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Editor’s Note: This story includes a discussion of suicide. Help is always available. The Suicide Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, and prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, 1-800-273-8255. Additional resources specific to this area are listed at the bottom of the story.

There was a time when Bryan Miller surely seemed to have it all. Certainly, he was a legend to those of us in the world of journalism. He worked at various newspapers in Connecticut and Rhode Island, the Associated Press, and then spent about a year working for Restaurant du Village in Chester, considered one of the top restaurants in Connecticut. He then started working for The New York Times and was vacationing in Italy with the woman he loved when he saw a copy of the International Herald Tribune.

Mimi Sheraton, after serving as restaurant critic for The New York Times for eight years, was stepping down. Miller had been on staff at The Times for less than a year, and he did not feel ready to take on such a huge job—made all the more important because this was the era before the proliferation of food writers, food bloggers, online food critics, and foodies. But Arthur Gelb, the managing editor, did think Miller was ready and insisted he take the job.

“I am offering you the greatest job in journalism,” Miller remembers Gelb telling him. “You will be the king!”

After turning it down twice, worried it would be too much too soon, Miller said yes, making the jump from a small-town reporter to nationally renowned restaurant critic in less than a decade. A front-page profile in The Wine Spectator dubbed him “the most powerful restaurant critic in America.” Anyone might think, looking at him, that he was the guy who had it all.

But, in fact, he was suffering from depression so thick, so deep, and so long lasting that, before it was over, he would try to kill himself not once but several times. He managed to live only because he was so depressed that he botched the attempts.

Through hard work, persistence, and a bit of a miracle, he eventually emerged from his depression and was able to understand the universe as a good place. The story of how he did that is recounted in his recently published memoir Dining in the Dark: A Famed Restaurant Critic’s Struggle with and Triumph over Depression.

“I’d like to say, ‘Stick it out,’” he says. “It’s going to get better. It’s a self-limiting disease.”

Over the course of many years, Miller developed a relationship with therapists and doctors who helped him untangle both the biochemical causes and emotional disturbances in his life that contributed to his disease.

For those who have yet to find or develop a relationship with a therapist, he recommends starting by finding a medical practitioner who can prescribe an antidepressant.

“People ask me, ‘What should I do?’ The first thing you do is get the meds. If you’re in really bad shape, you’re not going to be able to take advantage of the therapy. People often do the opposite...and suffer for months. In the year 2022, there is no reason for people to suffer like I did. Mine was a complicated case; they threw everything at me and it took almost 20 years,” he says, adding that there have been many advances in the pharmacological and therapeutic management of depression over those years.

He notes in his book and in our interview that it may take more than one try, or one combination of antidepressants, before there is relief. And, while the antidepressant might not cure anything, it could help put someone who is suffering in a position where they are better able to access help, or to make good use of that help when they do connect with a therapist.

For people who are suffering and might be medication-wary, he encourages them to reconsider.

“I’ve helped a lot of people with that advice,” he says. “Mostly young people. Most people are disinclined to take medicine for whatever reason.”

And of those who do take medicine and find it effective, he says about 20 percent of those people stop taking it when they think they feel better, risking a relapse.

He also recommends confiding in someone, but only someone you trust. Miller at one point found comfort in a support group he discovered by reading his local newspaper. Talking with others who were likewise suffering did not fix anything, but it made him feel less alone. He also sought and found support from some trustworthy people in his family.

Miller was diagnosed with a specific kind of depression called Bipolar Two. A form of manic depression, it is one most people are not familiar with. He would become depressed and stay depressed for a period of time, and then he would return to normal. He didn’t experience extreme manic episodes.

“You stay down a certain amount of time and then you come back up to normal,” he said, likening it to riding an elevator down to the basement and then returning to the ground floor, over and over and over again. “And in my case, there were times I could set my watch to it. It might be seven days. I knew it was coming. It was really dreadful.”

Miller says he was tempted not to write the memoir and he was tempted to write a different book, one that might have focused on anecdotes and light moments from his time as one of the most powerful people in the restaurant world. There are times when he can’t believe he wrote the book.

“When you’re depressed, you get good at hiding all this stuff,” he says. But after he got better, “I thought, depression was the major determining force in my life. So I realized I could just kick the door down on that, and I did kick the door down.”

He was aided in that endeavor by a diary he started to keep in 1975. But he realized only after many, many years of therapy that the seeds of his depression took root when he was a small child and his father died.

“If there’s one message in my book, it’s about the incredible power of early childhood experiences. I never really believed that and it can take more than 30 years to manifest,” as it did in his case, he says. “For pre-schoolers and toddlers, the death of a parent has such a devastating effect on a child’s sense of personal safety, that it’s impossible to say where grief ends and trauma begins. Children don’t really know what’s going on, but then the child might start to feel culpable. But you can’t articulate it. So it just ticks away for 30 years, and then explodes.”

He initially went to therapy reluctantly, and one of the first things they discussed was the impact of early childhood trauma.

