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Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry. That was a line in Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip’s Thou Shalt Kill way back in the mists of 2007. Now I love Pip but I’ve got to disagree. Things have changes significantly since then as Fry has become the ubiquitous bumbling brand, this omni-intellect that sort of burbles about anything he’s asked to by TV companies. There’s many a Stephen Fry ‘documentary’ that’s just a holiday with a camera crew along for the ride and his persistent theft of journalism jobs is wrong. He was a technology columnist for The Guardian sometime and wrote a cover story on Apple for Time. He is a friend of Apple. He is a friend of Jonny Ive and knew Steve Jobs personally. He could not write a single word objectively. That’s OK but he gave pretence to the notion that he was somehow journalistic. He was penning advertorials with a rather more public profile than the average copywriter. But all of these niggles are naught when compared to Stephen Fry’s branding of depression. Stephen Fry has made quite a thing of talking and writing about the black dog that stalks him. I have no doubt his manic depression is a very grave thing but like Keith Richards and heroin addiction, the travails of a celebrity are rather different to those suffered by mortals like me who have neither the money or the famous friends to just flee to Belgium when a job doesn’t go the way we want it to. Depression is a slow death by a million paper cuts. When it descends on you the black cloud obscures everything. When Stephen Fry did a documentary series on depression it was through the prism of celebrity. The bulk of the interviewees were people who talked about how there black moods are the flip side to their creativity. I know many depressives who have no upside whatsoever. I’m lucky to get some manic with my depressive but it is not always that way. Why am I ‘attacking’ a fellow sufferer? Because Stephen Fry uses his depression as a badge at times. It’s a handy little thing to point to when he feels under attack. He can do a big public flounce off Twitter and have his fans baying for him to return. He can be eggshell fragile in the face of criticism or bad reviews. He can have his celebrity cake and eat it with a big squirt of black icing. Even for writing this I put myself in the frame to be castigated by his vast numbers of followers. How could I, a mere mortal, know anything of the pain of the great Mr Fry? Well, sadly depression is quite the leveller. It killed Kurt Cobain just as its killed friends of mine. The black dog is not discerning about who it bites. For all the great work Stephen Fry has done (I love Fry & Laurie, his first few books, several of his TV projects), the things he has said and done about depression feel somewhat wrong to me. He has every right to say and do whatever he pleases but to turn depression into a kind of celebrity affliction, something that he must bare as this great Wildean wit, is quite tiresome. It also elevates the darkness to something it is not, turns it into something where if you do not feel the creative spark flickering in the darkness, you’ve failed even more.