How mental illness stopped being a terrible dark secret."

-Source-The New York Times- Nearly 30 years ago the author William Styron outed himself in these pages as mentally ill. My days were pervaded by a gray drizzle of unrelenting horror" he wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article describing the deep depression that had landed him in the psych ward. He compared the agony of mental illness to that of a heart attack. Pain is pain whether its in the mind or the body. So why he asked were depressed people treated as pariahs? A confession of mental illness might not seem like a big deal now but it was back then. In the 1980s if you were depressed it was a terrible dark secret that you hid from the world" according to Andrew Solomon a historian of mental illness and author of The Noonday Demon." People with depression were seen as pathetic and even dangerous. You didnt let them near your kids." William Styrons Op-Ed on Depression In the popular mind suicide is usually the work of a coward or sometimes paradoxically a deed of great courage but it is neither; the torment that precipitates the act makes it often one of blind necessity." 1 page 0.47 MB The response to Mr. Styrons op-ed was immediate. Letters flooded into The New York Times. The readers thanked him blurted out their stories and begged him for more. Inadvertently I had helped unlock a closet from which many souls were eager to come out" Mr. Styron wrote later. It was like the #MeToo movement" Alexandra Styron the authors daughter told me. Somebody comes out and says: This happened. This is real. This is what it feels like. And it just unleashed the floodgates." Readers were electrified by Mr. Styrons confession in part because he inhabited a storybook world of glamour. After his novel Sophies Choice" was adapted into a blockbuster movie in 1982 Mr. Styron rocketed from mere literary success to Hollywood fame. Meryl Streep who won an Oscar for playing Sophie became a lifelong friend adding to Mr. Styrons roster of illustrious buddies from Jimmy" Baldwin to Arthur Miller. He appeared at gala events with his silver hair upswept in a genius-y pompadour and his face ruddy from summers on Marthas Vineyard. And yet he had been so depressed that he had eyed the knives in his kitchen with suicide-lust.