Dear Philip,

I think you kind of summed it up in two sentences that I read.

“It's of course inexplicable, the why him and not me…”

And the difference and saving grace for you might simply have been as you stated, "I'll call it psychological stamina."

We’ll never really know about him?

Warmly,
Herb
VNSdepression.com

Philip, I think this exert is key:

"James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

As one who became suicidal thanks to being cold turkeyed off of Prozac and Ritalin, it sounds like he was cold turkeyed off of the meds and then withdrawal wasn't recognized for what it was. I really wish more people would recognize that.

Regarding your other point about resiliency, not to burst your bubble but I never played sports but dealt with this suicidal ideation for 3 years and then the horrific side effects of SSRIS. I actually managed to get through work one day when I was severely agitated from Celexa.

I think I developed my resiliency from my mother. She had dealt with chronic medical condition her whole life and then had to to deal with losing her vision.

I do love your story about coming back to score the winning goal. As a sports fan, I love it.

Me again. My, our exchange yesterday got interesting ("discern and destroy"...moi? little ole me?). Yet compared to so much of psychiatry out there, I am so much on your side.

By all means check out my new blog, arspsychiatrica.blogspot.com. Furious Seasons is among the "neglected margins" of psychiatry that I'm talking about. Heck, it's even on my blogroll--is that masochistic or what?

Anyway, I just thought I'd add that Sylvia Plath of course had ECT as well, although I think hers was a few years before her suicide.

I truly appreciate what you have to say about sports. I think the individualism of this culture has its merits, but it also leaves many people feeling alone and adrift in a sea of other people. They don't belong to anything or to anyone. There is something noble and purposeful about suffering for the good of a group. There is nothing noble or purposeful about simply suffering.

When I read or hear about stories like this I always have to ask what else was going on. The label "depression" is applied to so many things these days it's hard to know what is really going on when someone says that. I have worked with clients who were struggling with a history of severe sexual or physical abuse. They were this suicidal, this profoundly hopeless. It was technically labeled "depression" but the actually problem was their struggle with what had been done to them and how completely it destroyed them. "Depression" does not tell us the private and personal demons with whom Mr. Wallace was struggling, and they sound as if they were profound.

What a great loss.

I think it's important to remember that depression is never the same for any two people. There is always some variation in the the physical, mental and emotional symptoms and the severity of and expression of these symptoms.

Not everyone experiences the absolute and utter sense of hopelessness that I suspect many who kill themselves do.

To 'suck it up' and keep going there has to be at least a tiny glimmer of hope as the motivator to keep going on. Without this there is no reason to 'suck it up' and go on.

It think it unfair to Wallace to see him as having given up. A person without even the faintest glimmer of hope is probably making what seems to be the most rational and logical decision when they decide to end it.

To 'keep going' there must be some motivating force - just a tiny glimmer of hope is enough. When a person experiences absolutely no glimmer of hope whatsoever there is no motivator to drive them to suck it up and keep going.

What stood out to me when considering Hemingway and Wallace is what they had in common beyond depression: ECT. What I saw while a ward clerk in a psych ward in a very upscale suburb of Boston, was the massive damage done to patients' cognitive and verbal abilities by ECT. Universally, those people declined intellectually - permanently.




It seems to me suicide following the realization that although one is no longer depressed, one can no longer think or practice one's craft, parallels opting out of treatment like dialysis or palliative chemo. People regularly determine that suffering through such treatments and the quality of life that those treatments afford is not worth it. Having gone to the extreme of having ECT, perhaps the prospect of stumbling along in a fog, deprived of their talents was just not worth it to Hemingway and Wallace.

As someone who always wanted to be a writer, who admired DFW's work, his death has affected me too as I'm sure it has many people. It seems obvious to me that the problem was the first doctor who told him his brain was defective and that he suffered from a medical disease that would make him incapable of happiness without drugs, much like Pies would tell a young man jilted. When you tell someone their emotions are defective you are harming them, especially if the person is intelligent and, from what I can tell, a man to did his utmost to be decent to others. To tell some one like this that their way of thinking is profoundly wrong and because of the chemical structure of their brain they will never be able to perceive reality accurately is to me murder. Those who are severely unhappy should never be treated so inhumanely.

Depression didn't kill this guy..

ECT, medication and psychiatry did....

