Darkness Visible
William Styron is probably best known for his 1979 novel, Sophie’s Choice, which was turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Klein in 1982. Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress that year, for her portrayal of Sophie, a Polish Roman Catholic Auschwitz survivor. The “choice” in Sophie’s Choice refers to her being forced, while imprisoned at Auschwitz, to choose which one of her two children—firstborn son or second-born daughter—will be sent to the gas chambers. If she cannot choose, then both will be gassed. Spoiler alert: she picks her son, perhaps because he, being older and stronger, has a better chance of surviving the concentration camp. Or maybe because the boy came first, and, as Ani Difranco sings in her song “School Night,” “I stand committed to a love that came before you.”
Other Styron books include his acclaimed first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, published in 1951 when he was twenty-six, and 1967’s Confessions of Nat Turner, told from the perspective of Turner, the leader of an 1831 slave revolt in Virginia. Styron himself was born in Virginia. Numerous critics reviled his portrayal of Turner as racist stereotyping, while others, including James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, defended him, and the book won both the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1970.
But for the last two decades of his life, Styron was best known for Darkness Visible, his brutally elegant, devastating, and concise portrait of major depressive disorder, from which he suffered most acutely in late 1985, when he was 60 years old. The book began as a lecture given in Baltimore in May of 1989 at a symposium on affective disorders sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Styron then expanded the lecture into an essay that was published in the December 1989 issue of Vanity Fair, which he then expanded further into its final book form, a total of 84 pages, published in 1990. A pioneering literary work in clinical depression awareness, Darkness Visible shed light on an illness that was not well known or well documented at the time, and helped eliminate a substantial amount of stigma surrounding it. The book’s title comes from John Milton’s description of Hell in Paradise Lost: "No light; but rather darkness visible / Served only to discover sights of woe, / Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace / And rest can never dwell, hope never comes…”
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Styron begins his memoir in October of 1985, in Paris, where he has flown to accept the Prix Mondial Cino del Duca, an annual, international award of 200,000 Euros (about 224,000 dollars) that is still given today to writers, artists, and scientists whose work “reflects themes or principles of a certain ‘humanism.’” The first recipient of the Cino del Duca World Prize, in 1969, was Austrian zoologist and ornithologist Konrad Lorenz. More recently, in 2020, American writer Joyce Carol Oates won the prize. Styron was deeply honored to be the recipient in 1985, but his depression, which had been gradually worsening over the previous months, made it nearly impossible for him to enjoy that honor. One of the more heartbreaking moments of the book is when he must say, in French, “I am sick. A psychiatric disorder,” as part of his disoriented and shame-filled apology for having to forego the traditional post-prize ceremony lunch, much to the dismayed chagrin of his admiring hosts and benefactors.
One aspect of depression that Styron revisits multiple times in Darkness Visible is its indescribability. Those who have never experienced it could never adequately empathize with those in its throes, and he stresses again and again how words could never remedy this state of affairs. Of course, being a writer, he still makes a valiant effort in using words to capture what depression feels like. He compares it to the brain being under “siege,” to his thought processes “being engulfed by a toxic and unnamable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.” He describes depression as a kind of physical pain, “most closely connected to drowning or suffocation,” and he quotes William James, who said in Varieties of Religious Experience that “it is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.” Styron also calls depression a “trance of supreme discomfort,” a state in which rational thought is often absent, a “condition of helpless stupor.”
He takes issue with the word “depression,” calling it “a true wimp of a word for such a major illness,” asserting that “melancholia” would still be better at evoking “the blacker forms of the disorder.” He would also suggest “brainstorm” as a way of comparing the illness to a “howling tempest in the brain,” if that term weren’t already used to denote the healthy-minded exploration of ideas and action plans. The word “depression,” he says, tends to inspire responses as “insipid” as the descriptor itself, along the lines of “You’ll pull out of it”—as if it were just a rut in the ground or an economic slump, which are indeed the other meanings of the word. Styron would probably agree that there should be no other meanings of a word used to describe such a terrible phenomenon; it should have a word all to itself. And not namely to gratify the linguistic and literary minded among us who insist on nothing less than le mot juste, but because, as Styron says, the lack of adequate language prevents “a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.”
