At any rate, my few hours of sleep were usually terminated at three or four in the morning, when I stared up into yawning darkness, wondering and writhing at the devastation taking place in my mind, and awaiting the dawn, which usually permitted me a feverish, dreamless nap. What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.
One of the memorable moments in Madame Bovary is the scene where the heroine seeks help from the village priest. But the priest, a simple soul and none too bright, can only pluck at his stained cassock, distractedly shout at his acolytes, and offer Christian platitudes. Emma goes on her quietly frantic way, beyond comfort of God or man. I felt a bit like Emma Bovary in my relationship with the psychiatrist I shall call Dr. Gold, whom I began to visit as October became November, when the despair had commenced its merciless daily drumming.
I had never before consulted a mental therapist for anything, and I felt awkward, also a bit defensive; my pain had become so intense that I considered it quite improbable that conversation with another mortal, even one with professional expertise in mood disorders, could alleviate the distress.
Madame Bovary went to the priest with the same hesitant doubt. Yet our society is so structured that Dr. Still, while I would never question the potential efficacy of psychotherapy in the beginning manifestations or milder forms of the illness—or possibly even in the aftermath of a serious onslaught—its usefulness at the advanced stage I was in has to be virtually nil.
My more specific purpose in consulting Dr. Gold was to obtain help through pharmacology—though this too was, alas, a chimera for a bottomed-out victim such as I had become. He asked me if I was suicidal, and I reluctantly told him yes. I did not particularize—since there seemed no need to—did not tell him that in truth many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters and an outside maple or two a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries.
The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me. Death by heart attack seemed particularly inviting, absolving me as it would of active responsibility, and I had toyed with the idea of self-induced pneumonia—a long, frigid, shirtsleeved hike through the rainy woods. Nor had I overlooked an ostensible accident, a la Randall Jarrell, by walking in front of a truck on the highway nearby. These thoughts may seem outlandishly macabre—a strained joke—but they are genuine.
They are doubtless especially repugnant to healthy Americans, with their faith in self-improvement. Yet in truth such hideous fantasies, which cause well people to shudder, are to the deeply depressed mind what lascivious daydreams are to persons of robust sexuality.
Gold and I began to chat twice weekly, but there was little I could tell him except to try, vainly, to describe my desolation. Nor could he say much of value to me. The pill made me edgy, disagreeably hyperactive, and when the dosage was increased after ten days, it blocked my bladder for hours one night. Upon informing Dr. Gold of this problem, I was told that ten more days must pass for the drug to clear my system before starting anew with a different pill.
Ten days to one stretched on such a torture rack is like ten centuries—and this does not begin to take into account the fact that when a new pill is inaugurated several weeks must pass before it becomes effective, a development which is far from guaranteed in any case.
This brings up the matter of medication in general. Psychiatry must be given due credit for its continuing struggle to treat depression pharmacologically. The use of lithium to stabilize moods in manic-depression is a great medical achievement; the same drug is also being employed effectively as a preventive in many instances of unipolar depression.
There can be no doubt that in many moderate cases and some chronic forms of the disease the so-called endogenous depressions medications have proved invaluable, often altering the course of a serious disturbance dramatically. The failure of these pills to act positively and quickly—a defect which is now the general case—is somewhat analogous to the failure of nearly all drugs to stem massive bacterial infections in the years before antibiotics became a specific remedy. And it can be just as dangerous.
So I found little of worth to anticipate in my consultations with Dr. Despite the still-faltering methods of treatment, psychiatry has, on an analytical and philosophical level, contributed much to an understanding of the origins of depression. Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.
At a later date I would gradually be persuaded that a devastating loss in childhood figured as a probable genesis of my own disorder; meanwhile, as I monitored my retrograde condition, I felt loss at every hand. The loss of self-esteem is a celebrated symptom, and my own sense of self had all but disappeared, along with any self-reliance.