I never knew that ECT could cause suicidality. Both my children had ECT due to manic depression depression, severe, not knowing what else to do. The benefit(?) was that it took away their memory (not permanently) and so they forgot they were going to commit suicide. It was always extremely painful to have to resort to this as my father was killed by ECT in the early days.

I'm glad you made it. Sorry Wallace didn't. As to sports, many say that physical exercise beats SSRIs hands down. Maybe we can start a new profession - sports psychiatry.

Philip well said. I have been re- reading his short stories and all I can say is what a loss.

You are right about Hemingway's Garden of Eden, it was unreadable. It made me sad to see the author come to this- it should have never been published.

I loved the glimpse of you in here. The Portrait of the Journalist as a Young Man.

You know Philip, this is a beautiful tribute you have written, it's very moving.

I agree with the sports and how it builds/built psychological stamina. This is how I have endured, as a result of high school sports, and being in 2 that required perseverence. I honestly fall back on the deep concentration I learned then to live my life now, and I feel I have beat the odds quite a bit as a result. Though of course everyone is different.

Thanks for a touching post.

Dear Philip:
So many great minds and talents gone to the afterlife; and we are only left with so many unanswered questions and unfulfilled reasoning. Why? What could have prevented it? How much suffering can be endured?
Your Hockey analogy was spot on and touching. My Brother played semi-pro defenseman before cancer took him away to the afterlife. There are never any really good answers when you’re referring to suicide; it's just a reality we all grapple with in this journey through life. As sad as the end and event may be; we the breathing go on in spite of each loss. These are the types of stories that constantly remind us how fragile and precious life really is. Unfortunately this is the true story of both life and death. We can only honor the dead in heartfelt thoughts, remembrance, and kind words as the sun dips below the horizon to say farewell to another day. Yet with each fresh day the sun light and warmth once again raises up and with it a new beginning, so many unknowns and opportunities laid before each of us, yet sometimes a shocking unjust end is ponderously thrown into the mix like being gooned by destiny itself.

Yours truly
Stan

I have such a hard time understanding a famous, respected, money-in-the-bank suicide. My bipolar started derailing my career at about 20. I would be in seventh heaven to have written a book people-who-count think is great.

Perhaps it is because my mania is with me than my depression. That's not to say I haven't been depressed almost to suicide. Like many, I don't think I will kill myself because I am a coward when it comes to that.

Anyway, call me shallow, but I don't get it. How could someone with literary acclaim, money and a good job do this? I don't understand life. I'm barely hanging on, suspended at ebay, cannot buy anything but food, my book unpublished. I would love to be in Wallace's situ...minus the depress
ion.

Wow. Hanging yourself. He was at the end of his rope and I don't understand it.

A moving piece, Philip, but you sound a bit cavelier with the psychological stamina bit. Part of the reason there are grades of depression and that some people can't get out of it is they don't have psychological stamina. It's not their fault they didn't play sports or have a good network of friends or a supportive family or a loving relationship that might have helped give them that kind of stamina. As we know, drugs and therapy can play a part, but some cases just can't be cracked. I think suicide is always sad, but I do understand that it is the only answer perceivable to some people. Let's not make them feel guilty for not being able to "suck it up."

This is a moving tribute and like many, it's hard for me to imagine that someone with so much going for him, so much that I have tried to accomplish and failed, would choose death. I am pretty happy regardless. Still I have to think the problem is with the psuedoscientific field of psychiatry which tells people that sucking it up is impossible and trying, a symptom not a courageous effort. Still, I assume the mhp's who "treated" DFW were really trying to help and it sounds like he had a pretty supportive family.

amazing. brilliant. insightful. moving. touching. and most of all, compassionate.

david foster wallace should've sucked it up. absolutely. he needed tough love. and who better to decide what he needed than us, right? right.

but it would make no sense for any of us to suck it up. no, no, no. see, big pharma broke into our homes like a rapist and forced drugs and ect on all of us, and i mean FORCED IT, so it makes NO sense for any of us to suck it up. instead, we're just going to endlessly fucking whine and moan about it in the comments section of a blog. that's empowering, isn't it? don't you feel like a good soldier? we're all just a bit better and stronger because we weren't weak and succumbed to suicide, right?

and dawdy, your sports "analogy" is SO spot on, dude. like, wow. if ONLY he had played some sports. wait. holy crap. um, i just remembered that, like, he *was* a pretty avid tennis player. shit, dude. now what? don't worry--you still look cool and valid w/ your "analogy."