Words are so important. Will Oldham’s pretty good with them. I think Styron would approve of how he describes depression (or at least I assume that’s what he’s describing), and I wonder if Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie Prince Billy—had Styron’s Darkness Visible in mind—or maybe Milton’s Paradise Lost— when he compared depression to “seeing a darkness,” in the title track to his 1998 album, I See a Darkness. Part of the chorus of “I See a Darkness” reminds me of a theme in Darkness Visible, which has to do with the role that other people play in helping someone overcome depression. Addressing his friend, the song’s narrator says, “Did you know how much I love you? Here’s a hope that somehow you can save me from this darkness.” But how are the loved ones of people afflicted with depression supposed to save those people? Styron exhorts loved ones to tell their suffering friend, spouse, or family member, in no uncertain terms, that the illness will run its course. They must convince the anguished on that he will pull through, in the same way that he would pull through a common cold or stomach virus. Styron says, “It has been shown over and over again that if the encouragement is dogged enough—and the support equally committed and passionate—the endangered one can nearly always be saved…It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life’s worth…”
I take equal parts comfort and discomfort in Styron’s conviction that one can be persuaded of life’s worth. If I am ever in the position to do such persuading, I hope I can be as dogged and devoted as he says one must be. But if, God forbid, my hypothetical loved one’s battle with depression ends in suicide—and here’s where the discomfort comes in—could I not then be to blame on some level, for perhaps not trying hard enough to convince them that their illness would have passed, and that life would feel worth living again? Part of me thinks it’s way too much pressure to put on the healthy loved ones of those with depression; another part thinks maybe we should be that responsible for the people we love. And of course all we can do is our best. And of course we shouldn’t lose our own minds in the process. And people always think they should have done more for suicide victims while they were still alive. In some cases that might be true, and I can’t imagine the weight of that guilt. In other cases, though, people did do their best to save the person, and depression’s best was simply better.
Styron was actually inspired to write the Vanity Fair article that evolved into Darkness Visible, by the outpouring of responses that a previous New York Times op-ed piece of his had received, which was about the apparent suicide of the Italian writer Primo Levi, who’d survived the Nazi death camps but at 67 succumbed to depression—which was, no doubt, related to having lived in the death camps. Styron was enraged by the public’s unsympathetic response to Levi’s death, and in Darkness Visible he makes his own sympathy clear. He recalls Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, wherein Camus writes, “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.” Styron says he was “puzzled” when first reading this, “unable to deal with the premise that anyone should come close to wishing to kill himself in the first place.” That was before Styron experienced extreme depression and had the realization himself, in Paris in 1985, that if his own depression-caused pain did not ease up soon, then he “would be forced to judge that life was not worth living and thereby answer, for myself at least, the fundamental question of philosophy.”
He references a few other suicide-deaths in Darkness Visible, including, in 1989, that of American political and social activist Abbie Hoffman, whom Styron had known personally. Apparently there was a lot of public denial that Hoffman’s death was a suicide, despite the fact that Hoffman had washed down with liquor 150 phenobarbital tablets. Styron felt that people’s refusal to accept the fact of suicide, projected onto it “a delinquency that somehow lessened the man and his character.” He acknowledged that not everyone who suffers from major depression ends up committing suicide, but “to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.” Anyone who harshly judges some such tragic figure simply cannot fathom the depths of their pain.
At the time of Styron’s writing Darkness Visible, Prozac had just been introduced. And many of the suffering souls he mentions did not live to experience its potentially relieving effects. This general lack of helpful medical treatment—of “immediate measures” and forms of alleviation—was “one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it revealed itself to the victim, and one that helped situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases.” Styron also talks about how people with depression are expected to go about their normal lives, to endure “the most intolerable social and family situations,” when someone else as gravely ill with any other sickness would be granted, without question, the luxury of “lying flat in bed.” He calls this phenomenon of people with depression having to continue being a part of everyday normal life the “striking experience…of the walking wounded.” One’s “bed of nails,” he says, is never abandoned for a moment.
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In writing about his own suicidality, Styron references an apparently common phenomenon experienced by people in deep depression: the feeling of having a second self who’s watching them. This “wraithlike observer” is comparably rational and clear-headed, capable of watching with “dispassionate curiosity” as their disturbed companion tries to resist their own demise, or decides to welcome it. Styron did not have a specific suicide plan, but he still felt like he was being irresistibly drawn to that action and knew that his method would reveal itself soon. Regarding the feeling of having a second self by his side, he writes, “As I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn’t shake off a sense of melodrama—a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.”
