On The Multiplicity of Depression: Édouard Levé’s Suicide
An account meant to resemble a suicide note has far more than just generic feel-good statements to say about living with a mental illness.
I had heard of Édouard Levé’s Suicide a few months ago. The title alone grabbed my attention: suicide. What could it be? An essay on suicide. A novel? Poetry? Regardless of its format, the subject matter was clear. Someone committed suicide and the author had much to say about that. I had read plenty about the topic throughout my life and have had myself suicidal ideations at different points in my life. There was no reason then for me to want to immerse myself in a book dealing with that subject, especially as I had just finished reading another novel dealing with it and I am trying to stabilize my own struggles with my mental health. But the book was brief, and I wanted to see if Levé had anything illuminating to say about an action embedded with so many cultural and clinical meanings.
Suicide remarkably uses the second person throughout its pages, with a close friend addressing a 25 year-old man with a plethora of unique traits and a life that on paper did not seem bad but who nonetheless has entertained the idea of suicide for a while. This conflict drives much of the narration: he has beauty, health, a wife and a family, friends and colleagues and a stable income — so why is he always so melancholic, so reluctant to step outside his room? The easy answer is that depression is a medical condition somewhat independent of external factors: it is chemical imbalances in one’s brain what stops people from wanting to lead a regular life.
Is it just chemical imbalances? After consulting a psychiatrist and trying medications that induce mania, panic and disassociation, this unnamed man starts to wonder whether his depression is not just chemical imbalances in his nervous system. His dissatisfaction with life is so heavily felt by his whole being — his thoughts and his body — that he decides to bet on death solving this suffering. This is not an easy decision: he sincerely regrets he will inflict pain on his wife and family, but sees no alternative.
Levé notably committed suicide shortly after turning in his manuscript to the editor, and the news turned the book into a best-seller. People wanted to know why, as if there were specific circumstances that pushed him to this end. The idea communicated by his prose, however, is that depression as a lived experience is neither simply external events that can be modified nor chemical imbalances fixed by medication. It is both to different extents for different people — it’s multiple, hard to grasp and therefore hard to treat. Levé asks people to understand this: the sufferer of depression and associated mental conditions is experiencing something that perhaps cannot be explained by the contemporary scientific discourse or by our current linguistic paradigms.
What to do about depression, then, if it is so multiple and hard to capture and treat? Suicide is certainly not a pro-suicide manifesto even if that was his eventual end. It simply asks us to view mental illness through different lenses — sociological, medical, and perhaps philosophical ones too. In some cases, it’s a force that can’t be explained at all. It is a haunting revelation that humans can’t get rid of every cause of suffering just yet, but hearing it is highly reassuring for some too.
