Darkness Visible

“I recall saying to myself that when I left Paris for New York the next morning it would certainly be a matter of forever. I was shaken by the certainty with which I accepted the idea that I would never see France again, just as I would never recapture a lucidity that was slipping away from me with terrifying speed.”

At this point, Styron accepted the belief that he would likely commit suicide soon. He is describing this loss of Paris—a loss that has not yet occurred—as something he felt he could never regain. Similarly, his mind was plagued with darkness and fog, and he didn’t believe it could ever return to its previous clarity.

“Of the many dreadful manifestations of the disease, both physical and psychological, a sense of self-hatred—or put less categorically, a failure of self-esteem—is one of the most universally experienced symptoms, and I had suffered more and more from a general feeling of worthlessness as the malady had progressed.”

Styron refers to the feeling of self-hatred and then corrects himself, because one aspect of depression is a sense of passivity and an inability to motivate oneself. Self-esteem fails to rise up and support the sufferer. Feelings of insignificance and uselessness permeate everything, making every triumph feel undeserved.

“While the giving and receiving of prizes usually induce from all sources an unhealthy uprising of false modesty, backbiting, self-torture and envy, my own view is that certain awards, though not necessary, can be very nice to receive.”

Styron went to Paris to receive the Cino del Duca award for his writing. Awards can bring out the worst in people who are competing for them, but Styron admits that it still feels good to receive one. His depression, however, robbed him of positive feelings about the experience. Even when he momentarily lost the check, he was less concerned with what would be a devastatingly large loss of money than with whether he deserved the prize. 

“Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description.”

Throughout the memoir, Styron repeatedly apologizes for his inability to describe depression, yet through metaphor, he paints a vivid picture. He clearly demonstrates that depression is more than a temporary bout of sadness.

“Such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.”

Styron identifies the indescribability of depression as one of the major roadblocks to treating the disease. Those who love someone with depression are generally neither callous nor unwilling to help; they simply can’t understand what it’s like. 

“The weather of depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.”

Recalling a cold and rainy night in Paris, Styron recognizes that no environment could have changed his pain and despondency. The depression poisoned his perspective from within; he would be able to enjoy an ideal night no more than a miserable one. The weather in his mind didn’t change, and the metaphorical rain never let up.

“But the stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.”

Because suicide is stigmatized, those left behind often refuse to accept that their loved ones could have killed themselves. Suicide victims are often considered weak or selfish, and their loved ones are left with the guilt of wondering what they could have done to prevent the act. Styron talks about the way that desperate family members sometimes try to insist that the death was not intentional, erasing the suicide even if it means erasing the significant suffering that the person endured. 

“It is the only time in my life I have felt it worthwhile to have invaded my own privacy, and to make that privacy public.”

Styron’s op-ed in The New York Times reveals his very personal struggle with depression, and he reveals even more in both the Vanity Fair article and this memoir. Although he did not like making his private life public, his decision to share his story emphasizes his point of view: depression and suicide should not be treated as so taboo that no one talks about them. Sharing experiences of mental illness can make others feel less alone, which can make them more likely to seek help instead of committing suicide.

“When one thinks of these doomed and splendidly creative men and women, one is drawn to contemplate their childhoods, where, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the seeds of the illness take strong root; could any of them have had a hint, then, of the psyche’s perishability, its exquisite fragility? And why were they destroyed, while others—similarly stricken—struggled through?

Styron comments on how many creative people throughout history, how many writers and artists—including himself—were afflicted with depression. Many who knew them shared nothing about their struggle, and loved ones didn’t know until the person had taken their own life. Styron asks questions that can’t really be answered, including why some people end up depressed while others don’t, and why some survive while others die.

“‘Melancholia’ would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.”

For such a debilitating disease, Styron argues that “depression” is too commonplace a word. In the early days of Freud, psychiatry, and psychiatric diagnosis, depression was called melancholia, a far more expressive and dramatic term. Styron suggests that the versatility of the word “depression” dilutes its meaning, taking away its power to describe something catastrophic.

“To discover why some people plunge into the downward spiral of depression, one must search beyond the manifest crisis—and then still fail to come up with anything beyond wise conjecture.”