This loss can quickly degenerate into dependence, and from dependence into infantile dread. One dreads the loss of all things, all people close and dear. Of the images of myself recollected from that time the most bizarre, and discomfiting, remains the one of me, age four and a half, tagging through a market after my long-suffering wife; not for an instant could I let out of my sight the endlessly patient soul who had become nanny, mommy, comforter, priestess, and, most important, confidante—a counselor of rocklike centrality to my existence whose wisom far exceeded that of Dr.
I would hazard the opinion that many disastrous sequels to depression might be averted if the victims received support like that which she gave me. But meanwhile my losses mounted and proliferated. One develops fierce attachments. Ludicrous things—my reading glasses, a handkerchief, a certain writing instrument—became the objects of my demented possessiveness.
Each momentary misplacement filled me with a frenzied dismay, each item being the tactile reminder of a world soon to be obliterated. November wore on, bleak, raw, and chill. One Sunday a photographer and his assistants came to take pictures for an article to be published in a national magazine.
Of the session I can recall little except the first snowflakes of winter dotting the air outside. I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.
There I would lie as long as six hours, stuporous and virtually paralyzed, gazing at the ceiling and waiting for that moment of evening when, mysteriously, the crucifixion would ease up just enough to allow me to force down some food and then, like an automaton, seek an hour or two of sleep again. The answer is forthcoming. For years I had a kept a notebook—not strictly a diary, its entries were erratic and haphazardly written—whose contents I would not have particularly liked to be scrutinized by eyes other than my own.
I had hidden it well out of sight in my house. I imply no scandalousness; the observations were far less raunchy, or wicked, or self-revealing, than my desire to keep the notebook private might indicate.
Nonetheless, the small volume was one that I fully intended to make use of professionally and then destroy before the distant day when the specter of the nursing home came too near. So as my illness worsened I rather queasily realized that if I once decided to get rid of the notebook that moment would necessarily coincide with my decision to put an end to myself.
And one evening during December this moment came. That afternoon I had been driven I could no longer drive to Dr. However, there were drawbacks. Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage was likely to have the side effect of impotence. Putting myself in Dr. This concerns not the familiar threshold of pain but a parallel phenomenon, and that is the probable inability of the psyche to absorb pain beyond predictable limits of time.
There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance. We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. In depression this faith in deliverance, of ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute.
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. And so the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying— or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity—but moving from pain to pain.
That December evening, for example, I could have remained in bed as usual during those worst hours, or agreed to the small dinner party my wife had arranged downstairs. But the very idea of a decision was academic. Either course was torture, and I chose the dinner not out of any particular merit but through indifference to what I knew would be indistinguishable ordeals of fogbound horror. At dinner I was barely able to speak, but the guests, who were all good friends, were aware of my condition and politely ignored my catatonic muteness.
Then, after dinner, sitting in the living room, I experienced a curious inner convulsion that I can describe only as despair beyond despair. It came out of the cold air; I did not think such anguish was possible. While my friends quietly chatted in front of the fire I excused myself and went upstairs, where I retrieved my notebook from its special place. I felt my heart pounding wildly, like that of a man facing a firing squad, and I knew I had made an irreversible decision.
A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self—a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. I had not as yet chosen the mode of my departure, but I knew that step would come next, and soon, as inescapable as nightfall.
I watched myself in mingled terror and fascination as I began to make the necessary preparation: going to see my lawyer in the nearby town—there rewriting my will—and spending part of a couple afternoons in a muddled attempt to bestow upon posterity a letter of farewell.
It turned out that putting together a suicide note, which I felt obsessed with a necessity to compose, was the most difficult task of writing that I had ever tackled. There were too many people to acknowledge, to thank, to bequeath final bouquets. I should have used as an example the mordant one-liner of the Italian writer Cesare Pavese, who in parting wrote simply, Not too much gossip, please.
But even few words came to seem to me long-winded, and I tore up all my efforts, resolving to go out in silence. I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. Robert Frost Within six years I was a specialist in prosecuting child abuse.
I was bestowed somehow with a high degree of empathy. It can be a gift and a curse. I became known as Mr. I had a unique ability to talk with children. Mike, first by children, then by police, social workers, and the name stuck. I was called in to interview very young children who had witnessed their fathers kill their mothers. I became a protector of mockingbirds.
