A Lesson from DFW's Depression
Thumb Wrestling in Baltimore and Fek and Shorter Excerpts noted a Salon article on David Foster Wallace’s final months, which is indeed quite sad, particularly in the resemblance of the desperate efforts he and doctors made at restoring his mind after he plunged into depression to certain passages from his works.
I wanted to note something, though: it has now been mentioned several times that Wallace was able to write and live for two decades due to his medication, and that only going off of it (due to increasing side-effects)* led to his despair’s return.
I cannot count how many sensitive or artistic young people have resisted diagnosis of mental illness or a prescribed psychopharmacological regimen out of concern for the authenticity of their “identity” and the health of their creativity. It is a persistent concern for many that taking pills will kill their inner-artist or amputate their personality from their mind.
I hope that Wallace’s tremendous success as an author and thinker is an antidote to that fear, and that anyone struggling with the decision to take medicine recognizes that, very simply, doing so can make livable a life otherwise doomed. The right medicines don’t partialize you; they allow you to be whole.
*This sudden cessation of a medicine’s efficacy, or the arrival of previously nonexistent side-effects, is a phenomenon that terrifies me; imagine struggling and fighting and then stabilizing for decades, only to have the ground suddenly give way without warning.
Maybe I’m lucky that I never had the drive to create the way many acclaimed artists do; maybe my depression is just too severe. For me it was never a choice whether or not to be treated. Either I take the meds, remain engaged in therapy and other social activities, and remain drug/alcohol-free, or I lay down wherever I happen to be and wait to care enough about something to get up.
