"I had been hijacked by strangeness."
THE NOONDAY DEMON: AN ATLAS OF DEPRESSION
Andrew Solomon
The entry point for Solomon's voyage through depression as an experience and idea, with pitstops examining its cultural significance, the place it holds in biological inquiry, and its braiding with addiction, is his own experience with the mood disorder. The sentences are beautiful and elegant, even as one realizes just how much a depressive episode and its eventual (hopefully) end are flavored by one's circumstance, one's socioeconomic standing, one's familial resources, all of that. Which was perhaps where I felt the book most broke its promise. Solomon goes to extraordinary efforts to diagram the experience of depression in places like war-torn Cambodia and among Polish immigrants in New York City, the Inuit population in Greenland, and even undergoes an ndeup ceremony in Senegal to be purged of the noonday demon. It seemed a bit of a copout that such populations identified as so foreign to the author's experiential orbit should merit examination but that the peculiar and particular brand of black American psychic distress have little to know ink spilled on its behalf.
It is a titanic book with fingers in many different pies, some chapters more affective than others; I'm thinking in particular of the chapter on suicide. And there is no small amount of editorializing, but perhaps most eye-opening were the experiences in Congress and the efforts made there to raise awareness of mental illness. The pharmaceutical industry is here portrayed as much more benevolent than one would perhaps expect. And the laundry list of horrors those interviewed had suffered because of their depression is very likely to give Ms. Yanighara's book a run for its money.
The final chapter, on Hope, moved me, as expected, the most. And that was perhaps where the most salient insights lay with regards to dealing with mental illness in oneself and in others, the idea that rather than it be a separate part of you its being something woven into your fabric, and that perhaps the therapized self and the unmedicated self are no less true selves. Maybe despair and cruelty are hardwired into one's brain, but also part of that Gordion Knot is capacity for love and generosity and the lurking wisdom that having been plunged into darkness prepares one best for appreciating the light.
Andrew Solomon
The entry point for Solomon's voyage through depression as an experience and idea, with pitstops examining its cultural significance, the place it holds in biological inquiry, and its braiding with addiction, is his own experience with the mood disorder. The sentences are beautiful and elegant, even as one realizes just how much a depressive episode and its eventual (hopefully) end are flavored by one's circumstance, one's socioeconomic standing, one's familial resources, all of that. Which was perhaps where I felt the book most broke its promise. Solomon goes to extraordinary efforts to diagram the experience of depression in places like war-torn Cambodia and among Polish immigrants in New York City, the Inuit population in Greenland, and even undergoes an ndeup ceremony in Senegal to be purged of the noonday demon. It seemed a bit of a copout that such populations identified as so foreign to the author's experiential orbit should merit examination but that the peculiar and particular brand of black American psychic distress have little to know ink spilled on its behalf.
It is a titanic book with fingers in many different pies, some chapters more affective than others; I'm thinking in particular of the chapter on suicide. And there is no small amount of editorializing, but perhaps most eye-opening were the experiences in Congress and the efforts made there to raise awareness of mental illness. The pharmaceutical industry is here portrayed as much more benevolent than one would perhaps expect. And the laundry list of horrors those interviewed had suffered because of their depression is very likely to give Ms. Yanighara's book a run for its money.
The final chapter, on Hope, moved me, as expected, the most. And that was perhaps where the most salient insights lay with regards to dealing with mental illness in oneself and in others, the idea that rather than it be a separate part of you its being something woven into your fabric, and that perhaps the therapized self and the unmedicated self are no less true selves. Maybe despair and cruelty are hardwired into one's brain, but also part of that Gordion Knot is capacity for love and generosity and the lurking wisdom that having been plunged into darkness prepares one best for appreciating the light.