The caseload was relentless. I was a man capable of great tenderness mixed with the ability to turn mean. I was described as a lawyer who had an uncanny ability to connect with a witness on the stand. I often worked late into the night in trial preparation. My former wife complained I cared about other people's children more than my own.
She could not understand it when I told her I knew ours were protected but the others were not. I was and remain haunted by the eyes of the dead, particularly the eyes of dead children. I have flashbacks at times. What Styron said about being expected to smile,is true. I wore a mask.
Exceptionally well. I was a cop's DA. My best lawyer friend resorted to a John Wayne phrase calling me "a man with a lot of hard bark on him. Although our office had an on-call system, Investigators usually called me. Frankly, I was very, very good at my job.
I was a fine trial lawyer. I lost very few cases. I did lose control of my emotions more than once on closing argument before a jury and cried. I considered it a weakness even when the jury convicted.
During all my years as a prosecutor I lost count of the number of crime scenes I attended, the number of dead I saw, the number of autopsies I witnessed, the exhumation of a dead child I obtained an order for, and the subsequent re-autopsy.
I had no outlet to talk about my work. My former wife did not want to hear about it. I guess it was. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated --the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer -- had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted for such a dreadful and raging disease.
Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.
It's a simple as just adding a little pill to help the anti-depressant you're on. And all delivered in a seconds long cartoon commercial. What kind of message does that send to people who have never dealt with the condition, those who have just had the commonplace blues. Looks serious, doesn't it? And where are the men in those commercials? Alright, so the statistics show women report depression more than men. How about, women are more forthcoming and truthful in reporting depression.
After all, that male ego is such an impediment to admitting to what is viewed as a weakness. Since Darkness Visible William Styron was repeatedly prescribed Halcion by more than one physician for his insomnia. Halcion was banned in Great Britain in on the basis of its connection to depression and possible suicidal behavior. The drug is currently the subject of litigation in various jurisdictions. Considerable progress has been made in pharmacology for the treatment of clinical depression since Styron published Darkness Visible.
Why I'm Still Here I fell off the edge of the earth twice. Call it a crack up. Call it a nervous break down. Throughout my life I have been consumed by the fear of failure. Formerly the Director of a Not for Profit Corporation, I was placed under a degree of stress I was incapable of handling. I had long been associated with the program as a board member. The President of the Board had succeeded in removing two Directors preceding my taking the position. When that President initiated the same tactics against me, I became frozen by anxiety, incapable of focus, unable to function.
Men closely identify themselves with their work. The loss of what they do is essentially the same as the loss of their identity. That was the case for me. Did I consider whether life was worth living anymore? Yes, I did. Clinical Depression is a chemical imbalance. Restoration to health requires a combination of psychological therapy and psychiatric pharmacology. I was fortunate to find the right combination. I entered a second stage of crisis after being my mother's care giver during her final illness.
It was a long hard death for her. I very unrealistically thought I could help save her life. I lived in a state of denial. She finally was hospitalized in intensive care for a month. The end was inevitable. The morning she died, I found myself lost once again. What was left for me to do. An adjustment of my medications was necessary. Within two months, I had found myself once again. Each time I considered life wasn't worth the living, one thing kept me from taking the final step.
It was the same thing that kept Styron alive. For him, it was the effect it would have had on his family. For me, it was the effect it would have had on my mother and my wife, the lovely woman with whom I found happiness relatively late in life. The second time, my wife. I have seen too many people devastated by the suicide of a loved one. But it took the right help to make me remember that. The help is there.
View all 47 comments. Jul 02, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction , memoir , biography , psychology , health , 20th-century , united-states.
It is among the last books published by Styron, and is widely considered one of his best, and most influential works. Darkness Visible also helped raise awareness for depression, which was relatively unknown at the time. In October , American author William Styron travels to Paris to receive a prestigious literary award.
During the trip, Styron's mental state begins to degenerate rapidly as the depressive symptoms that he has been experiencing for several months worsen. He tentatively concludes that his depression was brought about his sudden withdrawal from years of alcoholism and exacerbated by his over dependence on Halcion, a prescription drug that he took to treat insomnia.
