globeandmail.com: The shadow of depression

September 16, 2008 at 4:50 AM EDT

It is hard to believe that a highly treatable illness could stop the prodigious voice of the U.S. novelist, short-story writer and essayist David Foster Wallace, just 46 when he took his own life last Friday by hanging himself. His suicide is a reminder of the depredations of mental illness, and in particular of how depression can still be, in spite of medical advances, an overpowering and potentially fatal disease.

His entire career, it seems, was conducted in the shadow of this illness. For 20 years, according to his father, he took medication for depression. A 1996 profile of him in the New York Times Magazine reported that he had tried to commit suicide at least once. Like any good writer he made his illness into material; depression is omnipresent in his 1,079-page tour de force, Infinite Jest.

Mr. Wallace's short story The Depressed Person begins, "The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror." His achievements, in light of his illness, seem all the more remarkable.

While his work was notoriously demanding of readers (it most resembles that of the postmodernist Thomas Pynchon) and not always entertaining or satisfying in the ways many readers have come to expect good fiction to be, there is no denying the originality and scope of his talent.

Mr. Wallace made his mark early, publishing The Broom of the System, his first novel, at age 24, followed by a short-story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, and then at just 34 the colossal Infinite Jest, which helped him earn a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" of $230,000. "Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction," Sven Birkerts wrote in the Atlantic Monthly. "He is carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit in a world gone as flat as a circuit board; he is tailoring that richly comic idiom for its new-millennial uses."

Whether he would have been the same artist without his illness is not known; perhaps he would have produced a whole shelf of 1,000-page novels, or perhaps he would have turned to a less lonely profession. To note that he overcame depression to create works of originality and beauty, and that depression ultimately overcame him, is to stand in awe both at his singular achievements and the remorseless power of the disease.

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NYT: The Urge To End It All

By SCOTT ANDERSON


Is suicide the deadly result of a deep psychological condition — or a fleeting impulse brought on by opportunity?

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Threat Level: Experts Say MySpace Suicide Indictment Sets "Scary" Legal Precedent

Threat Level from Wired.com:

By Kim Zetter May 15, 2008 | 8:39:09 PM

In their eagerness to visit justice on a 49-year-old woman involved in the Megan Meier MySpace suicide tragedy, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are resorting to a novel and dangerous interpretation of a decades-old computer crime law -- potentially making a felon out of anybody who violates the terms of service of any website, experts say.

"This is a novel and extreme reading of what [the law] prohibits,"says Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "To say that you're violating a criminal law by registering to speak under a false name is highly problematic. It's probably an unconstitutional reading of the statute."

Lori Drew, of O'Fallon, Missouri, is charged with one count of conspiracy and three violations of the anti-hacking Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, in a case involving cyberbullying through a fake MySpace profile.

Drew is one of three people who helped set up and maintain a phony MySpace account in 2006 under the identity of a nonexistent 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. The Evans account was used to flirt with and befriend 13-year-old Megan Meier, who'd had a falling-out with Drew's daughter.

The fake "Josh" ultimately turned on Meier and told the girl that the world would be a better place without her. Meier already suffered from clinical depression, and shortly after that final message she hung herself in her bedroom.

A nationwide community backlash ensued, after a news story published last year revealed Drew's role in the cyberbullying, and pressure was placed on Missouri authorities to charge Drew with a crime. But after investigating the incident, local prosecutors concluded last December that they could find no law under which to charge Drew.

That's when federal prosecutors began working to build a case -- a difficult task, given that there is no federal law against cyberbullying. On Thursday, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles unveiled its solution by charging Drew with "unauthorized access" to MySpace's computers, for allegedly violating the site's terms of service.

MySpace's user agreement requires registrants, among other things, to provide factual information about themselves and to refrain from soliciting personal information from minors or using information obtained from MySpace services to harass or harm other people. By allegedly violating that click-to-agree contract, Drew committed the same crime as any hacker.

That sets a potentially troubling precedent, given that terms-of-service agreements sometimes contain onerous provisions, and are rarely read by users.

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Beyond Blue: J.K. Rowling's Suicidal Days

(I am so grateful to Therese Borchard for being the lone voice to say what I think. Knowing that I'm expected to live for my daughter and feeling, because it's not enough for me, she probably would be better off without me ...)

While I know that severe major depression and cycles of depression with bipolar disorder can be triggered by life events, they don't make the depression. Depression, as I have said 100 times on Beyond Blue, is a brain disease, just like cancer or diabetes or arthritis. It is not caused by a divorce, or a bad breakup, or a job failure, just like a person doesn't become diabetic when her husband is caught having an affair (unless she stuffs her face with Ben and Jerry's to cope, that is). Even if those things precede a severe episode.

"The thing that made me go for help was probably my daughter," said Rowling, referring to the then-infant, Jessica, reports the Telegraph. "She was something that earthed me, grounded me, and I thought, this isn't right, this can't be right, she cannot grow up with me in this state.”

While I appreciate her point here, it once again deceives the masses on the complicated and disabling bio-chemistry, on the neurological shut down, that happens inside the brain of a person with a serious mood disorder.

Despite Rowling's suicidal thoughts, it's possible that her depression wasn't that severe. Because when a person wants to die as much as I wanted to die, no one thing is enough to save her. While I knew that I had to hang on for my kids, I also wanted to disappear for my kids. My self-esteem was so low that I wanted to get out of the picture so that they had a shot at a normal life without the baggage of a whackjob mom.

My God, think if everyone just had to think of their kids to save their lives! There would be so many less suicides. I truly wish that was all you needed to think about. But I know that this disease is so powerful and manipulative, that it finds a way to persuade you to end it FOR THE GOOD of your kids.

I applaud Rowling for speaking publicly about her darker days, for saying this: "I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never. I think I'm abnormally shameless on that account because what's to be ashamed of?"

I congratulate her on telling anyone who suffers from depression to "go and get help." But I warn people of the shallowness in this one profile: that falling down with a breakup and picking yourself up for the kids can itself send a superficial impression of what, exactly, this brain disease is capable of.

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