There are 18,000 suicides each year caused by depression in the USA. And depression is becoming more frequent. However, nine out of ten people with depression can be helped. Unfortunately there is still a stigma attached to mental diseases, so that treatment is often not sought early enough. Moreover, family and friends usually cannot envisage the genuine mental pain that depressed patients experience.
"Dead Blue" is a one-hour documentary movie that contains three very personal accounts of depression by 2 well-known Americans (Mike Wallace, the CBS "60 Minutes" anchorman, and William Styron, the Pulitzer prize novelist) and a clinical psychologist, who give their own accounts of the symptoms that they have experienced.
For people who suffer from depression, the movie will help to put their feelings into words. For family and friends of those who are depressed, it will give some insight into the psychic pain the sufferer experiences. It is well worth viewing by anyone who comes in contact with clinical depression, or melancholia, as William Styron prefers to call it.
You may also want to read William Styron's Darkness Visible (1990), an account of his own battle with melancholia.