(no subject)

[pmb]

Crazy genius author (and Pomona professor) David Foster Wallace killed himself on Friday. I want to make a mean joke about a suicide note with lots of footnotes, but the whole thing bothers me a lot. I strongly dislike it when people who are incisively introspective and terrifyingly smart are unable to handle that which they discover.

Comments

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Nothing seems to be forthcoming. It's known that he both had drug problems at one point, and has also been through depression at least once. The prognosis for each of those is pretty bad.

[jes5199.livejournal.com]

So, "No" ?

NYTimes now has a hint:

[pmb.livejournal.com]

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.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

So the answer seems to be: severe depression. Fun fact about depression: it's a fatal disease for a double-digit percentage of its sufferers.