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“The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

That’s the opening sentence of David Foster Wallace’s story “The Depressed Person,” and it buzzes with a troubled self-awareness that transcends the usual Wallace modus operandi. The story follows the thoughts of an unhappy young woman—“the depressed person”—afflicted by self-doubt and paranoia; but it’s the inner echoes of her ill feelings, which she cannot transmute from retches of emotion to communicable formulations of language, that make her feel most desperately alone.

Such ineffability is a theme of this week’s lead story, Tom Faure’s personal and investigative account of mental health issues at Columbia, where a sorrowful miasma still lingers from the death of one of its students. And ineffability seems especially prescient in a week that saw the New Yorker’s disturbing account of the life and suicide of Wallace—a writer so recently at the peak of his career, a writer so capable of producing words by the bucketful, and yet a writer who, for all his novels and books of stories, couldn’t manage to write his way out of desolation.

As Faure’s lead story makes clear, depression is not something that can be contained by facile descriptions, or soothed with platitudinal remedies. The sad life of David Foster Wallace, though, suggests that not even one of the clearest-eyed chroniclers of humanity could claw his way out of its darkest disappointments and perturbations. Writing about art, Wallace likened the slow embrace of a difficult work to people “pounding and pushing and kicking” at a locked door only to discover that the door opens outward, and that “we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.” If only, we lament, he had believed the same thing about life.

—Thomas Rhiel