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Styron has already staked his own claim in the literature of depression with his award-winning 1990 work, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, a narrative of his bout with severe clinical depression.
One critic called the work an example of "art refined in the fire of experience: the writing is so pure, one is hardly aware of the ink on the page."
In an address both solemn and uplifting to psychiatrists, Styron recounted the agony of his illness.
Drawing on literary examples from Biblical times to the present, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author suggested that depression--or "melancholia"--might be the literary symbol of every form of human suffering.
"Through literature and art, the theme of depression has run like a durable thread of woe," Styron said, "from Hamlet's soliloquy to the verses of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, from John Donne to Hawthorne and Poe and Virginia Wolfe.
"In science and art, the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of [depression's] meaning, which to those who have known it sometimes represents all the evil in our world. . .irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, the impulse toward death and our flight from it. . . ."
Yet Styron spoke with greatest passion not about depression as literary symbol, but as the real and present scourge that inflicts pain on millions.
"One of the universally unrecognized central facts of depression is its excruciating pain," he said. "The truth is that too many people who have not experienced extreme depression, including professionals, are unaware that its victims are suffering unimaginable psychic anguish."
One of the disease's victims, Styron noted, was White House aide Vincent Foster, whose death by suicide in 1993 made national headlines.
Styron told the audience that a friend of Foster's, aware of the attorney's deepening depression, was on the verge of giving him Styron's book just one week before Foster shot himself in a Virginia park.
"I don't presume to think my book might have alone altered matters," Styron said, ". . .but I cringe when I realize how Clinton's aide might have been rescued had he only been granted the fortunate circumstances that saved me."
Styron added that he believes the suspicion surrounding the circumstances of Foster's death is evidence of a still-widespread ignorance of the nature of depression. In retrospect, he asserted, Foster's suicide appears predestined to anyone familiar with the course of a severe depression.
"The ghost of Vincent Foster continues to haunt us," Styron said. "Since his death there has been mounted a lurid and extensively orchestrated campaign to demonstrate that Foster's death was an act of murder. Even those who hate the Clinton Administration must reject this as a vicious imposture.
"Quite aside from the implausibility of the data intended to prove murder," Styron continued, "one factor has been deliberately overlooked, and that is the inexorable course of Foster's depression.
"His desperate melancholia appears now so predestined for a suicidal outcome that the chance of his life being snuffed out by an assassin's bullet is remote beyond absurdity."
The tragedy is compounded, he added, because Foster could have been spared his fate. Given the names of two Washington-area psychiatrists in the days before his suicide, Foster never contacted them.
"Vincent Foster may have shunned psychiatry because, already demoralized, he felt it would be a final capitulation of his selfhood to lay bare his existential wounding in front of another fallible human being," Styron said.
The author's address concluded with a reminder that depression, for all its torment, can be defeated.
"If depression has no termination, then suicide would indeed be the only remedy," he said. "But one need not sound a false or insincere note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul's annihilation. Men and women who have recovered from the disease--and they are countless--bear witness to what is probably [the disease's] only saving grace, that it is conquerable."
Styron was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Confessions of Nat Turner. In 1980 he received the American Book Award for Sophie's Choice, later made into a popular movie starring Meryl Streep.
Styron was recipient of the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 1993. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Arts and Letters, and he is an honorary consultant for the Library of Congress.
(Psychiatric News, June 20, 1997)