Styron also briefly mentions his own father's battle with depression and his mother's premature death from breast cancer, both of which he believes could have also contributed to his deteriorated state of mind.
View 1 comment. Jul 03, Mikol rated it it was amazing. It was August in the year I was about to enter the room for my final exam. This was the introduction to Unix and it was coming to an end. So was I. Tears flowing copiously, leaning over the second floor balcony, I was overcome with darkness, the likes of which I had never experienced before.
I finished the exam and could not gather myself. I had no reason for living. The water was calling me to her. I could taste her and the light drew me near. I kept remembering the bliss of that day as I sank deeper into the lake my last breath bubbling to the surface and the incredible softness and beauty of the afternoon sun reaching below the surface and I in total surrender, enveloped by her.
By brother pushed me to the surface that afternoon and with the aid of the lifeguard revived me. It wasn't my time. The bliss was calling again and I was ready. I set up a meeting with my best friend at the time. A last beer together. Again, it wasn't my time. A month later, this book was sitting in the lunchroom at my place of work. I brought it home and read it and saw myself in the pages looking back at me.
It would be a couple of months before I regained my appetite for living. Looking back I've had a major episode of depression at about every 15 years. None were as deep and despairing as this last one. There was something about this slim volume that really helped in the immediate post-suicidal period when I was in a sort of purgatory, a daze, a grey zone between the worlds.
I'm better now, thanks to caring friends and divine intervention. I have a zest for life, interesting projects, friends, and community. Just like before. But I am different for having the experience I had. Here is hope that your days are full of light. View all 8 comments. Aug 07, BlackOxford rated it it was amazing Shelves: american , biography-biographical. If indeed it is a single condition at all. Not even the highly articulate William Styron feels he can describe his own experience adequately.
All the pros agree that something has gone wrong chemically in the brain. But beyond that they can only guess at the pharmacological fix that might alleviate symptoms - sometimes with disastrous adverse effects. The state of being Styron, and so many others, experienced is not one of feeling low, or the blues, or being down, or any of dozens of other euphemisms. It is a state of total incapacitation. The malady attacks the body only indirectly through the attempted destruction of the Self.
It is the ultimate auto-immune disease and wages war on existence itself. And it frequently wins that war through suicide. There is no permanent cure, no immunity. Drugs might work temporarily but they are not a preventative vaccine. Recovery therefore is only into a recognition that the beast can strike again, and again.
As Styron says, the genetic roots of the malady are now beyond question. Against our genes we are essentially defenceless. The malady is particularly associated with artistic talent.
If so, it may be that the search for the personally unique right word is an important part of keeping oneself alive. Could it be that there is a meaning to this mysterious illness that we have yet to grasp? Styron might agree. The trick, I suppose, at least according to Blanchot, is not getting stuck on the one story, that is, to keep being born. View all 12 comments. Dec 12, Swaroop rated it really liked it. It has yielded its secrets to science far more reluctantly than many of the other major ills besetting us.
Aug 02, Melanie rated it did not like it Recommends it for: depressed people who aren't me? Shelves: Maybe I'm being needlessly harsh in my one-star rating, but there was something about Styron's memoir that really distressed me. I read it during one of my own periods of depression, and for whatever reason I decided to pair it with The Bell Jar , and instead of feeling any sort of comfort or recognition in Styron's words, I just felt sort of angry.
I became so hung up on the ways we women, men, Americans, depressed people, etc. This is the point at which a simultaneous re-reading of Sylvia Plath became not so helpful, but provided an interesting contrast. It was also around the time--and this was in a total fit of unabashed Crazy--that I decided to reclaim the phrase "mental illness.
But I guess what I really struggled with, in reading this memoir, was the notion of finding anything noble in suffering from depression. I've never felt especially noble or touched by a strange, dark power or whatever--I've spent almost fifteen years of my life thinking that I'm broken and that I should cheer up already. I know that there's no such thing as capital-D Depression, and that we all experience it differently and maybe even differently throughout our own lives , but there was just something about Styron's tone that really irked me.
