THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
The winner of eleven national awards including a New York Times Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year
“Both heartrending and fascinating . . . the book has a scope and passionate intelligence that give it intrigue as well as heft.”
— GAIL CALDWELL, The Boston Globe
The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations—around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.
“The book for a generation. . . . Solomon interweaves a personal narrative with scientific, philosophical, historical, political, and cultural insights. . . . The result is an elegantly written, meticulously researched book that is empathetic and enlightening, scholarly and useful. . . . Solomon apologizes that ‘no book can span the reach of human suffering.’ This one comes close.”
— CHRISTINE WHITEHOUSE , Time
ANDREW SOLOMON studied at Yale University and Jesus College Cambridge. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, ArtForum, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost and a novel, A Stone Boat, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. He is the winner of the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. For more information, visit the author’s website at www.noondaydemon.net.
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Praise for
The Noonday Demon
“The Noonday Demon is the ideal and definitive book on depression. There is nothing falsely consoling about this account, which is the opposite of a bromide, unless to be accompanied by so much intelligence and understanding is a consolation in itself.”
—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story and The Flaneur
“An exhaustively researched, provocative, and often deeply moving survey of depression . . . original and vividly recounted. Solomon writes engagingly; his style is intimate and anecdotal . . . witty and persuasive. Over all . . . The Noonday Demon is a considerable accomplishment. It is likely to provoke discussion and controversy, and its generous assortment of voices, from the pathological to the philosophical, makes for rich, variegated reading.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review
“The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors the present state of our civilization and its profound discontents. As wide-ranging as it is incisive, this astonishing work is a testimony both to the muted suffering of millions and to the great courage it must have taken the author to set his mind against it.”
—W. G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants
“It’s a compendium, it’s a think piece; it’s both! . . . Remarkable . . . [Solomon] has a killer eye for detail, as well as curiosity and compassion.”
—Emily Nussbaum, The Village Voice
“A wrenchingly candid, fascinating, and exhaustive tour of one of the darker chambers of the human heart.”
—Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence
“Everyone will find a piece of himself in Solomon’s account, even if he has been spared the experience of watching that kernel blossom into a monstrous and strangling plant. . . . Solomon shows bravery and rigor.”
—Christopher Caldwell, Slate magazine
“Solomon is able to examine depression in its considerable darkness, with an unblinking look at its sometimes lethal agonies. His greatest brilliance, however, is in his capacity to consider depression in the light, to recognize that there are elements of the experience that challenge its sufferers to learn, to change, and to salvage joy wherever they may find it. Personal or professional experience with depression are not prerequisites for this book. It’s a great read—for anyone.”
—Martha Manning Ph.D., clinical psychologist and author of Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface
“Exhaustive and eloquent.”
—Maria Russo, Salon.com
“Andrew Solomon’s book is an extraordinarily honest testimony about suffering, which often touches, and is touched by, illumination.”
—John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and To the Wedding
“Painfully honest, sometimes shocking . . . Few books are as powerful or as controversial, as distressing or, at times, as wryly humorous. . . . The Noonday Demon is poised to be a classic of our time.”
—Alice Fowler, Night & Day
“Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon is as gripping as a thriller, and at the same time it has the seriousness and weight of a literary landmark.”
—John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
“Solomon says there’s positive power in our demons. This extraordinary book tackles despair from the inside out.”
—Richard Avedon
“A brilliant, kaleidoscopic portrayal of the human experience of depression.”
—James Watson, discoverer of DNA, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Double Helix
“An exhaustively researched, provocative, and moving survey of depression, engagingly rendered by a man brave enough to say that he loves his depression because it helped him find his soul.”
—The New York Times
“The Noonday Demon is an amazingly rich and absorbing work that deals with depression on many levels of perception. In its flow of insights and its scope—encompassing not only the author’s own ordeal but also keen inquiries into the biological, social, and political aspects of the illness—The Noonday Demon has achieved a level of authority that should assure its place among the few indispensable works on depression.”
—William Styron, author of Darkness Visible
“Frank . . . clearheaded [and] valuable . . .”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon is immensely readable and should be universally useful. It is indeed an atlas of depression, sensitively chronicling the illness’s characteristics, social and cultural history, modes of treatment, and prospects. What makes it remarkable is a highly individual blend of the personal and the dispassionate, the work of a benign intelligence.”
—Harold Bloom, author of How to Read and Why and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Triumphant . . . Solomon looks at the idea of depression from every angle imaginable.”
—David Kipen,
San Francisco Chronicle
“Compulsively readable, harrowing, and helpful, The Noonday Demon is an act of redemption in an epidemic of sorrow.”
—Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife
“Solomon’s done his homework . . . smart, lucid, and sometimes intensely moving.”
—David Gates, Newsweek
“As the great Flaubert discovered, it’s hard to write about boring people without being boring oneself. Similarly, it’s hard to write at length about depression without depressing the reader. Yet in The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon, through his candor, intellectual elegance, and ultimately his human resilience, manages to write of traumas both deep and ordinary without leaving the reader traumatized. His book is a large achievement.”
—Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lonesome Dove
“Solomon’s highly readable, tag-all-bases new book . . . gives us nothing less than an evolving portrait of who, collectively, we are . . . ambitious and broadly synthesizing . . . [written with] considerable stylistic grace. . . . Solomon is knowledgeable, trenchant, and an admirable distiller of facts and perspectives.”
—Sven Birkerts, The New York Observer
“With unflinching humanity and empathy, Solomon has written a landmark work about the universal experience of chronic grief. The book is so beautifully documented and widely researched that it helps to reinvigorate the dying tradition of the public intellectual. And for so many women who are the more likely gender to experience lasting depression, whose grief is so often trivialized, The Noonday Demon will be a valued sourcebook, even a lifeline.”
—Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and Primogeniture
“Chronicling a vast array of human experience (including his own), Solomon weaves together a deeply poetic, yet always honest, vision of depression. Investigating the cultural, political, and economic influences affecting human moods worldwide, he debunks some of the myths about the disease—for example, that it is primarily a modern middle-class affliction. A must read for all who seek a better understanding of the dimensions of suffering.”
—Tikkun magazine
“Andrew Solomon’s new book on the descent of melancholy is, strange as it sounds, charming, lively, intelligent, and, in its diligent fascination with what turns out to be a permanent feature of the human condition, never the least bit depressing.”
—Adam Gopnick, author of Paris to the Moon
“The Noonday Demon is an eloquent, harrowing account of melancholy and dread. It informs deeply, in every manner—personal, scientific, historical, and political—about the roots, experience, and treatment of clinical depression. It is an important book about suffering, but an even more important one about hope.”
—Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and author of An Unquiet Mind and Night Falls Fast
“The melancholic, Freud observed, has ‘a keener eye for truth than others,’ and Solomon is a case in point. Interweaving personal experiences with scientific reporting, he has produced a meditation on the human capacity to suffer—but also to prevail.”
—The New Yorker
“Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon succeeds brilliantly. This is the best lay guide ever written for understanding and surviving depression.”
—Dr. David Nathan, Barron’s
ALSO BY ANDREW SOLOMON
A Stone Boat
The Irony Tower:
Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost
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Copyright © 2001 by Andrew Solomon
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First Scribner trade paperback edition 2003
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7 9 10 8
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:
Solomon, Andrew, 1963–
The Noonday demon : an atlas of depression / Andrew Solomon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Depression, Mental. 2. Solomon, Andrew, 1963–. 3. Depressed persons—Case studies. I. Title.
RC537.S598 2001
616.85′27′0092—dc21
[B] 2001018884
ISBN 0-684-85466-X
0-684-85467-8 (Pbk)
eISBN-13: 978-1-45167-688-4
The copyright page continues after the index.
For my father,
who gave me life not once, but twice
Contents
A Note on Method
Chapter I: Depression
Chapter II: Breakdowns
Chapter III: Treatments
Chapter IV: Alternatives
Chapter V: Populations
Chapter VI: Addiction
Chapter VII: Suicide
Chapter VIII: History
Chapter IX: Poverty
Chapter X: Politics
Chapter XI: Evolution
Chapter XII: Hope
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Everything passes away—suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?
—Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard
A Note on Method
The writing of this book has been my life for the past five years, and it is sometimes hard for me to trace my own ideas back to their various sources. I have attempted to credit all influences in the notes at the back of the book, and not to distract readers with a cascade of unfamiliar names and technical jargon in the main text. I asked my subjects to allow me to use their actual names, because real names lend authority to real stories. In a book one of the aims of which is to remove the burden of stigma from mental illness, it is important not to play to that stigma by hiding the identities of depressed people. I have, however, included the stories of seven people who wished to remain pseudonymous and who persuaded me that they had significant reason to do so. They appear in this text as Sheila Hernandez, Frank Rusakoff, Bill Stein, Danquille Stetson, Lolly Washington, Claudia Weaver, and Fred Wilson. None of them is a composite personality, and I have taken pains to change no details. The members of Mood Disorders Support Groups (MDSG) use first names only; these have all been changed in keeping with the private nature of the meetings. All other names are actual.
I have allowed the men and women whose battles are the primary subject of this book to tell their own stories. I have done my best to get coherent stories from them, but I have not in general done fact-checking on their accounts of themselves. I have not insisted that all personal narrative be strictly linear.
I have often been asked how I found my subjects. A number of professionals, as noted in the acknowledgments, helped me to gain access to their patients. I met an enormous number of people in my ordinary life who volunteered, upon learning of my subject, their own copious histories, some of which were extremely fascinating and ultimately became source material. I published an article about depression in The New Yorker in 1998 and received over a thousand letters in the months immediately following publication. Graham Greene once said, “I sometimes wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.” I think he vastly underestimated the number of people who do write in one way or another to alleviate melancholia and panic fear. In responding to my flood of mail, I asked some people whose correspondence had been particularly moving
to me whether they would be interested in doing interviews for this book. Additionally, I spoke at and attended numerous conferences where I met consumers of mental health care.
I have never written on any subject about which so many people have so much to say, nor on any subject about which so many people have chosen to say so much to me. It is frighteningly easy to accumulate material about depression. I felt in the end that what was missing in the field of depression studies was synthesis. Science, philosophy, law, psychology, literature, art, history, and many other disciplines have independently taken up the cause of depression. So many interesting things are happening to so many interesting people and so many interesting things are being said and being published—and there is chaos in the kingdom. The first goal of this book is empathy; the second, which has been for me much more difficult to achieve, is order: an order based as closely as possible on empiricism, rather than on sweeping generalizations extracted from haphazard anecdotes.
I must emphasize that I am not a doctor or a psychologist or even a philosopher. This is an extremely personal book and should not be taken as anything more than that. Though I have offered explanations and interpretations of complex ideas, this book is not intended to substitute for appropriate treatment.
For the sake of readability, I have not used ellipsis marks or brackets in quotations, from spoken or written sources, where I felt that the omitted or added words did not substantially change meaning; anyone wishing to reference these sources should go back to the originals, which are all cataloged at the end of this book. I have also avoided use of “[sic]” in the eighth chapter, where historical sources use obsolete spellings. Quotations for which citations are not furnished are from personal interviews, most of which were conducted between 1995 and 2001.
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