Darkness Visible - Stryon

 

If you’re normal, or consider yourself normal, would you ever read a book about depression?  If you had, perhaps, a bout with “the blues” maybe following a divorce, loss of a job, or perhaps a death in the family, quite possibly you were down for awhile, and thought you were depressed.  I doubt, even still, you would have warrant to go read a book like, “Darkness Visible”, by William Styron, one of the great American novelists from last century.  Styron wrote this memoir after his own run in with depression after he quit alcohol.  He was in his sixties when he first recognized it’s grip, and it terrified him.  When his pain grew into thoughts so dark his decision to end it all was firm, he sought help, perhaps, as Kay Redfield Jamison, describes, night was indeed falling fast.  He survived, at least until he was 80.  Many, with the pain he describes in this book do not.

So we can establish, that if the pain of depression is as real as Stryon describes, those with depression will resonate with his description of something beyond description, the noise, or the storm in ones mind brings on a suffering so real, pain has been the only way to describe it.  Physical pain, say as a result of nerve damage, so severe as to drive a person to suicide, might be the only way to describe the despair that someone with depression feels when they are at the brink.  Stryon was at the brink.  His explanation is heart wrenching and felt.  But perhaps his greatest contribution, and the one we must heed, comes early in his book.  And it has nothing to do with insight for the depressed, they already know, but it is worth mentioning here for everyone else.  He says, “That the word ‘indescribable’ should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict  for their friends and loved ones...some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but for the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience”.

Society in general does not understand depression.  Styron goes on to paint the actual word depression as too cheap of a word to describe what’s really going on in the minds of the depressed.  Depression, or clinical depression, or severe depression, is not your garden variety rainy days, and Monday’s type of blues.  It is a critical affliction as severe as cancer, because, in some cases, the outcome of the disease is terminal.   Society at large will never read this book.  But, I recommend this book, not to the depressed, but to those caring for anyone who may have this disease.  A sister, a brother, a parent, grandmother, a co-worker, or perhaps someone much closer, a spouse or a child.  Understanding the storm and it’s anguish is the first step in helping with this ancient affliction.  Styron get’s five stars from me for this great work.