The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (Sold as a set of two volumes)

The Depression Classic by the Author of "Far From the Tree"

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.

"When writing a book about depression, it's very difficult to avoid either glamorizing or demonizing it. In some ways, I committed both errors." But perhaps this approach is the most honest. Rather than saying my feelings about depression lie somewhere between gratitude and fear, I felt both in the most extreme ways.

Three years after his mother's death, Andrew Solomon experienced his first depressive episode – at a time when his life, career, and relationships were all going smoothly, and he couldn't think of any reason for falling into depression. Severe depression robbed him of his ability to care for himself, making a stranger grow inside him. In his most desperate period, he tried to contract HIV, just to have a plausible excuse to commit suicide. He ultimately failed, but he also accepted that he would forever live with depression and embarked on a lifelong study of the condition.

Years later, he completed the monumental work "The Noonday Demon." With multiple perspectives, experiences, and connections as a patient, literary writer, clinical psychologist, and psychiatrist, he combined harrowing personal experiences with extensive knowledge, dissecting depression from twelve angles. This ranged from the most common confusions people have about depression – whether it's triggered by external stimuli or internal personality, whether it's a physiological or psychological problem, whether to choose medication or psychodynamic therapy, whether it's just unhappiness or actual depression – to more macroscopic, structural aspects. These included the evolutionary significance of depression, how politics determines the description and treatment of depression, and the relationship between gender, age, ethnicity, poverty, suicide, and depression, repeatedly debating this widely recognized and difficult-to-understand illness.

He interviewed a large number of patients, doctors, scientists, and drug developers, explaining why various therapies were effective or ineffective, from conventional treatments such as medication, talk therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy, to several experimental but highly anticipated electroceuticals and psychedelics. He also boldly immersed himself in over a dozen alternative therapies, from recognized effective methods like exercise and dietary control, to serious considerations like repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, survival courses, EMDR, group therapy, and even seemingly absurd but quite insightful Senegalese animistic rituals.

Depression is the most misunderstood and heavily stigmatized mental illness, and also the most difficult to define – which reactions are symptoms of the illness, the life that depression cultivates within the patient? Which are part of the patient's personality structure? What does treatment change? After treatment, does one become normal or abnormal? The value of this book lies not only in the author's accomplishment of an impossible task: integrating psychosocial and psychopharmacological understandings to comprehensively and precisely describe the nature and manifestations of this illness; it lies in the author's consistent frankness in exposing various dysfunctional ideas, unhelpful treatments, attempts to exploit depression for self-gain, and the human tendency for self-deception; and it lies in the author's sensitivity and compassion as a literary artist, conveyed through vivid comparisons