Book Review: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon (audiobook)

This book is both a personal story of the author’s struggles with depression as well as a primer for people who are not familiar with the clinical aspects of the disease. It is chalk full of medical information that is first explained in terms that are not incredibley lay-reader friendly. Fortunately, Solomon is able to give examples from many walks of life that serve to illustrate the many difficult to understand and relate to emotions, actions, and physical symptoms that characterize depression. This is an extremely dense read, if I had read it instead of listening to the book on tape, I would have never finished it (perhaps a testament to my own loss of focus while experiencing depression).

Part of being vigilant about depression is being well informed and Solomon is very thorough in his overall view of depression, sharing not only the horrors he experienced during his own bouts, but also showing how depression is viewed in other cultures which serves to illuminate the continued stigma and undertreatment of it. The most heartwrenching chapter in his book focused on the Inuit or Eskimo people of Alaska and how they have the highest rate of suicides among any depressed population studied. It was eye-opening to learn how some cultures do not have the language to talk about their dark feelings, how it is considered inappropriate to bring your sadness and anger out in to the open to begin the healing process. You do not share these emotional and physical burdens with those around you because you should be stoic. I cried listening to the chapter on the undertreatment of depression in our homeless and drug addicted communities. How they are denied treatment since they are pre-judged as being failures due to their homelessness and drug abuse which are seen as problems and not the symptoms of mental illness.

I leave you with this quote from the text:

“There is a moment, if you slip or trip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, faction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there's a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth. With the depression, your vision narrows and begins to close down; it is like trying to watch TV through terrible static, where you can sort of see the picture but not really; where you cannot ever see people's faces, except almost if there is a close-up; where nothing has edges. The air seems thick and resistant, as though it were full of mushed-up bread. Becoming depressed is like going blind, the darkness at first gradual, then encompassing; it is like going deaf, hearing less and less until a terrible silence is all around you, until you cannot make any sound of your own to penetrate the quiet. It is like feeling your clothing slowly turning into wood on your body, a stiffness in the elbows and the knees progressing to a terrible weight and an isolating immobility that will atrophy you and in time destroy you."

As a side note, “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, has won {him} fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and is being published in 22 languages. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.“