I recently re-read Bill Styron’s Darkness Visible for, at least, the 4th time. Weirdly, since men account for at least half of depression patients and a more than half of successful suicides (and rising), there aren’t many useful resources available for me. Darkness Visible is one, although it has been around since the 80s and Styron is from a previous generation. It still helped, a little.

An old friend has been suffering from depression for the past couple of years. He turned 65 a few years ago and, suddenly, began to feel that he no longer had control of his destiny. Of course, none of us ever do, but when he was young he was always sure than no matter what kind of employment calamity might befall him he would find a better situation and survive. In 2019, the school where he taught went out-of-business and between not wanting to leave Santa Fe and not having sufficient education to get a jig with a state college, he has been struggling since he lost that job. And he has become severely depressed.

I can’t remember many times when I wasn’t chronically depressed. Seriously, since the earliest age I can remember (around 9 when my mother died) I have “challenged” life for some evidence of meaning. When I met my friend, 25 years ago, I had just dropped out of an engineering career in medical devices due to a severe depression episode caused by being trapped in an amoral organization and being asked to do things I could have been arrested for doing. He was an incredible friend, a sponsor at the school where he worked, and a wonderful manager when I joined the school as an instructor. He left the school first, for disgusting political reasons, and ended up in New Mexico. I retired a few years later and a few years after that the school where we’d both taught bankrupted and vanished.

We have stayed friends, getting together rarely over the past decade but talking on the phone or over Zoom often. In the past year, we’ve talked often in an attempt to keep both of our spirits up. Another friend commented that I am probably the worst person possible to be able to help anyone with depression problems. Styron, in Darkness, remarked that after his hospitalization he had regular conversations with a friend who, like me, was chronically depressed and it was one of the things that pulled him through his own depression. I hope that will be true for my friend.