In his book, "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression," Andrew Solomon gives credence to what is often perceived as a widespread delusion. He provides an exhaustive, intelligent, passionate and emotionally resonant account of a whole range of melancholies. It's an exploration that is sorely needed; as Solomon writes, "Depressed people tend to find everyday life overwhelming, and they are therefore incompetent lobbyists."
The disorder is misunderstood because its symptoms are variegated, subjective and concealed. Solomon aims to "bring the cure of self-regard to those who have not had it" by communicating what so many depressed people have suppressed.
He probes depression ranging from the harrowing aftermath of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to Inuit communities where 80 percent of the population suffered from depression. He discusses the most deeply impoverished parts of the U.S. and honestly shares his own experience, that of a wealthy, charismatic person ripped apart by feeling.
Solomon is impressively well-read and provides explanations and illustrations of depression that trace its protean silhouette through history, literature, psychology, brain chemistry, evolution, demographic trends, politics and life experience.
For all its knowledge, the book is most remarkable for its sincerity. As a depressive himself, Solomon has immense respect for his subject matter and admires the vast range of pain of the sufferers that populate his pages. Descriptions of some of their lives are "implausibly horrendous."
One of the interviewees, Phaly Nuon, watched the Khmer Rouge gang-rape and murder her daughter before she herself was raped and tied to a rod of bamboo suspended over a muddy field. She would only live as long as she could keep her legs tense. Her son was left beside her and her infant was tied to her; they would all drown in the mud when she fell. When the soldiers grew impatient, they let her run. She lived in the forest for three years and four months. When she emerged, she found that her husband had been beaten into a permanent mental stupor. In spite of this trauma, Nuon has established a clinic and embraced a doctrine of "forgetting, working, and loving," seeking to liberate Cambodian women from the past.
In the face of such suffering, it's difficult to justify the petty unhappiness of middle class life. Solomon, however, argues that even privileged lives, though less graphically violent, can be full of equally intense suffering. Pain, Solomon tells us, is merely a consequence of being susceptible to the disease – you need only be human.
"To be depressed when you have experienced trauma or when your life is clearly a mess is one thing," Solomon writes. "But to sit around and be depressed when you are finally at a remove from trauma and your life is not a mess is awfully confusing and destabilizing."
In his attempts to elucidate the origins of the disease, Solomon goes beyond the vague modern understanding of neurotransmitters and psychoanalysis. He delves into the evolutionary purpose that depression plays, suggesting that it is an accidental byproduct of the grief that allows us to love and protect one another. Grief is evolutionarily advantageous: the genes of passionate parents who love and assiduously care for their young are at an advantage. "If we did not suffer enough loss to fear grief," Solomon writes, "we could not love intensely."
The braininess and spectacular journalism of the book are a pleasure, but Solomon's capacity to feel gives his work direction. The lucidly observed suffering of the author is seductively personal and well-informed. He never flaunts the terror of his experience, although clearly he has felt strongly. Describing his own depression, Solomon says the anxiety came after his mother's death. In the compelling "Suicide" chapter, he describes how he and his family participated in the assisted suicide of his terminally ill mother.
Though accounts of his three major depressive episodes are piercing, it is the aftermath of these episodes and their recurrence that is most disturbing. After he has convalesced from his first breakdown, Solomon is dogged by a wish to die and is finally well enough to act on that impulse. He attempts to contract HIV by having random and unprotected sex with homeless strangers. After realizing that he may be infecting others, he relapses into another depression.
The cycle repeats, and Solomon avers that, in the end, depression is chronic. He, like almost all depressive people, is dependent on continued medication and treatment. Depression is like myopia; it needs constant correction.
Solomon retains a faith in a self that is inextricably interwoven with his illness. He fights against the common depressive outlook that the world is awful and unlivable. However, he seems unable to completely shed the insight that comes from depression. Although he is optimistic, he will never be able to embrace happiness completely. He cannot imagine ever being unfettered and is, in some ways, glad of it. He writes, "The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed."
In his attempt to reveal the geography of the world of depression and reconcile the experience of it with the actual disease, Solomon has followed the advice of Emily Dickinson's famous poem, "Tell the truth but tell it slant." His slanted version of reality is dazzling and smart and full of the deep love that both makes us prey to depression and allows us to transcend it.