TW: Mention of suicide and suicidality
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.
— William Styron, Darkness Visible
I’m grateful to my friend and colleague James Taylor for lending me his copy of William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, accepting it might be a while before he saw it again. It was two months before I got further than the Author’s Note. At a mere eighty-five pages I could probably have read it in a couple of days but I kept putting it off. Last year I completed Colin Wilson’s The Outsider at the suggestion of a stranger I met in a pub. The book was more than interesting to me as I’ve explored elsewhere. It wasn’t an easy read, however. The experience contributed to my hesitation regarding Styron’s memoir.
The back cover of Darkness Visible declares “This is a story of depression: a condition that reduced William Styron from a person enjoying life and success as an acclaimed writer, to a man engulfed and menaced by mental anguish.” James was right in thinking I’d find the book of interest but such works are not to be engaged lightly. I’ve read many first-hand accounts of mental illness since Fran and I met in May 2011. I’ve learned a lot from Fran herself but I wanted to extend my awareness beyond the detailed but singular perspective she laid bare in our daily calls and chats. I needed that broader take on the subject to support my friend more effectively. It was also invaluable as we began work on our book High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder.
When Fran undertook a three-month tour of Europe with her parents in the summer of 2013 I took advantage of our relative lack of contact to read as widely as possible. Amongst titles I read at that time were The Words to Say It: An Autobiographical Novel by Marie Cardinal and Patty Duke’s A Brilliant Madness: Living With Manic-Depressive Illness. The following is taken from a short post I wrote in response to the latter.
I cannot recommend [A Brilliant Madness] highly enough. I found myself in tears again and again, reading her story. The book is especially effective because the chapters telling her personal tale are interleaved by chapters by Gloria Hochman providing background on the condition, its impact on those with bipolar (called manic depression throughout the book) and those who love and care about them.
As I told Fran just now: “Patty Duke’s story isn’t yours, of course, but it helps me see a bigger picture. I don’t know her at all. I couldn’t pick her photo out in a line up or recognise her in a movie or a show if I saw it. But I love this woman. Her courage and heart and honesty ... I know those ... I recognise those ...”
I’d also recommend Resilience: Two Sisters and a Story of Mental Illness by Jessie Close and Pete Earley, the four volume Stigma Fighters Anthology, and Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. You’ll find these and other titles on our resources page.
But what of Darkness Visible? The first thing to say is that it details the author’s experience of unipolar depression rather than bipolar disorder. The latter is mentioned by way of contrast, referred to by its former label of manic depression.
The depression that engulfed me was not of the manic type — the one accompanied by euphoric highs — which would have most probably presented itself earlier in my life. I was sixty when the illness struck for the first time, in the “unipolar” form, which leads straight down.
The second thing to note is that despite describing with brutal clarity his experience of suicidal thinking, Styron survived his depression. The book opens with the following line.
In Paris on a chilly evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind — a struggle which had engaged me for several months — might have a fatal outcome.
Styron died two decades later from pneumonia at the age of eighty-one. The possibility of recovery from depression is the book’s central message but that in no way minimises the peril of his situation during the period it depicts. The thread of suicide is woven throughout the narrative as it weaves through the thinking of many who live with mental illness. This was one of the first things I learned from Fran. Suicidality isn’t limited to occasional dramatic and dangerous acts. It can be, and often is, a persistent companion, a nagging urge towards danger that requires continual and exhausting resistance.
The opening lines of Darkness Visible echo those of Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus which famously begins “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” The echo is not accidental. Styron admired Camus and mentions his life and works on several occasions. He’d planned to meet with the French philosopher and author in 1960 at the invitation of a mutual friend.
I was of course greatly flattered [...] But before I arrived in France there came the appalling news: Camus had been in an automobile crash, and was dead at the cruelly young age of forty-six. [...] I pondered his death endlessly.
The references to Camus gave me a handle on the topic at hand. I’ve no experience of depression or suicidality but I’m familiar with Camus’ works, especially The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger. I’ve explored his philosophy in several posts including One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy and One Must Imagine Marty and John Happy.
Styron addressses the stigma of suicide early in the book. Responding to an article in The New York Times concerning the death by suicide of renowned author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, Styron made his feelings clear in an op-ed submitted to the same publication.
The argument I put forth was fairly straightforward: the pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. [...] to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.
His piece evoked a wholeheartedly supportive response from people who “were eager to come out and proclaim that they, too, had experienced the feelings I had described.” Stigma is a topic Fran and I have discussed privately many times and describe in our book.
The stigma surrounding mental illness is unhelpful and dangerous to the extent it makes people less likely to seek help, or speak to someone about what they are going through. Yet paradoxically, it can be protective to some degree. As Fran sees it, the taint of suicide would follow her even in death. She would be remembered not for her successes — her career, her books, her caring relationships, or the courage she has displayed through decades of illness — but as a failure. Whether or not she survived, she would always be “Fran Houston, that woman who tried to kill herself.” As much as she despises it, the shame of suicide helps to keep her away from the edge.
Stigma does not arise by accident. It’s the direct result of how we respond to and treat others. Fran is clear about our individual and collective responsibilities.
Fran distinguishes suicide interruptors, “those who are able to defuse the suicide bomb,” and suicide aggravators. The latter are people who, consciously or unconsciously, impact her so adversely that suicide seems a viable choice.
Styron’s descent into depression is described with a matter-of-fact clarity that reminds me of Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality. Published posthumously in 2012 Mortality documents the author’s struggle with esophageal cancer from its diagnosis to his death two years later at the age of sixty-two. Styron’s depression is not fatal but there’s no certainty of that as his situation deteriorates. On the contrary, “... there came over me the knowledge [...] that this condition would cost me my life if it continued on such a course. [...] I was still keeping the idea of suicide at bay. But plainly the possibility was around the corner, and I would soon meet it face to face.”