When someone commits suicide, survivors want to know why. They seek the instigating event that pushed the person over the edge. Someone must delve into an entire history to search for this answer and may still find no real motive. The only person with the real answer is no longer capable of answering, and even they may not know. One thing people fail to understand about suicide and depression: There is no one cause. 

“But it should be kept in mind how idiosyncratic the faces of depression can be.”

For all of Styron’s investigation and speculation, he admits that depression differs for all sufferers. The loss of his ability to drink alcohol affected him deeply, perhaps triggering the onset of his symptoms. Many people stop drinking without such a dire response, so ultimately, depression comes down to individual experiences that cannot be easily generalized.

“It’s easy to see how this condition is part of the psyche’s apparatus of defense: Unwilling to accept its own gathering deterioration, the mind announces to its indwelling consciousness that it is the body with its perhaps correctable defects—not the precious and irreplaceable mind that is going haywire.”

The mind is the seat of one’s sense of self. To combat the sense that the mind is deteriorating, the brain seeks physical causes for suffering, often creating somatic maladies that may have possible solutions, thus making hypochondriasis a natural companion to depression. A physical disease of the body, unlike depression, may kill outright, but it doesn’t destroy the person’s soul. 

“But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness. The madness results from an aberrant biochemical process.”

Most people experience some sort of short-term depression in their lives, and clinical depression is not merely an amplified or prolonged version of that experience. Styron argues that words are sanitized when it comes to mental illness, which sometimes sanitizes human understanding of mental illness and its severity. 

“But with their minds turned agonizingly inward, people with depression are usually dangerous only to themselves. The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.”

Part of the stigma of mental illness is the fear that mentally ill people may be unstable or dangerous. This fear partially explains the need to euphemize and sanitize words, and the impulse to pretend that a loved one died by accident rather than suicide: It changes the way a person is perceived. Styron asserts that in the case of depression, violence turns inward. A person assaults themselves mentally and emotionally, and sometimes progresses to assaulting themselves physically. 

“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.”

One of the challenges of therapy, as Styron discovered, is the requirement of opening up, speaking truthfully, and trusting someone to help. Naturally, Styron was uncomfortable. He even mitigated his responses, admitting to suicidal thoughts without confessing that he thought about ways to accomplish the act. His actions illustrate the part of the disease in which the sufferer feels hopeless and cannot believe that relief is possible.

“These thoughts might 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.”

Imagining one’s own death is terrifying for those who don’t suffer from mental illness. For someone with severe depression, suicidal ideation can feel like visualizing a path to relief from endless torment.  

“Ten days to someone stretched on such a torture rack is like 10 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.”

In the battle against mental illness, pharmaceutical intervention rarely works quickly and effectively. The medication may not work, or it may make the situation worse; there is no guarantee that any medication will be successful. For someone whose disorder tells them that they will never feel better, the wait is torturous. The constant affliction of severe physical pain for 10 days plus several weeks would be unbearably inhumane; seemingly endless mental pain is equally unbearable, especially since relief is slow to happen. 

“Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease, and likely, in its origin.”

Depression is a disease of loss: a loss of self, a loss of pleasure, a loss of the things that make life worth living. Often, at the root of depression and its causes are traumatic events, which often involve loss. 

“There is no doubt that as one nears the penultimate depths of depression—which is to say just before the stage when one begins to act out one’s suicide instead of being a mere contemplator of it—the acute sense of loss is connected with a knowledge of life slipping away at accelerated speed.”

The ultimate loss of depression is the loss of one’s own life, which, the sufferer generally mourns toward the end. Depression is about involuntary self-destruction, which in the final stages may lead to death. Styron suggests that the urge to die is not about a desire for death, but about a need to end one’s suffering.

“It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”

What elevates the pain of depression to the level of torture is the constant, unshakeable surety that this suffering will never end. Through every step of his treatment, Styron remained skeptical. Even when he was hospitalized, he doubted that the doctors would be able to help him. He argues that those who resort to suicide do so because they see no possibility for relief from pain.

“Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality.”

The depression sufferer develops a distorted perception of the world around them, often with some paranoia about the negative intentions of others. As Styron illustrates, it is very difficult to step out of those delusions and see that they are false.

“To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists.”

Styron again feels frustrated by his inability to convey the experience of depression. Considering the frequency with which artists are afflicted by depression, it makes sense that this frustration would permeate the works of those whose vocation is artistic expression.