The Noonday Demon [Hardcover]

"Breakdowns are preposterous" writes Andrew Solomon in his wide-ranging and illuminating study, The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression. With the current vogue for self-help books, medication doled out at the drop of a hat, and therapy-speak, it would seem that depression is a modern phenomenon, a reaction to the stresses of a consumerist, high-achieving world. Yet as Solomon explains, the word " depression" was "first used in English to describe low spirits in 1660"; prior to this time, the vagaries of the unquiet mind were termed "melancholia". Bravely cataloguing his own series of depressive episodes, Solomon attempts to go to the roots of the illness--for an illness it is, and has to be treated as such--by interviewing fellow sufferers, delving back into history ("the history of depression in the West is closely tied to the history of Western thought")--analysing suicide, addictions, treatments, and depression's underlying causes, from politics to poverty. At the heart of this informed, compassionate book lies Solomon's own story--an established writer with seemingly everything going for him, he succumbed to a series of breakdowns in his 31st year, and eventually rallied with the support of his father, other family members and friends, a good therapist and a shopping list of medications, which he still takes daily. Out of his depression emerged qualities of self he never knew existed, and a desire to "find and cling to the reasons for living". Solomon's dark night of the soul, on a par with Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness is a significant and important chronicle. Between 10 and 15 per cent of Americans and up to 6 million people in the UK experience depression; books like The Noonday Demon might just broaden our understanding of it. --Catherine Taylor

Naomi Wolfauthor of "The Beauty Myth" and "Promiscuities"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 reinvigorates 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'A mesmerising journey... magnificent', Observer .'Extraordinary and redeeming... A work of great charm and individuality but also of impressive scholarship', Evening Standard .'A lodestone work', Guardian

This extraordinarily moving, shocking and eye-opening work is set to become the classic text on the subject of depression, mental illness and the way we live now, for the literary market - the book that knocks even William Styron's Darkness Visible out of the water. Like Kay Jamison's An Unquiet Mind it digs deep and painfully into personal experience, but it also looks at the much wider picture - the historical, social, biological, chemical, pharmaceutical and medical aspects and implications of the disease - broadening the scope immeasurably. What is crucial is that Solomon has not only experienced what he is writing about firsthand, and describes the experience from the inside terrifyingly and brilliantly, but also that he has researched every aspect of depression, from the historical treatment and study of 'melancholy' as far back as the Greeks and Romans (who believed that cauliflower was good for depression), right through to the side effects of the pharmaceutical cocktails of the present day, case histories of people in & out of mental hospitals, faith healers, the power of suggestion, as well as the implications for the future of Western society. He also writes like a dream.