Depression didn't kill this guy..

ECT, medication and psychiatry did....

It may come as some shock to you that long before the existence of ECT, medication and psychiatry, people were killing themselves.

The first time Sylvia Plath tried to kill herself it was out of keen recognition of what her life would be like as an institutionalized mental patient. Her best poetry came in the last year of her life, when she was completely preoccupied with it:

http://www.henkimaa.nu/writings/crit/plath/ressurect.html

Plath's work also touched on circumstances surrounding her suicide attempt, such as the electroconvulsive "therapy" (ECT) -- shock treatments -- she was given both prior to and following her 1953 suicide attempt. As shown in the unsent letter in which Plath explained her motives, her suicide attempt seemed to follow at least in part from the shock treatments, given on an outpatient basis with no muscle relaxants, anesthesia, or followup counseling (Alexander, 120), that had been prescribed for treatment of her depression. The electroshock given to her after her attempt was conducted much more humanely; nonetheless, she remained fearful of electroshock to the end of her life (Stevenson, 294). One of her biographers, Anne Stevenson, writes:

The kinds of psychiatric treatment Sylvia Plath received in the 1950s now seems almost as barbaric as the rituals of eighteenth-century Bedlam. Certainly the experience of shock treatment during her prolonged summer breakdown and again during the purgatory of her "cure" affected Sylvia more deeply than anyone understood at the time. It may be that she never really recovered from it, that it changed her personality permanently, stripping her of a psychological "skin" that she could ill afford to use. Attributable to her ECT is the unseen menace that haunts nearly everything she wrote, her conviction that the world, however benign in appearance, conceals dangerous animosity, directed particularly at herself. (Stevenson, 47)[3]

Discussion of electroshock or electroshock imagery can be found in several of her journal entries, in The Bell Jar, in the short story "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" (1958), and in the poems "Poem for a Birthday" (1959), "The Hanging Man" (1960) and "Elm" (1962). In "Elm," for example, she writes:

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

In "Hanging Man," whose title come from the name of a card in a Tarot deck, she seemed to relate the experience of electroshock to a subsequent suicide attempt:

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid.
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.

. "Edge" is the last poem Plath is known to have written, six days before her death:

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

FP, Elm is a brilliant poem. Wallace is one of the few writers who deserves the honor of having Plath referenced in a thread about his life and death.

Thanks for the Plath.

Here's a bit from Lady Lazarus, at least partly about being an inmate in a psych hospital:

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart---
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

I love you Flawed Plan.
I have been missing your blog tremendously.

Have you ever read Alvarez " The Savage God"? His theory was Sylvia didn't mean to suicide, it was a fatal error by an American who was thinking the gas acted the same way it did in the States. If she had known it was going to be fatal she would not have attempted with her children in the flat.

He believes it was a cry for help, a way to beg Ted Hughes to come back. Strange that two of Hughes wives suicided.

Thank you for the Plath quotes. OT: my favorite is Lady Lazarus, and the one that had a line "love set you going like a fat gold watch".

Take care.

Thanks for the more personal post that shows the man behind the writer, Phillip. :) I take no stance as to what David Wallace might have died of/succumbed to or his strength or life circumstances. I am just one other survivor that chose the non-drug route after experiencing the drug's effects myself and witnessing them in a few that I loved. But I do know that there are times that those drugs can save a life. It's the long-term use that makes me wonder....the denial of "yourself" when you're on them. ECT? Who knows? It's playing with the human brain, in my humble opinion. It's just like in the book, "Opening Skinner's Box". How much is too much and how much do they really know about the brain? And how far are they willing to go? Everyone has their strength for surviving when that darkness sometimes overwhelms and I'm just happy that you had, and still have, yours, as do so many of your readers. We can analyze and analyze from each of our individual standpoints, but all I'd like to add is "Rest in Peace, David Wallace".

It kills me to know that Pdocs still push ECT on people with depression, but they won't consider treating refractory depression with buprenorphine. There are studies that show the promise of long-acting opiate medication in the treatment of treatment-resistant/refractory depression, but our puritanical drug-laws make it almost impossible to get this medication.

