Exploiting Styron’s Ghost

“I’ve been through a lot, good and bad, I’ve seen governments rise and fall and scientific theories rise and fall, and I think there’s a breadth of mind which, provided the brain is healthy, comes with age.” —Oliver Sacks

Eli Lilly got FDA approval to market Prozac in December 1987. The company had a brilliant strategy for making it a blockbuster: promote not the drug so much as the disorder, “Clinical Depression” —a supposedly widespread “mental illness” that, by the way, Lilly’s new “Selective Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitor” could supposedly treat.

Lilly’s peer-reviewed publicists made many false claims. A major theme was that millions of Americans were being kept from getting a Depression diagnosis (and proper medication) by baseless shame. ‘Overcome your shame’ worked as a sales pitch then and it’s working still —witness the publication in the NY Times August 5 of “The Great God of Depression,” an article about the novelist William Styron by a woman named Pagan Kennedy. It begins:

Nearly 30 years ago, the author William Styron outed himself in these pages as mentally ill. “My days were pervaded by a gray drizzle of unrelenting horror,” he wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article, describing the deep depression that had landed him in the psych ward… why, he asked, were depressed people treated as pariahs? A confession of mental illness might not seem like a big deal now, but it was back then.

Not true. Discussion of melancholy has always been acceptable among those who could afford to discuss it. The reason millions of US Americans didn’t make “a confession of mental illness” until Prozac came along is that they didn’t define their unhappiness as mental illness.

In the 1990s I reported on the marketing of Clinical Depression for the Anderson Valley Advertiser, and with Alexander Cockburn, wrote a comprehensive piece on the subject  that was rejected by the LA Times.  Based on 100 phone interviews (in response to a classified ad in the San Francisco Bay Guardian), we concluded that “Clinical Depression is invariably a function of loneliness and/or insecurity —plain words that suggest social rather than chemical causation.”

We noted that William Styron and Mike Wallace filled an important niche in Lilly’s marketing campaign, being prime examples of men who were famous, respected, well-to-do… and yet prone to Clinical Depression! Both Styron and Wallace suffered from loneliness, broadly defined. Styron’s beloved mother died when he was 13 after a many-years-long ordeal with cancer. Boys who watch their mothers suffer and then lose them can feel the loss forever. That’s not a medical disorder, it’s grief that can never be resolved. Mike Wallace’s handsome, talented son Peter died at age 19 in a mountain-climbing accident. Was the father’s enduring grief an illness?

Psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health explained in a phone interview that an episode of major depression is one of “relentless duration —week after week. You can have a grief reaction that can be every bit as intense as a clinical depression. But it doesn’t last. Depressions stick around…” A key to defining depression, Goodwin reiterated, was “duration, measured in weeks and months rather than days.”

Cockburn and I wrote: “Weeks and months? Is that ‘relentless duration?’ We don’t know about you and your friends and patients in Washington D.C., doctor, but in our circles grief reactions last for years, decades, lifetimes, generations!”

Reading “Darkness Visible” years ago I was very surprised to learn that William Styron didn’t see himself as a man who had been affected by fear and sadness. His first novel, “Lie Down in Darkness,” is excruciating. His best-seller, “Sophie’s Choice,” was grim, to put it mildly. My favorite, “Set This House on Fire,” is his lightest —but it’s pretty heavy.  “Darkness Visible” is s stylishly written memoir, not dark in tone until page 83 when Styron describes the death of his mother and his unresolvable loss, grief, and rage get expressed. Who told him that how he felt was “mental illness.”

I met Styron and his wife Rose in the 1960s through their Martha’s Vineyard neighbor, Lillian Hellman. I was interviewing Hellman for a possible book. I remember Styron being devastated when “The Confessions of Nat Turner” got dissed by Black intellectuals. The admiration of classy friends was no consolation. I stopped visiting Hellman in ’71, she died in ’84, and I don’t know to whom Styron turned as sadness overcame him in life.  He needed honest feedback from a sensible friend; instead he got treatment from a “brain scientist.” Pagan Kennedy writess:

This past year, I have been working on an audio documentary about Mr. Styron and Dr. Flaherty (a longtime friend of mine).

Pagan Kennedy (@Pagankennedy) is the co-producer of “The Great God of Depression,” a serial podcast from PRX’s Radiotopia; the author of “Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World”; and a contributing opinion writer.

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