It’s almost an out-of-body experience he’s describing, except he can still feel the pain of being in his body. But the fact that he knows the “wraithlike observer” does not share his pain or dementia suggests that he can somehow access that observer’s state of mind, which is very interesting. It seems to me an example of how consciousness does not exist in the brain—the other primary example being people who’ve had near-death experiences. I once heard the story of a woman who’d been shot four times in the head and was therefore wholly unconscious for her subsequent emergency brain surgery. After regaining consciousness post-op, she reported watching the surgery from up on the ceiling; she accurately described her doctor’s brightly colored surgical cap, the music that was playing, and other details she could not have known if consciousness existed in the brain. Similar stories have been echoed by other people who’ve technically been dead and then brought back to life. Maybe the wraithlike observer Styron and others have reported is a different level of consciousness people are able to access when close to death (in this case, death by suicide), as opposed to being actually dead.
It’s also interesting to note that, in his short story “A Tidewater Morning,” which he wrote soon after being released from Yale-New Haven Hospital in early 1986, Styron uses out-of-body language to describe the death of his mother. He was thirteen when she died. He wrote, “We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable. . . I let myself be elevated slowly up and up through the room’s hot, dense shadows. And there… I was able to gaze down impassively on the grieving father and the boy pinioned in his arms.” Studies suggest that such dissociative reactions to trauma—as opposed to one being able to physically fight or flee a given threat—are most likely to later result in mental health issues, including PTSD and depression. Maybe the people who have that feeling of a second self watching them while majorly depressed have been that separate self in the past, when the root cause of their depression was still happening in real time.
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Another commonality among many depression sufferers that Styron addresses in Darkness Visible is the experience of hypochondria. He says that as far back as the 17th century, connections between hypochondria and melancholia have been made, and that even the words themselves were used interchangeably until the 19th century “by writers as various as Sir Walter Scott and the Brontës.” He theorizes that hypochondria is a defense mechanism of the psyche. By focusing on potential malfunctions within the body, it pushes away the possibility that it—the mind itself—is “going haywire.” A belief underlying this train of subconscious thought is that the body is easier to “fix” than the mind, which might very well be true if they were actually separate entities. Out-of-body and near-death experiences aside, the mind and body are interconnected parts of the same system or vehicle of consciousness. And maybe hypochondria could be seen as another iteration of self-hatred, which Styron says is the hallmark of depression. Constantly fearing illness or being convinced that one is ill implies at least a supreme distrust in one’s own body. And of course the cruel irony is that the more stressed-out we are—about anything, including feared sicknesses—the more susceptible we are to getting sick.
Virginia Woolf serves as a relevant example of how melancholia and hypochondria—or in her case, actual physical illness—can sometimes be the same phenomenon. One in a long list of artist suicides that Styron provides in Darkness Visible, Woolf is best known for her novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. She was also a prolific diarist, and her Writer’s Diary, compiled and published by her husband Leonard not long after her death, is among my top favorites in that genre. On March 28th, 1941, when she was 59, Woolf put a heavy stone in her coat pocket and walked into the River Ouse in Sussex, England. Her body was found downstream three weeks later. She had suffered from mental illness—what we’d now diagnose as bipolar disorder—since her mother’s death when Woolf was thirteen, which she described as “the greatest disaster that could happen.” Woolf shares this tragedy with Styron, whose mother, as I just mentioned, died when he was thirteen. Subsequent family deaths and the stress she endured in the writing and publishing of each novel or other book all contributed to Woolf’s recurrent bouts of depression, but her biographer, Hermione Lee, contends that the treatment of her illness probably exacerbated her symptoms, which affected her body as much as her mind. For this reason Woolf spent a good deal of time wondering about the connection between the two, and if it was possible to separate them. Debilitating headaches always signaled the onset of illness or exhaustion; her heart rate and temperature would also increase, sometimes remaining high for weeks.
Woolf’s psychiatric doctor, George Savage, believed her illness was hereditary (more on the genetic aspects of depression later) and prescribed the then-popular and respected “cure” that combined entire rest with excessive feeding. She was made to drink an absurd amount of milk as part of this cure, and prevented from doing her favorite things: reading, writing, and walking. In other instances she was given drugs whose neuropsychiatric effects could, in certain conditions, cause impaired judgment, violent rage, and even all-out delirium. Others, in large doses, could cause skin rashes and a deadening effect on the personality. In her 1928 diary (when she was 46) Woolf wrote, “Never was anyone so tossed up & down by the body as I am…Such ‘sensations’ spread over my spine & head directly I give them the chance; such an exaggerated tiredness; such anguishes and despairs..” In an earlier entry, from 1926, titled State of Mind, she wrote, “Oh its beginning its coming—the horror—physically like a painful wave about the heart—tossing me up. I’m unhappy unhappy! Down—God, I wish I were dead…But why am I feeling this?…Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I’ve only a few years to live I hope. I can’t face this horror anymore—(this is the wave spreading out over me).” All her talk of waves swelling and crashing brings to mind Styron’s wish that the word “brainstorm” weren’t already taken and could replace the word “depression.”
