Darkness Visible - William Styron's Memoir of Madness

During my visit to California earlier this month, my friend Ardith gave me this book Darkness Visible published by William Styron in 1990, in which he recounts his personal struggle with his most serious bout of the mental illness known as depression which took him to the brink of suicide in 1985.  I am grateful to Ardith for this gift and to William Styron (born in Newport News, VA in 1925), who found words I could not find to convey the tortuous progression of the disease which I now realize I have lived with most of my life since my teen years. Styron's mother died from breast cancer in 1939 when Styron was a young teen, and his father, a shipyard engineer, suffered from clinical depression.  He explains how these two events in his young life contributed to his depression. 

I have extracted several passages from his Memoir which helped me to understand my own bouts of depression, especially the most severe ones that caused me to be hospitalized in 1973 and again in 2010 when I had to take a 12-week medical leave of absence from work. I have also set down these passages for each of you, my close friends and family, as a way to help you better understand what chronic depression really feels like from one who is experiencing it.  I was diagnosed with last year and will have to live with for it for the rest of my life. "Chronic depression" is different from "clinical depression."  Though chronic depression is always with me, it is not a show stopper as were the two episodes of severe clinical depression I have referred to above.  I also write in case you or someone you know is struggling with this disease.  Encouragement, kindness, compassion and a sense of humor all help.
I am grateful at the time of this writing that I am stable due to the outpouring of the kindness of friends, medical intervention and on-going therapy as well life-style changes I am attempting to implement one at a time and which the "Old Judith" doesn't like one damn bit and in fact fights with "New Judith" who has hope for a better and more satisfying life experience and believes now (as a result of a recently powerful dream) that she has within herself the resources she needs to make those changes possible.  Old Judith would much prefer to continue to sleep on the weekends and let the dishes pile up, the cat box remain unchanged for days on end, and the garbage not set outside at its scheduled pick-up time. She would prefer to stare at the ceiling or watch endless hours of mindless TV.  New Judith has good days and bad. She knows she must do her own personal daily due diligence that includes keeping in touch with her daughter and friends, daily prayer and meditation, proper diet, sufficient rest, and exercise to maintain health so as not to fall victim to relapse.

I have experienced every single symptom that Styron so eloquently describes.  My mornings are the most difficult as I wake up shaking with anxiety.  As the day wears on, I am better and able to concentrate at work, but I move much slower than I used to. I ask each of you for your continued kind and loving support.  I ask that you read these excerpts from Styron. I have purposely chosen not to read his books. I saw the movie, "Sophie's Choice," which troubled me for months.  Although I have been blessed with years of therapy by the best therapists in Richmond -- even 2 years of psychoanalysis in the '70s -- therapy, including group therapy, hasn't made me well.  It has given me insights into my own behavior and attitudes and relationships and helped me see my life's experiences differently and more positively.  I remember my Mother had bouts of depression and I was sexually abused as a child from about age 2 to age 16 when I threatened to run away from home.  I don't know if those early childhood experiences are the root of my depression, but I have integrated those experiences through forgiveness into my life and they are part of who I have become today. I experience periods of great joy and gratitude and happiness as I reflect on the multitude of blessings in my life.

In this Memoir, Styron writes that the word "depression" is a wimp of a word to describe "the howling tempest in the brain" which is what clinical depression resembles and which remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.  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 (even their physicians) 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 to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience." (p. 17)

"'The blues' which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form." (p.7)  Depression can be "as serious a medical affair as diabetes or cancer. The most honest authorities face up squarely to the fact that serious depression is not readily treatable.  Unlike, let us say, diabetes, where immediate measures taken to rearrange the body's adaptation to glucose can dramatically reverse a dangerous process and bring it under control, depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy:   failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the  victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases... There are decent popular works which intelligently point the way toward treatment and cure, demonstrating how certain therapies--psychotherapy or pharmacology, or a combination of these--can indeed restore people to health in all but the most persistent and devastating cases; but the wisest books among them underscore the hard truth that serious depressions do not disappear overnight.  All of this emphasizes an essential though difficult reality:  the disease of depression remains a great mystery... Most people who begin to suffer from the illness are laid low in the morning, with such malefic effect that they are unable to get out of bed. They feel better only as the day wears on." (p. 11)  "Some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks [are] confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory." (p. 14)

"Never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness.  The madness results from an aberrant biochemical process.  It has been established with reasonable certainty...that such madness 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.  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 an organ in convulsion....  With their minds turned agonizingly inward, people with depression are usually dangerous only to themselves.  Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero.  Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained. (p. 47)

