Kathleen Russo, the wife of noted actor and monologist Spalding Gray, hadn't seen her husband in several weeks. Because he was gravely ill, depressed and suicidal, she knew that his disappearance was life-threatening. Her suspicions were confirmed when the New York City medical examiner's office reported in March 2004 that the body of Spalding Gray had been pulled from the East River.
"There was a sense of relief that he was out of his pain and we as a family didn't have to go through this turmoil anymore," Russo said.
Kathleen Russo (center), wife of actor and playwright Spalding Gray, and Alexandra Styron (right), daughter of author William Styron, discuss the effects of depression on family members of depressed individuals. Dr. Richard A. Friedman (left) moderated the special presentation, part of the Medical College's Humanities and Medicine program.
Russo, who produced the play "Spalding Gray, Stories Left to Tell," based on Gray's unpublished journals, joined Alexandra Styron, daughter of author William Styron, in Uris Auditorium on Jan. 30 to discuss the effects of depression on the family members of depressed individuals.
"When Depression Is a Family Affair: A Conversation With Alexandra Styron and Kathie Russo," was part of the Weill Cornell Medical College's ongoing Humanities and Medicine Program. Dr. Richard A. Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry and director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell, moderated the lecture.
Gray's battle with depression was a lifelong affair, Russo said. His mother had committed suicide, and even invited her son to suggest possible methods for her to kill herself. By age 11, Gray had already suffered his first breakdown.
His famous monologues were his therapy, she said. Writing and performing on stage was how he would recover from his darkest depths. But after a car accident in 2001 left him severely injured and perhaps as depressed as he had ever been, Russo saw her husband wasn't rebounding through his work as he usually had.
"That's when I knew it wasn't going to get better," she said.
Russo described in sometimes painful detail — there was one instance when she and her children saw Gray tear his hair out — the toll Gray's illness took his family. Only at the urging of Russo was Gray able to function as a father.
"If he had his way, he would just sit in this one chair in the living room, slumped over and not talking," Russo said.
Russo found herself playing the "cheerleader," repeatedly assuring Gray, and herself, that things were going to get better. But she rarely believed in her own pep talks.
"You don't see a light at the end of the tunnel," Russo said.
Alexandra Styron echoed many of Russo's experiences, even though the complete picture of her father's depression didn't become clear to her until she was a young adult.
By then, William Styron was already a very famous author, having written the classic post-World War II novel "Sophie's Choice." At the time of his death in November 2006 at age 81, Styron would be regarded as one of the finest authors of his generation.
Alexandra Styron, whose recent article in the New Yorker, "Reading My Father," addresses her difficult relationship with her father, grew up believing her dad to be gruff and distant, but not depressed.
"I thought that I had a really unpleasant father for a lot of my childhood," Styron said. "In hindsight, I see a mental illness that had not yet flowered."
By 1985, William Styron's depression was evident. Alexandra was 18 at the time, and, oddly enough, began to see in her father glimpses of the paternal qualities that his drinking and rough demeanor had always suppressed. He seemed vulnerable, she said, and actually needed his family.
"Watching one's father go mad is both scary and dislocating," she wrote in the New Yorker. "But Daddy's self-recrimination also neutralized some of my strongest feelings about him. The simmering adolescent anger cooled, giving way to a kind of bewildered pity. I think it's safe to say that we all felt this way to varying degrees; it's hard, after all, to be pissed off at a guy who is suffering so terribly, and who hates himself so much."
William Styron chronicled his depression in the 1990 book "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness."
Both Russo and Styron illustrated the difficulties and frustrations of living with and loving depressed individuals. Doctors were often little help and very callous. Russo said she was stunned when after an extended day in a psychiatric facility, Gray's doctors wouldn't call for a follow-up.
"The doctors who would communicate with me were the ones I liked," Russo said.
Styron said she didn't see "much in the way of bedside manner" with many of the doctors who treated her father.
Russo and Styron's answer to cold doctors, uncooperative insurance companies and constant tension was unmitigated honesty. Nothing was bottled up or ignored.
"I was very open with my kids," Russo said. "We didn't sweep things under the rug. It's nothing to be embarrassed about, your father killing himself. It was like he had any other disease."
Photography by Amelia Panico.