Depression was famously described as a wimp of a word by William Styron. A Pulitzer-prize winning author, his own experience of depression was described in a memoir, Darkness Visible, about thirty years ago. It took a brave man to speak in public about mental illness at the time. Depression is a word that has ‘slithered innocuously through our language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence, and preventing by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the illness when it is out of control’ (Styron, 2010). Styron gave us a definitive account of a man enduring a severe depressive episode. It highlighted his own vulnerability by virtue of family history, the professional and personal disappointments that preceded its onset, and its excruciating and lengthy course and subsequent recovery. He illuminated the obvious link between the agony of depression and the impulse to commit suicide. It encapsulates, at the level of the individual, what severe depression is like for an intelligent, creative man. Systematic research at the population level largely confirms this individual experience. It also demonstrates modest differences from the rates and patterns of illness described in women.