"Depression afflicts millions directly, and millions more who are relatives or friends.  It has been estimated that as many as one in ten Americans will suffer from the illness....  It strikes indiscriminately at all ages, races, creeds and classes, though women are at considerably higher risk than men...  Despite depression's eclectic reach, it has been demonstrated with fair convincingness that artistic types (especially poets) are particularly vulnerable to the disorder--which, in its graver, clinical manifestation takes upward of twenty percent of its victims by way of suicide.  Just a few of these fallen artists, all modern, make up a sad but scintillant roll call:  Hart Crane, Vincent van Gogh, Randall Jarrell, Virginia Woolf, Arshile Gorky, Vachel Lindsay, Sylvia Plath, Mark Rothko, John Berryman, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, William Inge, Paul Selan, Anne Sexton--the list goes on.  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." (at p. 35)

Styron describes his depression as a suffocating gloom.  Though he was not alone, his wife "Rose was present and listened with unflagging patience to [his] complaints, [he] felt an immense and aching solitude.  [He] could no longer concentrate during those afternoon hours, which for years had been [his] working time, and the act of writing itself, becoming more and more difficult and exhausting, stalled, then finally ceased.  There were also dreadful, pouncing seizures of anxiety." (p. 45)

"One psychological element that has been established beyond reasonable doubt ... is the concept of loss.  Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression--in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.  At a later date [he] would gradually be persuaded that devastating loss in childhood figured as a probable genesis of [his] own disorder; meanwhile, as [he] monitored [his] retrograde condition, [he] felt loss at every hand.  The loss of self-esteem is a celebrated symptom...along with any self-reliance.  This loss can quickly degenerate into dependence, and from dependence into infantile dread.  One dreads the loss of all things, all people close and dear.  There is an acute fear of abandonment." (at p. 56)

"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.  One develops fierce attachments.  Ludicrous things--[his] reading glasses, a handkerchief, a certain writing instrument--became the objects of [his] demented possessiveness.  Each momentary misplacement filled [him] with a frenzied dismay, each item being the tactile reminder of a world soon to be obliterated." (p. 57)

Styron reached that "phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; his brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.  The mornings themselves were becoming bad now as [he] wandered about lethargic, following [his] synthetic sleep, but afternoons were still the worst, beginning at about three o'clock, when [he'd] feel the horror, like some poisonous fogbank, roll in upon [his] mind, forcing [him] into bed.  There [he] would lie for as long as six hours, stuporous and virtually paralyzed, gazing at the ceiling and waiting for that moment of evening when, mysteriously, the crucifixion would ease up just enough to allow [him] to force down some food and then, like an automaton, seek an hour or two of sleep again." (p. 58)

"There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance.  We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it.  When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature, our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accommodations to the pain's demands--to accept it.  Except in intractable terminal pain, there is almost always some form of relief; we look forward to that alleviation, whether it be through sleep or Tylenol or self-hypnosis or a change of posture or, most often, through the body's capacity for healing itself, and we embrace this eventual respite as the natural reward we receive for having been, temporarily, such good sports and doughty sufferers, such optimistic cheerleaders for life at heart." (at p. 61)

"In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent.  The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come--not in a day, an hour, a month or a minute.  If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow.  It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.  So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying--or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity--but moving from pain to pain.  One doesn't abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.  And this results in a striking experience--one which, borrowing military terminology, is called the situation of the walking wounded.  For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devastation would be lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting.  His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained.  However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations.  There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship.  He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown, and, God help him, even smile." (at p. 62)

The night came when he made the irreversible decision to end his life.  He was watching a film and heard "a sudden soaring passage from the Brahms Alto Rapsody. This sound, which like all music, indeed, like all pleasure--[he] had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced [his] heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection [he] thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds. All this [he] realized was more than [he] could ever abandon, even as what [he] had set out so deliberately to do was more than [he] could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to [him], with whom the memories were bound.  And just as powerfully [he] realized [he] could not commit this desecration on [himself].  [He] drew upon some last gleam of sanity to perceive the terrifying dimensions of the mortal predicament [he] had fallen into.  [He] woke up [his] wife and soon telephone calls were made.  The next day [he] was admitted to the hospital." (p. 64-66)

"Many psychiatrists, who simply do not seem to be able to comprehend the nature and depth of the anguish their patients are undergoing, maintain their stubborn allegiance to pharmaceuticals in the belief that eventually the pills will kick in, the patient will respond, and the somber surroundings of the hospital will be avoided.  Dr. Gold was such a type, it seems clear, but in [his] case [he] was convinced that [he] should have been in the hospital weeks before.  For, in fact, the hospital was [his] salvation, and in this austere place he found the repose, the assuagement of the tempest in [his] brain, that [he] was unable to find in [his] quiet farmhouse." (p. 68) 

"This is partly the result of sequestration, of safety, of being removed to a world in which the urge to pick up a knife and plunge it into one's own breast disappears in the newfound knowledge, quickly apparent even to the depressive's fuzzy brain, that the knife with which he is attempting to cut his dreadful Swiss steak is bendable plastic.  But the hospital also offers the mild, oddly gratifying trauma of sudden stabilization--a transfer out of the too familiar surroundings of home, where all is anxiety and discord, into an orderly and benign detention where one's only duty is to try to get well.  For [him] the real healers were seclusion and time." (p. 69)