Would you ever consider writing about this, Philip?

I would like to comment more substantively about this post when I have a chance but did want to point out that David was a prominent local junior tennis player (according to the article) so he was an athlete as a youngster. I wonder what became of this skill as he got older. Personally tennis has been enormously rewarding to me as a means of learning about myself and others and it's really helped me get through some tough times in my life (along with yoga). I agree with you that sports are a metaphor for life and that engaging in sports is enormously therapeutic and helpful (unless it becomes a burden because of outside pressures). I noticed that Wallace was a tennis player when I read the tribute the first time and wondered if he'd continued to play into adulthood.

Hey Susan, that struck me in The Savage God too. In fact I've read 4 Plath biographies, looking for understanding about her dread of psychiatry and no biographer seems to have understood her poetry on that level. Until now, check it: ECT in the Life and Work of Sylvia Plath:

http://www.rosemarierowley.ie/ect-in-the-life-and-work-of-sylvia-plath

This essay is an effort to come to terms with poetry born of deep trauma. In my view, electric shock therapy (also known as ECT, or electro-convulsive therapy) had a fundamental role in Sylvia Plath’s life as it effected her personally, when such material became not only the theme of her work but its very expression. The truth of what happened to her mind, and her response and attitude showed a phenomenal capacity to confront her total devastation which has only been partly understood. Through this barbaric intrusion into her mind and through the strictures and mesh of great art she forced a universal truth.

George Steiner, in Janet Malcolm’s book, writes of Sylvia Plath’s “total communion with those tortured and massacred”, while Seamus Heaney takes the view in relation to her major poem Daddy that (it) “rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply overdraws its rights to our sympathy”. George Steiner says that Daddy is “one of the few poems in any language to come near the last horror.”

It is my purpose in this essay to argue that Sylvia Plath, in her life events, earned the right to write about suffering, not in a vicarious way as suggested by Heaney, who after all, happily has no knowledge of how such drastic therapies could affect a person, but that her traumas and calamities were so profound, that on the contrary, by identifying them with a history of public oppression, she achieved the integrity and understanding that true suffering brings.

**snip**

In the story told by Janet Macolm, Plath, on the eve of her self destruction – having gone back to live in London and take up a new life – appeared to change her mind without telling anyone her intentions. On the night before she died, she appealed to a neighbour for the loan of a stamp because she was afraid she was going to die, and she insisted on paying for it, as she did not want to confront God with any debts. It is odd that she should show a belief in or fear of God in a relatively trivial matter. Her neighbour describes her as being in a trance, the import of which would have struck a professional. Obviously she had abandoned immediate reality to another plane of consciousness. There was an almost involuntary aspect to her behaviour, that she was being overwhelmed by dark forces – fear of again experiencing ECT. She had vowed she would rather die than have the treatment again. After losing Ted, the father of her children, her whole future was bleak, and no doubt she re-experienced those emotions again when she had lost her father, and she like her mother would have to struggle as a single mother to survive in a post-bomb post-Holocaust alienating world. But it was actually the fear of herself going out of control in dealing with this grief that caused her greatest anxiety.

As Anne Stevenson wrote in Bitter Fame:

In fact, Electro-shock therapy may have substantially contributed to her core logically-arrived-at decision to do away with herself.

Linda Wagner Martin charts this fear in her biography of Sylvia Plath:

What Sylvia feared most was her loss of self. When mad, she explained, no person possesses a self. With her customary thoroughness, Sylvia read widely in sociology and psychology of identity. Whatever was known about the problem in the 1950s, Sylvia researched. One of the results she seldom talked about, however, probably because it was frightening, was the effect shock treatment
had on her long-term memory. When she did talk about it, it was like being in a dream, she never knew whether she was awake or asleep or dreaming. It was as if she lost events, people, years from her life.

Of the last years, Linda Wagner Martin writes:

Sylvia’s fear of electro-shock treatments made her unwilling to be
hospitalized. She had said repeatedly ten years before she would
not go through such treatment again.

