David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46 (he hanged himself):

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn't discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst...

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor's suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

"He was being very heavily medicated," he said. "He'd been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn't stand it anymore."

Excerpt from Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's big novel:

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

How many people do I know on anti-depressants right now? How many times do I wonder about my own mental health? I think of depression as a nuisance, a frustration. But then I remember: it is a killer. My uncle, my friends, many authors and musicians I admire, they all jumped out of that burning building.

I realised yesterday that depression works much like HIV. HIV attacks your immune system, your body's mechanism of defending itself. Depression attacks your will to defend yourself. Eventually it's a small thing that gets you, whether it's the pneumonia that you can't quite fight off, or that quiet thought that becomes deafening.

And here's how electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) feels for some people:


DFW memoriam thread at MetaFilter

Labels: depression, dfw, suicide