Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being

“One has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy.”

There is a dangerous fallacy — a biological falsehood, a feebleness of empathy, an ethical failing — in the view that people who die by suicide after living with mental illness have somehow failed at life. It is one thing to feel deeply the tragedy of that loss, to rue the help not available to them in their time of struggle; it is quite another to... See more