**snip**

Perhaps the saddest moment in The Bell Jar is when Sylvia, in the persona of Esther, puts her trust in her therapist, a woman who has already betrayed her trust. Dr Beutscher had ordered electro shock therapy, and she also sought Plath’s compliance in this destructive act. In a dire way it mimics the competition for accomplishment at home. Sylvia wanted to be perfect at everything, even being the perfect patient. She accepted the treatment with the extraordinarily reverberant words “I wonder what it was I had done”

In the extraordinary story Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, written in 1957. Sylvia Plath writes of the treatment and her betrayal by a woman figure:

At the head of the cot is a table on which sits a metal box covered with dials and gauges…

The white cot is ready. With a terrible gentleness Miss Milleravage takes the watch from my wrist, the rings from my fingers, the hairpins from my hair. She begins to undress me. When I am bare, I am anointed on the temples and robed in sheets virginal as the first snow

The Only Thing to love is Fear itself
Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom
The only thing to love is fear itself
May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere

Writing of the ECT as a ritual should not surprise us. It is a ritual, a modern one. The treatment is both profoundly humiliating, and barbaric, twin elements of torture. In a letter to the author of this essay, myself, Ted Hughes described it as an atrocity. He wrote to me that ECT was the crucial event in her writing.

... Sylvia Plath had constant pain in her temples, where she had received the electric shocks.

Hughes’s poem The Tender Place begins:

Your temples, where the hair crowded in,
Were the tender place. Once to check
I dropped a file across the electrodes
Of a twelve-volt battery – it exploded
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed
The thunderbolt into your skull.
In their bleached coats, with blenched faces
They hovered again
To see how you were, in your straps.

Ted Hughes believed ECT was the nerve centre of her poems, the catastrophe which led to the extraordinary last poems. By using the words “your straps” instead of what might be reasonably called “their straps” he emphasizes the innate victim-hood of Plath, how she made even the most alien and inhuman condition her own.

Robin, thanks for the Plath. God how brilliant.

Robin, thank you for the Plath comments.

I just came back from a memorial service for a friend who suicided a week ago.

I am still, raw numb, my body aching from unshed tears and wanting to cry and have not been able to since I heard the news. Could not cry when I saw the family pictures, spoke to the widow and the brother, saw the urn with the ashes.

I have a friend with me now who drove up from DC to attend. She will leave in the morning, but right now she and the cat are snuggling in the bedroom, door shut and I am on the computer, trying to wind down from the day and to sleep.

All I can say is even though my ECT was a huge mistake, and it did horrible damage to me, I am alive. I am breathing, I looked at the full moon tonight, now waning, and I am alive. I AM ALIVE.

In the 23 years since I have been diagnosed, and on meds, and even now with my med cocktail, I have never been so glad to be alive as I am right now.

Oh how I wish people like David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain- my friend Kevin- were still here too. It's a beautiful thing to be alive. Even if your brain isn't working as well as you want.

Email me when you can and let me know how the kitties are faring.

Love,

susan

I'm a little confused. I was scrolling down the comments to the blog and I realized that all I could remember was the E.C.T. and later suicide of Sylvia Plath.

Whilst I do admire and love her poetry, I'm not entirely sure that she is the only example of a life less lived because of psychiactric cock-ups.

Philip writes of psychological stamina.

I've been locked up for a combination of about two and a half years out of the past eight years. During the second or third stay, I was recommended to have ECT. I agreed, despite the pleas of my boyfriend and friends of mine, who'd known me for fifteen years or more.

I've written about the memory loss of the three years surrounding it, which includes 9/11. They kept zapping my brain, even though I kept slicing my wrists. After more than twenty "treatments", I stopped. I don't recall why.

I like the fact that Philip is able to make his way physically, perhaps due to sports. But I was a bike messenger, the second female in Philadelphia, who still needed serious medical help. I've done the Philly to Harrisburg to Washington DC on a mountain bike. But I'm still in need of meds.

If I go off them, at best, I'm suicidal. I have issues with auditory and visual hallucinations anyway. I know that I've seen ghosts and heard from them. I painted a house where I saw a ghost cat, and asked if they'd had a cat of my description. They had, and she'd died recently.

When I lose it/find myself, the dimensions of reality shift and portals open up. If I don't take meds, these become overwhelming and stultifying.

I have a high tolerance to meds. Eventually what I'm on will fail. But I've not been in the hospital for over a year and a half now. That's amazing.

The thing about people who are mentally ill, is that we walk around in the utmost pain. If our mental sufferings were physical, we'd be bed-ridden and hooked up to some delightful pain-killer.