In her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee says that we can never be sure what caused the writer’s mental illness. “We can only look at what it did to her,” Lee asserts, “and what she did with it.” This reminds me of what May Sarton says about her own depression in Journal of a Solitude, which I talked about a few weeks ago. She basically says it’s far more interesting how one responds to it than why one has it. I can see where both Lee and Sarton and coming from. And also: I think our ways of responding to depression are greatly influenced by how much we know about its origins. And maybe we can never really know the whole story. But it seems like it’s at least worth contemplating a little.
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Writing 32 years ago, Styron asserts what was then accepted as truth but was nonetheless just a theory: that depression is “chemically induced amid the neurotransmitters of the brain, probably as the result of systemic stress, which for unknown reasons causes a depletion of the chemicals norepinephrine and serotonin, and the increase of a hormone, cortisol.” Today, however, the overwhelming consensus in psychiatric medicine is that there’s little evidence to confirm that an imbalance in brain chemicals is the cause of any mental health condition. There are no reliable tests to determine if such a chemical imbalance exists. The effectiveness of anti-depressant drugs have understandably convinced many people that chemicals are the root cause of depression. And while these medications can—in about 50% of the population—help improve a person’s symptoms, this doesn’t mean that the symptoms necessarily come from a chemical deficiency. In one physician-approved article, I read that “there are likely millions of chemical reactions occurring in the brain. The amount of reactions occurring at any one time makes it impossible to determine if someone is experiencing a singular chemical imbalance.” And also, for all we know, depression could be causing the chemical imbalances, rather than the other way around.
For about the past 30 years—so, right around or soon after the time that Darkness Visible was published—academic psychiatry has been advocating for a bio-psycho-social model of mental illness, which does consider the role of brain chemistry, but also of genetics, personality, trauma, and environmental factors. Recent studies suggest that inflammation is also likely a contributing factor. The rapid antidepressant effect of ketamine has raised the possibility that the NMDA receptor, and possibly, the body’s opioid system, are involved in the biology of depression, too. Early life stress, like various types of child abuse and neglect, has been shown to have a detrimental effect on brain structure, which increases the risk of an unfavorable disease course in major depression.
Earlier I mentioned that both Virginia Woolf and William Styron lost their mothers when they were 13 years old. In exploring the possible causes of his own extreme depressive episode, Styron says he is convinced that this dramatic loss was a primary contributing factor—both the loss itself and the tender age at which he experienced it (talk about brain chemicals being imbalanced! Hello, puberty!), and the “incomplete mourning” that followed. He doesn’t provide any details as to what prevented him from achieving “the catharsis of grief,” but I’d wager that such incomplete mourning is probably more common that its more complete counterpart—and was even more so the case in 1938, when Styron was thirteen. And the fact that he was male no doubt came with some cultural expectations around how much sadness he was allowed to express, and in what way. As for Virginia Woolf, she was thirteen in 1895, when our knowledge of human psychology and emotions was even more limited—and she was British, which is a country and culture known for its repressive, suppressive tendencies where feelings are concerned. Without being given adequate opportunity to process their grief, Woolf and Styron, to use the latter’s words, “carried within [themselves] through later years an insufferable burden of which rage and guilt, and not only dammed-up sorrow, [were] a part, and [became] the potential seeds of, self-destruction.”