“When there’s a trauma like that, little kids seem like, after weeks or months or whatever, to go back to their routine little-kid life. And people think they have gotten over it and other people have to get back to their routine, too,” he says. “But that kid will carry it around for a long time.”

Based on his family history, Miller also realized he had a genetic and biochemical tendency towards depression in addition to his childhood trauma. And childhood trauma can affect the brain in a way that makes it more susceptible to depression.

While Miller writes eloquently of sometimes feeling overwhelmed by the obligations and demands of being the restaurant reviewer for The New York Times, in his book he writes fondly of the time he spent working for Charlie Van Over and Priscilla Martel for “one of the best establishments in Connecticut, Restaurant du Village,” in Chester, which has since closed.

He and his girlfriend Anne spent seven months there, “Anne in the dining room and me in the kitchen taking orders from the occasionally sober Irish chef, John, and his assistant,” he writes in his book. “It was a tremendous learning experience, one that every aspiring restaurant critic should have, though few do.”

From his work there, he learned about “the mechanics of a restaurant, both inside and out of the kitchen. I learned that the difference between a great home cook and a professional chef is that the former can create an excellent dinner for six while a chef can do so for 60, and at staggered intervals. And seeing first-hand how restaurant dishes are created made me a more informed critic. When something goes wrong, even today, I have a good sense of why and how it can be rectified.”

After working at Restaurant du Village, he and Anne moved to Westport and he started writing for The New York Times, first with a freelance article, and then as a regular contributor of articles ranging from chef profiles to business and science topics, with a great deal of success.

Then, “my on-and-off depression began to cycle,” he writes. “Overnight it turned my work life upside down. When feeling well, I learned to stock the freezer with as many stories and columns as I could by working 10 to 12 hours a day. When the crash came–and it always came–this would provide a week or so of nourishment.”

After being hired on staff at The Times, “a thrilling place to be,” he was doing well when, one day, he was assigned a cushy, easy story and he recalls traveling as a passenger north on the Saw Mill River Parkway when “I had an urge to jump out of the car. That was the first time I contemplated suicide and although it was not close to actionable, it opened the door to a dark room that would both invite and repel me for years to come.”

“Contrary to conventional belief,” he writes, “many people who attempt to end their lives do not do so out of hopelessness, or lack of self-esteem, or personal loss, or even penury. They do it to stop the pain, emotional and physical, in the way a person trapped in a burning high rise will jump because the alternative is considered worse.”

Attempts at ending his own life followed, along with a great deal of success at work and in love and life. Then he lost it all, including his coveted job. Everything he had worked for, gone. Unable to work, he “lost his home, his life savings, two wonderful wives, a chance to have a family, and numerous friends and family.”

And then, without going into details, because the book must be read to fully appreciate what happens, he experienced what could be characterized as a miracle. It would help save his life.

He realized this was a different feeling from the other times he would temporarily recover from a depressive episode.

“This was not the same. I just started feeling better and better. I knew this was not the usual. I just said to myself, ‘It’s over.’ Twenty years of torment and I knew it was over. I haven’t had a minute of depression since.”

With all due respect to the miracle that happened, Miller also realized that his years and years and years of hard work and therapy and medication put him in a place where he was able to appreciate the momentous event in his life.

“It is said that only those who have suffered grave illness, and recovered, can experience true happiness,” he writes. “I revel in well-being, even on a no-frills basis. But it took some time.”

Family Support Group: 7 p.m. Second Tuesday and last Wednesday. Via Zoom. Offered by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Shoreline. Online peer-led support with NAMI-trained facilitators for family/friends of individuals living with mental health conditions. For info, contact 860-876-0236 or Divinna@comcast.net.

GriefShare: 1 p.m. Sundays. Via Zoom. Sponsored by Christ Chapel, 1185 Durham Rd., Madison. Includes supportive discussion and journaling. All materials can be accessed online. For info or to register, call 860-304-5695.

CT Suicide Prevention: 1 Word, 1 Voice, 1 Life www.preventsuicidect.org Phone: 2-1-1 from anywhere in CT. Outside of CT, call 1-800-273-8255

Crisis Text Line www.crisistextline.org Text HOME to 741741 and a counselor will text back, 24 hours/day, 7 days/week

BHcare Local mental health authority Branford, East Haven, Guilford, Madison, North Branford, and North Haven www.bhcare.org 203-446-9739

River Valley Services Local mental health authority for Chester, Clinton, Deep River, Essex, Killingworth, Old Saybrook, Westbrook, and other towns. www.ct.gov/dmhas/rvs 860-262-5200

National Alliance on Mental Illness/Connecticut www.namishoreline.org 203-421-5563

Author Bryan Miller, whose work at the former Restaurant Du Village in Chester helped inform his work as restaurant critic for The New York Times, has written a memoir detailing his struggle with crippling depression in a demanding career. Photo courtesy of Bryan Miller