Whatever you are doing to keep yourself together doesn't really matter. The fact that you are together matters incredibly.

I needed this reminder of stamina and physical exercise. I've been suffering what I think are the withdrawal effects of Zyprexa. Weird body temperature fluctuations, pins and needles all over, and lots of anxious thinking. I just couldn't keep sleeping 15 hours a day especially when it wasn't helping my constant worrying.

Today I went to a support group meeting for people like me. I meditated. I exercised. I did it all to cope with these disturbing physical and mental sensations. I thought of stamina, your words Philip. I said, "These sensations are not your core of your being. They are just sensations and thoughts, they cannot kill you. Remember who you are and push through!!!"

Thanks for the reminder.

I can not believe I haven't heard about DFW's death before this. I am freaked out...I thought of him TODAY (first time in at least five years). I'm writing my story about my own addiction for young people to read if they want. Its not pretty and its not even interesting which is what made me think of Wallace today. "Broom of the System" dealt with drug use and really sensationalized it...It was one of the few books in my life that I actually disliked, nothing rang true in it. After reading your post I have to get a copy of Infinite Jest though and please accept my 'criticism' as what it is, just my opinion. I still can't believe I came to your site tonight for the first time and thought of Wallace today...wierd.
I also have suicidal ideation, a coping mechanism. Did you ever read Herman Hesse's description of a suicide? A suicide, he claims, is not a person who is actively thinking of killing themselves but rather a person who assumes that their eventual death will come by their own hand. Interesting anyway.

Mary, never read that statement of Hesse, even though I 've read a great deal of Hesse.

You wrote (sorry don't know HTML), " A Suicide is, is not a person who is actively thinking of killing themselves, but rather a person who assumes that their eventual death will come by their own hand."

OMG! I have always believed this. Maybe this is why I work so hard as a suicide advocate, and work on a suicide prevention hot line. The harder I work to appease my demons, the harder I can keep the sirens at bay and not go into that good night.

Because I fear and suspect, that when my time comes, my heart will not stop on it's own accord, I will have made it stop.

For what it's worth, this is the first time I have said this out loud.

Thank you.

"The thing about people who are mentally ill, is that we walk around in the utmost pain. If our mental sufferings were physical, we'd be bed-ridden and hooked up to some delightful pain-killer.

Whatever you are doing to keep yourself together doesn't really matter. The fact that you are together matters incredibly. "

Great posting. Thank you, Dano.

I really share everyone's disappointment and sadness about DFW's death. When I first read about it in the NYT, it hit me like a ton of bricks and I'm still reeling. I feel a little more lost out in the world without him.

Some of my first thoughts were "How could someone who is motivated and disciplined enough to write something like IJ kill himself?"

But reading the comments by his family really shed a new light on the picture for me. The bottom line is we'll never really know DFW's story. Everyone has a different experience and it just isn't fair to compare him to other folks, tempting but unfair.

I say this as this as the sister of a very brave man who has struggled with mental illness for over two decades. I think if you were to take apart all of the decisions we've made about my brother's care, there are some things that might not make sense to outsiders. I challenge you to consider that if you were there in that moment with the information provided you would make the same decision.

DFW was an athlete - he likely had many stories to share like Phillip's above about psychological stamina. He wrote about that topic a lot in IJ.

We'll never know about what went on between him and his doctors that contributed to the decision to go off his medications. But this is someone who had decades of experience with depression and medication under his belt. I'm sure the decision wasn't made lightly.

There are a lot of people reeling from the death of DFW and it's tempting to turn this into anger - anger toward DFW, his family, his doctors, ECT, medications. You can blame it on sports or the supposed lack thereof in his life. Sure, DFW, Hemingway, and Plath all underwent ECT. How many authors are out there who underwent ECT and didn't commit suicide?

It sounds to me like we were living on borrowed time with DFW. The meds didn't do him in - they kept him with us and able to write for many years. It could be thanks to medications that we have IJ. We lost a lot when DFW died, but his family lost more. Do we know how long he forced himself to stay alive despite his depression?

It seems a bit selfish to judge him from the outside and think he should have forced himself to live just so we could have more from him. He gave a lot. He was a brave, highly motivated brilliant author who shined a light in this world for so many of us.

Rest in Peace, DFW.