Styron remained in the hospital for 7 weeks.  When he was finally released he wrote:  "...Although I was still shaky, I knew I had emerged into light.  I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again.  I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl." (p. 75)

"By far the great majority of the people who go through even the severest depression survive it, and live ever afterward at least as happily as their unafflicted counterparts.  Save for the awfulness of certain memories it leaves, acute depression inflicts few permanent wounds.  There is a Sisyphean torment in the fact that a great number--as many as half--of those who are devastated once will be struck again; depression has the habit of recurrence. But most victims live through even these relapses, often coping better because they have become psychologically tuned by past experience to deal with the ogre.  It is of great importance that those who are suffering a siege, perhaps for the first time, be told--be convinced, rather--that their illness will run its course and that they will pull through....  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.  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.  It may be required on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life's worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense of their own worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides. (p. 75-76) 

"The psychiatric literature on depression is enormous, with theory after theory concerning the disease's etiology proliferating as richly as theories about the death of the dinosaurs or the origin of black holes. The very number of hypotheses is testimony to the malady's all but impenetrable mystery.  As for that initial triggering mechanism--what [Styron] calls the manifest crisis--can [he] be satisfied with the idea that abrupt withdrawal from alcohol started the plunge downward?  What about other possibilities--the dour fact, for instance, that at about the same time [he] was smitten [he] turned sixty, that bulking milestone of mortality?.... These matters interested [him] less than the search for earlier origins of the disease.  What are the forgotten or buried events that suggest an ultimate explanation for the evolution of depression and its later flowering into madness?... After [he] had returned to health and was able to reflect on the past in the light of his ordeal, [he] began to see clearly how depression had clung close to the outer edges of [his] life for many years.  Suicide has been a persistent theme in [his] books--three of [his] major characters killed themselves.  In re-reading, for the first time in years, sequences from his novels--passages where [his] heroines have lurched down pathways toward doom--[he] was stunned to perceive how accurately [he] had created the landscape of depression in the minds of these young women, describing with what could only be instinct, out of a subconscious already roiled by disturbances of mood, the psychic imbalance that led them to destruction.  Thus depression, when it finally came to [him], was in fact no stranger, not even a visitor totally unannounced; it had been tapping at [his] door for decades." (77) 

"The genetic roots of depression seem now to be beyond controversy.  But [he was] persuaded that an even more significant factor was the death of [his] mother when [he] was thirteen; this disorder and early sorrow--the death or disappearance of a parent, especially a mother, before or during puberty--appears repeatedly in the literature on depression as a trauma sometimes likely to create nearly irreparable emotional havoc.  The danger is especially apparent if the young person is affected by what has been termed 'incomplete mourning' -- has, in effect, 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 dammed-up sorrow, are a part, and become the potential seeds of self-destruction." (p. 79) 

"The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless disorder, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:" (p. 82) 

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.

(p. 84-85)  "For 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....  If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; 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....  Whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair upon despair."

"And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars."

[Note about this author in case you want to read any of his works: Styron wrote Lie Down in Darkness (a story of a dysfunctional Virginia family, published in 1951 at age 26), The Long March (a short novel published in 1958), Set This House on Fire (a novel about American expatriates on the Riviera published in 1960), The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967, narrated by Nat Turner, leader of 1831 Virginia slave revolt), Sophie's Choice (1979, told through eyes of young writer from the South, about a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and her troubled Jewish lover in postwar Brooklyn), This Quiet Dust (1982), and A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales of Youth, 1993. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, The American Book Award and several other medals of honor. He graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in English, married a young Baltimore poet, Rose Burgunder, in 1953. He lived in Europe for an extended period and died of pneumonia in 2006 at Martha's Vineyard. He was 81.]

VA Man's Abuse Story Moves Legislators To Act

Posted January 29, 2011
Article written by Dena Potter of the Associated Press

This is an amazing story.  You can Google "Dena Potter" and the title of article and it will pop up for you to read.  It has taken 30 years for the Virginia General Assembly to pass this much needed legislation extending the statute of limitations for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.  It took the unrehearsed testimony of a 67-year-old man to reach their hearts.  (Apparently, rehearsed speeches from alleged victims don't carry much credibility since most legislators are lawyers and lawyers are excellent at "rehearsing" their clients before testifying.)  What is most amazing is how easily their hearts were turned - in an instant - after hearing Wayne Dorough's story.  I hope to find Wayne and to meet him too.  I have found Dena Potter.  She lives right here in Richmond, Virginia and works out of an Associated Press Office on Main Street. 

I gave up on the Virginia General Assembly years ago and never thought I'd live to see the day that victims of sexual abuse would actually be able to file civil suits against their abusers before the statute of limitations expired.  Formerly, victims only had 2 years after they turned 18 and most survivors, including Wayne Dorough, take many years before they are able to press charges or come to terms with the abuse and heal from the emotional and psychological scars.

I plan at least to write the chief patrons on the bills to thank them for listening to Wayne's story and for enacting this new law.