recalling an experience of helplessness. The blood’s immediate effects contrast with the handbook’s warning about magnified cravings, leaving abstainer depression bound to an unresolved conflict: restraint preserves Rowan’s chosen limits, but does not make the pain or the temptation disappear.