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In his highly acclaimed 2015 book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, noted psychotherapist Francis Weller talks a lot about the role that grief plays in depression. He asserts that what we often diagnose as depression is actually “low-grade chronic grief, locked into the psyche, complete with the ancillary ingredients of shame and despair.” He delineates what he calls the “five gates of grief,” with the first gate referring to the sorrow we experience upon losing a loved one. But the remaining four gates encompass different types of loss, which often occur outside of our awareness, as we have been conditioned not to notice them or pay them much mind. The second gate is what Weller calls The Places That Have Not Known Love. If you listened to my episode on Internal Family Systems Therapy, you might recall the notion that all of us have exiled “parts” within us, subpersonalities largely made of emotions that we have, for various reasons, and usually without knowing it, banished to the darkest corners of our psyches. When they do emerge, they are never greeted with kindness or compassion. Weller says that “these neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair.” Styron describes depression as “the despair beyond despair.” Weller asserts that we experience it as loss, whatever we perceive as defective about ourselves. He talks about developmental trauma, which he prefers to call “slow trauma,” often being the cause of such loss. This is a trauma that occurs when something important—like consistent nurturing—is absent in our lives, rather than from something dramatic happening to us. Of course some people experience the drama and the absence.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. But we—at least we here in the U.S.—have lost that village. As Weller says, “We needed to have many hands holding us and offering us the attention that one beleaguered human being could not possibly offer consistently. It is our deep grief that the village didn’t appear.” With this idea in mind, it makes sense that many people—Styron included—require hospitalization in order to conquer depression. In that setting, they finally get their village, whose sole job it is to help them get better.
I’d say another “place that has not known love,” for many if not most people, is our own bodies. We tend relate to our bodies as machines, used to accomplish tasks and needful of fuel. We are not taught to relate to our bodies with reverence, to connect to ourselves on a sensation level. Even when we exercise, many of us are simply making our bodies do certain movements, so that our bodies can be in “better shape.” Exercise is a means to an end, another chore we must check off the list so we can feel like we’re being good. A couple weeks before drowning herself in the River Ouse, Virginia Woolf told a friend that she had “never had any enjoyment of [her] body.” What a tragedy. And no wonder she was sick.
The third gate of grief that Weller delineates is “the sorrows of the world,” and it’s pretty self-explanatory. So much suffering happens everywhere, every day, that we are largely powerless to stop, let alone slightly ameliorate. War (I’m writing this on day 4 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), homelessness, habitat destruction, species extinction, human trafficking, starving children… The list goes on. Weller references the alchemical observation that “the greater part of the soul lies outside the body” (again I’m reminded of the woman observing her own brain surgery from the ceiling of the O.R.), and this notion suggests that when the planet is harmed—including the humans and other creatures inhabiting it—we are harmed. We might not be consciously aware of it, but Weller posits that we feel the pain of polluted rivers, of clear-cut forests and the like. He suggests that the anima mundi, or soul of the world, weeps through us. Our culture-wide loss of connection to nature is another facet of the third gate of grief. Weller references human biologist Paul Shepherd, who says that the sense of loss we often interpret as some fundamental flaw in our personality, “is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.” It’s just such encounters that the natural world offers us. But we too rarely take advantage of those offerings. As eco-philosopher Richard Louv says, most of us are suffering from “nature deficit disorder.”
The fourth gate of grief strikes me as having a lot of overlap with the second. It’s called What We Expected and Did Not Receive, and it includes the aforementioned “village” we never got, as well feeling like we belong—to a place, to a family, a group of friends, a tribe—and a sense of purpose in life. Weller says that all humans, on some level, know in their bones that they have something invaluable to offer, something that no one else can offer, but in order for our unique gift to emerge, we have to “be ourselves fully…Gifts are a consequence of authenticity.” But we are not given the time, space, respect, trust, and love required to fully be ourselves. Weller describes our state as one of “spiritual unemployment.” We want to feel needed in the world and by the world, and for the most part we don’t, inasmuch as what we find ourselves offering is not at all spiritually fulfilling. It is something anyone else could offer. The opposite of what Edward Espe Brown means when he says, “No one can take your place.” And so we feel a persistent grief. Evoking more elements of Internal Family Systems Therapy, Weller quotes one of his favorite contemporary writers, Michael Ventura, who says that life is a question of which parts of ourselves are dominant. “I think most people,” Ventura writes, “walk around possessed by the dullest parts of themselves; this, the worst state of possession, is called ‘normal.’” From this viewpoint, it’s no wonder we get depressed. It’s actually a wonder—a testament to the human spirit, to the life drive, to Eros—that more people aren’t full-on suicidal.
Finally, the fifth gate of grief is called Ancestral Grief. I’d say this overlaps with what we call the genetic roots of depression. Researchers and other experts seem to agree that there is a genetic component to the disorder. There is not, however, a gene for the disorder. So what, then, do we mean by “genetic”? Maybe it’s essentially what Weller says: “This is the grief we carry in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our ancestors.” And also, it just makes sense that if a child’s parent or caretaker suffers from mental illness—as was the case with Styron’s father—and I gather with Woolf’s, too—then that child is more likely to have similar struggles, not because of any gene, but because a child’s brain is affected by the brains of its parents, mostly by way of how that child observes its parents behaving, and the instinctive, nervous system response they have to that behavior. If a parent behaves in ways that cause the child stress, for instance, the aforementioned hormone cortisol will flood the nervous system. If that happens repeatedly enough, the system suffers. To quote Styron, “With all of this upheaval in the brain tissues, the alternate drenching and deprivation, it is no wonder that the mind begins to feel aggrieved, stricken, and the muddied thought processes register the distress of the organ in convulsion.”
