The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
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Having suffered through a couple of major bouts with depression, one related to physical ailment and another standalone depression, I can emphatically recommend this book. My depression was nowhere near as crippling as that of Andrew Solomon, but I can hear echoes of my own dark times and my melancholy nature in the words that he writes.
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This atlas of depression is just that. It's twelve major sections—depression, breakdowns, treatments, alternatives, populations, addiction, suicide, history, poverty, politics, evolution, and hope—peel back the skin of depression and poke about at all of the juicy bits of the corpse beneath. This book is encyclopedic in scope and personal in presentation, as Solomon walks the reader through a story that is universal while grounded in particulars, a story that is personal while allowing anyone to understand the pain that compels the author to share.
While the book begins with Solomon's personal struggles and discoveries, he pushes outside of himself (one of the best things for a depressive) and throws what little energy he has at exploring and explaining this darkness that holds him fast.
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Mental illness oftentimes seems scarier than physical illness because we haven't been able to map the mind in the same way that we have the body. It is fear of the unknown that drives us to distance ourselves from those we cannot control or comprehend. Andrew Solomon has tried to strip depression of some of its allure and mystery and magic in order to make it more manageable and more tangible, and I am glad that he did.
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I should note that it was partly due to reading books like The Noonday Demon and William Styron's Darkness Visible and Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression that helped to deliver me from my own cloud of despair and loneliness and anxiousness. In being able to see the pieces that hindered others, I was able to identify some of the same obstacles in my own life and begin to work around and through them.
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For more information about this 2001 National Book Award Winner, visit www.noondaydemon.com
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File under:
*Autobiography
*Depression
*History
*Hope
3 comments:
Does he address Robert Burton's Olde Tome The Anatomy of Melancholy, by any chance? It's a book I've heard a great deal about, but have never had the gumption to crack. I think I actually have a copy of the Noonday Demon around here somewhere, so kill two blackbirds with one stone would be helpful...
David:
He spends about four pages (and a few other mentions here and there) on Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy.
"The seventeenth century found history's greatest champion of the melancholy cause."
"Burton's ability to locate real ties between philosophy and medicine, and between science and metaphysics, started us on the path to a unifying theory of mind and matter."
And so on...
I realize I could have just dug up the book and used that thing at the back called an "index" I suppose. God I hate the Internet.
But thank you, Troy.
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