View all 23 comments. Aug 25, Diane rated it really liked it Shelves: angst , memoirs , sociology-psychology. This is a stirring memoir of Styron's depression, which nearly killed him. I had seen multiple references to this book, all of them praising its insight into the despair that a depressed person can feel. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come -- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute.
If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only tempora This is a stirring memoir of Styron's depression, which nearly killed him. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. He also wondered if the fact that he stopped drinking alcohol caused his despondency: "Like a great many American writers, whose sometimes lethal addiction to alcohol has become so legendary as to provide in itself a stream of studies and books, I used alcohol as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria, and to the enhancement of the imagination Alcohol was an invaluable senior partner of my intellect, besides being a friend whose ministrations I sought daily.
He realized that depression had been "tapping at my door for decades," ever since his mother died when he was Styron read extensively about the disease, even paging through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is grim reading, indeed. He most identified with the feeling of loss as described in the literature: "Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression -- in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.
I would gradually be persuaded that devastating loss in childhood figured as a probable genesis of my own disorder; meanwhile, I felt loss at every hand One dreads the loss of all things, all people close and dear. There is an acute fear of abandonment. Being alone in the house, even for a moment, caused me exquisite panic and trepidation.
For example, he said he usually felt the most depressed later in the day: "Afternoons were still the worst, beginning at about three o'clock, when I'd feel the horror, like some poisonous fogbank, roll in upon my mind, forcing me into bed. After several months of taking pills, he reached the point where suicide seemed to be imminent. He made preparations, such as updating his will and getting rid of a private journal he didn't want anyone else to read.
But when it came time to write a suicide note, Styron struggled: "It turned out that putting together a suicide note, which I felt obsessed with a necessity to compose, was the most difficult task of writing that I had ever tackled. There were too many people to acknowledge, to thank, to bequeath final bouquets. And finally I couldn't manage the sheer dirgelike solemnity of it. He was admitted to a hospital the next day, which was his salvation.
I think it might be a comfort to both those who have struggled with the disease or those who love someone who has depression, in an effort to better understand what they're going through. Styron does not claim that his experience is by any means universal, but like all good books, it reveals some fundamental human truths.
The waiter recognized Styon's name and said the book "Darkness Visible" saved his life. When the waiter left, Hitch asked Styron if that sort of thing happened often. I even get the police calling up to ask if I'll come on the line and talk to the man who's threatening to jump.
View all 9 comments. Dec 18, Jonathan O'Neill rated it it was amazing. In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. I found exactly what I was looking for in this book.
William has the talent as a writer to give proper expression to depression, an experience that has been, inherently, very hard for victi 4. William has the talent as a writer to give proper expression to depression, an experience that has been, inherently, very hard for victims to convey to their loved ones.
For this reason, as well as the potential for a degree of solace, I actually believe this book would be a beneficial read for sufferers of depression. I can definitely look back and see that now.
It manifested itself in a lack of confidence, low self-esteem and a lack of conviction in choices that I made as well as bouts of self-hate and intense emotional pain. It was nowhere close to the debilitating level that Styron writes about throughout this memoir but the signs were there. I had become withdrawn and quiet, she tells me, my usual hyperactive and jovial disposition was gone, the spark of a carefree youth had faded ever so slightly from my eyes. I think I subconsciously sought out replacement male role-models, my older brother, an uncle, a teacher, a sports coach, just to watch and observe.
There is a defensive wall that family and friends erect upon being given the news that their loved one has committed suicide. In a way I feel that the arguments are more a defence for themselves. Alas, as I read further, William mentioned several times that the support of his wife and friends were an absolute necessity in his eventual recovery.
Simply reading this, took a portion of the weight of helplessness off my own shoulders. He attributes the escalation of his illness, at least partially, to bad medical advice or poorly handled psychotherapy. Whilst not devaluing the results that others have achieved, he surmises that his experience was not great. His psychiatrist had him taking 3 times the recommended dosage of Halcion for sleep and when William first brought up the option of being hospitalised, the doctor warned him off it due to the stigma of mental health.
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