[I wasn’t going to review this book as it’s more of an essay,
but with the recent suicides of retired football player Junior Seau and The
Killers saxophone player Thomas Marth, it’s feels timely.]
“[I]n the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive,
and so we do – by the skin of our teeth.”
Depression is a very lonely, isolating affliction. It’s a
difficult thing to share even with someone else that is going through it. Visible Darkness is like a dispatch from
someone who is stranded in that desert, a message in a bottle from a ship
adrift in that dark and stormy sea. And it’s wonderful.
This book is an expanded essay that appeared in Vanity Fair. It describes in detail what
the landscape and journey of depression looks like from the point of view of
someone who has been severely depressed and a little bit of how those who have
never been afflicted react to those that have.
There are great anecdotes that show the level of confusion
that depression creates, which is something I’ve never encountered in any other
treatise on depression. Non-sufferers have no idea that there is so much
forgetting. One’s short term memory is absolutely shot. Sometimes you have to
physically strain to remember something important you did or said just hours
before. There’s also confusion in miscalculating socially appropriate responses
– how you should conduct yourself and the expectation of others, which can lead
to appalling, though not maliciously intended, behavior.
Styron also describes the pain that is depression. He quotes
William James: “It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical
neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.” (The
Varieties of Religious Experience) He also describes how his depression
would put him into a “trance . . a
condition of helpless stupor in which cognition was replaced by that ‘positive
and active anguish.’” There is not only mental anguish, but actual physical
pain as well. Beyond the chemical imbalance in the brain, the body undergoes an
assault.
He also discusses the indifference expressed by those who
have never been depressed towards those who have. He almost begs for some
understanding or at least a lack of judgment of those that commit suicide,
because “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. . . 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.”
Depression can be like being weightless in a fog where one’s
sound doesn’t even carry. Or like being trapped under a boulder without any
hope of rescue. Or in a rioting prison, being jostled around with a knife to
your throat. Whatever form it takes, it’s real. If you know someone who’s going
through it, try to understand that there exists a horror YOU can’t see or hear
or feel, even though it’s in the room with you and inhabiting someone you love.
This is a must read for anyone who has suffered through
depression and for anyone who knows someone who has done so. Though it’s a book
about depression, it’s not a downer. There are even some cheeky bits that made
me giggle, but it’s not flippant. Just
read it. It’ll take you only an hour or so.
[Here’s a quote from the book for my friends EZGZ, The Gos,
and Tiny: “One develops fierce attachments. Ludicrous things – my reading
glasses, a handkerchief, a certain writing instrument – became the objects of
my demented possessiveness.”]
