Darkness Invisible

Here is the question lurking behind the recent news of Owen Wilson’s suicide bid: In a culture that encourages outing everything from incest to pedophilia, is depression the last stigma, the one remaining subject that dares not gossip its name? Does a disclosure about depression, especially from someone who seems to have it all, violate an unspoken code of silence — or, at the least, make us radically uncomfortable with its suggestion of a blithe public face masking a troubled inner life?

Most of us have experienced the everyday, transient blues — the emotions nibbling around the edges of depression (whether they manifest themselves as a sense of malaise, dejection or comic-tinged despair) that can be brought on by a shift in the weather or an unfortunate event. They may be chronic yet benign, the sort of moroseness that causes the narrator of Camus’s “Stranger” to stand around listlessly puffing on a cigarette. Sadness is probably more endemic to the human subtext than sanguine spirits, which is why funereal songs like Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” strike a universal chord and why Freud conjectured that “ordinary unhappiness” (as opposed to what he called “hysterical misery”) was the best the talking cure could hope to achieve.

READ MORE @ NY TIMES