In a passage that affected me deeply Styron describes his plans concerning his personal notebook (“not strictly a diary”) in the event of his death. “I had hidden it well out of sight in my house,” he begins. “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.” I’ve never experienced suicidal urges but, paraphrasing Styron, for over fifty years I have kept diaries “whose contents I would not particularly [like] to be scrutinised by eyes other than my own.” As I recounted in End of Life Planning for the Overwhelmed “my inner life is captured in personal diaries spanning more than five decades. What happens to them after my death is a different matter, and something I’ve yet to reach any decision about.”
Styron disposes of his private notebook in a moment of crisis. “I had not yet chosen the mode of my departure, but I knew that that next step would come next, and soon, as inescapable as nightfall.” There’s a moment of clarity in which he realises he could not “commit this desecration” on himself and those who love him but he claims no credit for not taking that anticipated fatal step. There’s a strong sense that things might have ended very differently. In the event, “I woke up my wife and soon telephone calls were made. The next day I was admitted to the hospital.”
His condition was so serious that he was initially considered a candidate for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). My mother underwent a course of ECT for severe and persistent depression. A number of guests have described their experiences on our blog, including Andrew Turnan (The Efficacy of Electroshock: a Personal Story), Chris Good (Twenty-Plus Years of Misdiagnosis and Incorrect Treatment), and Eric Russell (ECT: A Patient’s Perspective). Also noteworthy is Andy Behrman’s Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania.
It’s clear that hospitalisation was critical to Styron’s survival and recovery — “The hospital was my salvation” — but he’s happy to highlight what he perceived as its deficiencies. Group Therapy “did nothing for me except make me seethe.” Art Therapy is “organized infantilism.” Medication was more helpful to his recovery. Specifically, replacing the medications he’d previously been prescribed. These did little to alieviate his depression and almost certainly exacerbated his thoughts of suicide. The ability of medication to affect suicidal thinking is something I learned from Fran in the first year of our friendship. An intense and dangerous episode of suicidal ideation (“stinking thinking” as she termed it) was brought to an almost complete halt when her previous medication was replaced with lithium.
The final chapters of Darkness Visible document the author’s recovery. He attempts to trace the origins of his depression, settling on a theory of “incomplete mourning” in which the bereaved person has been “unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, and so carries within himself through later years an insufferable burden of which rage and guilt, and not only damned-up sorrow, are a part, and become the potential seeds of self-destruction.”
I’ve no training in psychology or psychiatry but this strikes me as simplistic at best. I’m sure some mental health conditions can be traced to unresolved trauma connected to the loss of a parent or other family member. It nevertheless strikes me as presumptuous to infer future pathology on the basis of a grief response deemed inadequate by societal standards. Not everyone experiences or needs to experience “the catharsis of grief.” I speak from personal experience. In a post for National Grief Awareness Week 2024 I described how the death of a friend “affected me far more than either my father’s death when I was eighteen or my mother’s, decades later.” In the same post I highlight another link to Albert Camus, specifically the opening lines of The Stranger in which the lead character Meursault learns of his mother’s death.
Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.
In the novel there are no psychiatric consequences for Meursault but his perceived lack of emotion at his mother’s death is held against him as indicating a cold and unfeeling character. I relate to this but hope to avoid his fate. Meursault is executed for a murder he undoubtedly committed but scarcely understands.
Putative causes aside, it’s Styron’s attitude to his recovery from depression that leaves me most conflicted. Earlier in the book he’s at pains to point out that he’s writing from his own experience and doesn’t expect any lessons to be directly applicable to others.
In setting these reflections down I don’t intend my ordeal to stand as a representation of what happens, or might happen, to others. Depression is much too complex in its cause, its symptoms and its treatment for unqualified conclusions to be drawn from the experience of a single individual.
He nevertheless concludes his account with the confident, almost evangelical, assertion that recovery is a real, even a necessary, possibility for those who find themselves in depression’s grasp.
[...] if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.
For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as “the shining world.”
I wonder if I’m the only reader to draw a parallel between Styron’s “trudging upward and upward” into the light and Camus’ invitation at the conclusion of The Myth of Sisyphus.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
There is a critical difference, however. The blurb asserts that Darkness Visible is “ultimately about survival and redemption.” The happiness we’re invited to imagine for Sisyphus is not born of hope. It arises in hope’s absence, from the very act of struggle with no promise of rescue, redemption, or meaning.
The hope Styron offers is real. Recovery was a reality for him as it is for many. The message that there can be light at the end of the tunnel, clear skies after the “storm of murk,” is an important one. And yet it offers little to those — including many of my friends — for whom depression and suicidality are not single episodes from which, hard and perilous though the road might be, recovery may be glimpsed ahead in the distance and ultimately attained.
There is much to admire in this account but I’m unsure what it offers the person living with chronic, recurrent, or persistent depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or other long-term psychiatric conditions. “If depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy” is a bleak response to Camus’ “fundamental question of philosophy.” It is also, I would attest, dangerously misguided. It disrespects the courage and experience of those who live their lives without realistic hope of recovery. Their lives exist too and their stories deserve to be told.
Title: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Author: William Styron
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Publication date: 5 April 2001
ISBN-10: 0099285576
William Styron (1925-2006), a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible, and A Tidewater Morning. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Howells Medal, the American Book Award, the Legion d’Honneur, and the Witness to Justice Award from the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. With his wife, the poet and activist Rose Styron, he lived for most of his adult life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, where he is buried.
Photo by Andrea Riondino at Unsplash.
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