“The Great God of Depression,” an Insightful Podcast About William Styron, Writing, and Mental Health / Sarah Larson. In: The New Yorker August 30, 2018

“We’ve just passed through the iron gate that leads into the land of the dead,” the science journalist Pagan Kennedy says at the beginning of the recent podcast “The Great God of Depression.” “My friend Alice Flaherty unfurls a map.” They’re at the gorgeous Mount Auburn Cemetery, near Boston. Flaherty, a neurologist and writer, is guiding Kennedy to a hidden spot that’s deeply meaningful to her. “Our minds are full of rabbit holes that can send us tumbling into other realities,” Kennedy says. “There are medical names for what happened to Alice back in 1998, but she prefers an old-fashioned word, ‘madness,’ because her delusions seem like they came from a nineteenth-century novel, or a place like this one.” It’s a bit like the beginning of a dark, grown-up “Alice in Wonderland,” complete with its own Alice, and the rabbit hole leads to the world of depression.
Kennedy describes herself as a “connoisseur of odd people,” which might be another way of saying “writer,” and writing is almost as much a focus of “The Great God of Depression” as depression is. In five short episodes, the podcast, which is part of Radiotopia’s “Showcase” series, explores the stories of two individuals, Flaherty and the novelist William Styron, along with their depression, its relationship to their writing, and how, eventually, their lives connected.
In 1998, Flaherty, pregnant with twin sons, had a miscarriage. (She buried her sons’ ashes at the hidden spot in Mount Auburn.) Shortly after her miscarriage, she plummeted into a state far beyond grief. “I woke up and, all of a sudden, something was incredibly different,” she says. “It was like the sun and moon had switched places in the sky.” Her thoughts were racing, she had strange ideas that she knew weren’t true, and she had an uncontrollable urge to write. When she did, “her own handwriting looked alien to her,” Kennedy says. “The letters were tiny, like the tracks of bugs.” Flaherty was diagnosed with an unusual type of manic-depressive syndrome. She also became obsessed with reading, especially depression memoirs—among them, Styron’s “Darkness Visible,” which in the nineties was a required text for many medical-school students. “Every doctor in the hospital knew Styron, and as a man of stature, but not because he’d had a Pulitzer Prize and not because he wrote the screenplay for ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ ” Flaherty says. “It was because he was the great god of depression.”

William Styron