My review of Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, by William Styron

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a long essay, sold as a book, describing his experiences with depression. Styron's style and storytelling make this painful subject an engaging read. The telling is the right size; he leaves nothing out and his stories are on point. His creativity is not blanketed and stilled in this essay, written after surviving a black period. He is honest and open, describing how the illness developed, what it ia like to be in the grips of depression - or melancholia as he sometimes refers to it - as a mental illness. He makes it clear that what he, and many others experience is in fact a change in the body / mind, and not just sad feelings, or "the blues", and he tries to put into words what a brain inside a storm of activity that is destructive to its own feedback and self-consciousness feels like. I think the real value in this book is the way he's able to put his experiences into words, and to recognize the signs of depression in others, relate it to his own and try to verbalize their experiences. Suicide is a necessary associate in this story, it is obvious that this unrelenting storm of confusion and misery can settle in and exist for years, and that the loss of hope and the need for a way out causes many to take this exit. Styron describes some of the types of depression; manic, unipolar, and he's also forthright about the causes. Having read the DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association - he speaks with a very solid grasp of our current medical understanding of the disease, and he is candid about his triggers; entering the later years of his life, having quit an alcoholic pattern cold-turkey, relying on fairly massive doses of a kind of sleeping pill later shown to be a trigger for depression, and having experienced a parent's - his mother's - death at an early age. He also talks about his experience with doctors, psychiatrists and a mental health hospital. It's very clear that he put himself in the hands of professionals, and trusted in them, while being very self-aware and himself well-read on medical technology. He describes how he felt led astray, but then finds the right path after spending a period contemplating his own suicide. It becomes clear (spoiler) that getting off of those specific sleeping pills was the inflection point, as well as entering a hospital that put him in an entirely other environment, where his convalescence and healing are explicitly the top priority.

My take; consciousness makes possible self-consciousness. We are not a finished product, but an organism on a point of evolutionary continuum. Self-consciousness has flaws. A person's own brain can become caught, entrapped and lost in a storm of thoughts and feelings all trending toward destruction, with no hope of a rational version of themselves coming to the rescue. Only other people with a clear intent to help, and explicit communication about the real danger felt by the sufferer make help possible. Many survive depression, and most have experienced it. A lot of this essay rang bells, for me. I found myself thinking "If only he rode a bicycle, or got more exercise, or got out in nature more." I have my own way of putting my brain right. Honest and forthright read.

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