William Styron

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from a successful writer to a man arranging his own destruction. He lived to give us this gripping description of his descent into mental anguish, and his eventual success in overcoming a little-understood yet very common condition.The unabridged text of Darkness Visibleby William StyronVINTAGE MINIS- GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series-Swimming by Roger DeakinBabiesby Anne EnrightCalm by Tim ParksWork by Joseph Heller

Depression

Louisa

Read this for the second time and realised I had judged it quite poorly the first. It's interesting, well-written, holistic in its approach, and very very important because it makes some key yet generally unacknowledged points about depression that can also apply to mental illnesses in general. Apart from putting the reader in his shoes (William Styron was very severely depressed for a period of his later life), he highlights that depression is difficult to cure because of the idiosyncratic nature of the disease, and because the brain is still largely a mystery to science. Also, mental illnesses are *illnesses* even though they are often treated as behavioural choices of patients unwilling to make the extra effort at life. Though gloomy at times, it ends on a very optimistic note. Highly recommended!

Depression

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