Studies in parent-child attachment patterns have shown that if a parent was securely attached to their parent, chances are their child will be securely attached to them. The correlation remains if the parent had an avoidant, anxious, or disorganized attachment to their parent. So you see how it travels down the generations. It’s nobody’s fault, of course. And with more knowledge of how the human psych functions, and more awareness of the roles we might be playing in perpetuating generational patterns, we can change those patterns. Ancestral grief also refers to that which “remains in our collective soul for the abuses of millions of individuals.” The slavery and genocide, for instance, on which this country was built. The death and suffering caused by our atomic bomb. In this way the fifth gate is a retrospective version of the third (the sorrows of the world). Ungodly pains have been inflicted on the humans who came before us, the humans of whom we are a result——“You are the result of the love of thousands,” to quote Native American poet Linda Hogan—and it’s important to consider their pain, I think, and how we have inherited it, and how we’d like to treat it.
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Speaking of treatment, in Darkness Visible Styron provides another aspect of his depression story that is similar to Virginia Woolf’s. In her biography of Woolf, as I said earlier, Hermione Lee suggests that the drugs she was being prescribed were likely exacerbating, if not outright creating, the symptoms Woolf experienced. For Styron, this drug was Halcion, generically named triazolam, which he took for insomnia. Among its myriad side effects are tiredness, confusion, memory impairment, cramps, pain, depression, and visual disturbances. And those are the possible effects of taking a normal amount of Halcion. Styron was taking “three times the normally prescribed hypnotic dose…especially contraindicated for someone [his] age.” He learned this upon being admitted to the hospital because he’d become such a threat to himself. He was taking that obscene amount because he’d previously been told by a “breezy” doctor that he could take as much Ativan as he wanted—also for insomnia—and he assumed he could take Halcion as freely. And apparently his doctor kept filling the prescriptions. Crazy. After stopping Halcion during his 7-week hospital stay, his depression quickly improved. Styron was convinced that the drug was responsible for at least exaggerating the suicidal ideas that had possessed him.
And this would go on to be the case. After enjoying fourteen years without any major depressive episodes, Styron would once again “see a darkness,” and the remaining six years of his life would be a series of hospitalizations and failed attempts at curing him through electroconvulsive therapy and pharmaceuticals—none of which worked, as he was among the “treatment resistant,” and some of which (like Wellbutrin) clearly worsened his condition. Perhaps because his condition was not inherently chemical, but going way back to the traumas of his childhood.
One more contributor to Styron’s 1985 depressive episode bears mentioning: alcohol. The June before the October of his Paris breakdown, he’d quit drinking because alcohol (whiskey was his favorite) had quite suddenly started making him sick—nauseated and woozy with just one sip. What Styron had long abused and also come to see as a friend, “the great ally which for so long had kept my demons at bay,” abandoned him. In its absence, Styron experienced malaise, restlessness, and sudden fits of anxiety—all feelings the alcohol, he now deduced, had been protecting him from. Though a depressant, alcohol had never had a depressive effect on him, but had rather served as more of a tranquilizer, keeping him calm. This suggests that anxiety is a factor in depression, maybe specifically for some a precursor to it. Which makes sense given how trauma—unprocessed trauma, especially—is often a precursor, too.
Which reminds me of another reason for Virginia Woolf’s mental illness worsening: World War II. Lee writes, “From the start of the war she had been strained, apprehensive, depressed, and on edge.” She lived through the Blitz; two of her homes in London were bombed. People in Ukraine are enduring a similar trauma as I write this. The world continues to behave in ways we wish it wouldn’t. If we don’t have a firm sense of what we’re really made of as individuals—which is to say that we are not separate from the misbehaving world—then the world will drive us to despair, if not the despair beyond despair.
Styron ends Darkness Visible on a hopeful note: “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.” But Styron himself had a hard time believing that. According to his son Thomas, when Styron’s depression returned in the year 2000, he wanted the pain to end immediately and opted for aggressive treatments that made him feel worse. He died of pneumonia in November of 2006, at the age of 81.
