Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

One afternoon of my sophomore year in college my bicycle was stolen. For reasons I no longer can reconstruct, I decided not to buy another used bike, but henceforth to hitchhike to class. I met many interesting people this way: Professors, sex therapists, construction workers, mothers who wanted to recruit boyfriends for their daughters and the like. My goal for these trips to and fro campus was to strike up a conversation with every single person I met. Would I be able to get everyone to tell me a bit of his or her personal story? I did, indeed, manage to strike a conversation with all my lifters except for a man who I came to refer as the unhappiest person in the world. My efforts to get him to talk went nowhere. When I recounted this peculiar hitchhiking experience to a physicist turned psychotherapist, who gave me a lift a few days later, he explained that the man was probably clinically depressed.

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He suggested that I read a book by a gifted writer who beautifully described what goes in the mind of a clinically depressed person.
Many years later I may have finally stumbled upon this book when I picked up a copy of William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. His short autobiographical account of severe depression has changed my attitude towards the unfortunate people who suffer these dark moods. Nobody enjoys hanging out with depressed people. But after reading Darkess Visible it is clear to me that those of us who have never experienced severe depression cannot fathom the storm that rages in the mind of such a person. Feeling burdened by the presence of people with dark moods, we are prone to utter lines such as, “Come on, just try pull yourself together.” Byron makes clear that such advice fails to grasp that a clinically depressed person has no way of just pulling him or herself together. They simply want to die.

Postscript 11/2/2006 Obituary of Styron