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September 27, 2008

Robert Ito's Beautiful Piece on David Foster Wallace

Robert Ito has written a beautiful piece in Salon about David Foster Wallace's last few weeks and I want to share it with you. It sheds quite a bit of light on the terminal nature of clinical depression and shows how one family loved and cared for their suffering son in the end stage of his illness.

If you know someone who is under depression's heel, do not be afraid to step in and help in any small way you can. Often it's impossible for the person afflicted to do even the most simplest of day to day tasks that most people take for granted, let alone the monumental step of reaching out and asking for assistance. The following are excellent resources for learning more about clinical depression:

• National Institute of Mental Health
• Wikipedia, which has a surprisingly thorough entry on clinical depression
• Crazy Meds, a one-stop information portal for the mentally interesting and one of my favorite resources for user info on psychiatric drugs.

The Last Days of David Foster Wallace by Robert Ito.

Thanks to bitchphd over at Bitch Ph.D. for the heads up.

Posted by bethamsel at September 27, 2008 1:29 PM