"Depression is the flaw in love."
Damn. What a way to start, what a way to sum up 500 pages of unrelenting truth about the large and most pervasive failure of the human condition. Solomon takes us step-by-step through his own depression but shows us its many other colors through a wide range of interviews from those who are sent to the psychiatric ward in a cycle, to those who are too ashamed to tell even their spouse.
Depression is impossible to pin down. To describe one aspect of it is to ignore the thousands of others. To say that it is a "chemical imbalance" is to ignore the thoughts and responses to those thoughts that can be manipulated by therapy. To say it is all in the head is to ignore the millions of people with "perfect lives" that can hardly get out of bed.
I long thought that depression was a consequence of our modern world: we eat like shit, sit like shit, and interact like shit. No wonder our brains behave like shit, right? No. The Noonday Demon, Solomon assures us, has haunted every civilization and every society. It was isolated and its shadowy nature understood in ancient civilizations. It is summoned wherever and whenever a fallible human brain mashes its own gears.
It isn't genetic, not entirely. I have been reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene concurrently. In it, Mukherjee refers to a story of his aging father who slips from a rocking chair and unleashes a cascading series of symptoms that leave him incontinent and in-and-out of dementia. The hypertension that caused this was genetic, yes. But if the chair had been sturdier? The rocking a tinge less violent? Would he be alright?
And so we see the same with depression. It too is impacted by dozens, if not hundreds, of genes. Yet, the best guess is that even the most genetically gifted human would be laid low like Job if enough horrible, damaging stress was applied to his psyche.
I've also been worried in the past that the Internet was unleashing depression on the world: "depression as a meme" is not discussed in the book. Andrew Solomon does not consider that entire internet communities could be formed around Spongebob jokes where the punchline is suicide. (Both were in their infancy when he was writing the book). My fears may not be ungrounded- look at copy-cat suicides or the aftershocks of The Sorrows of Young Werther- but Solomon shows in interviews with support groups and with lone individuals that what's worse than a depressed individual reading memes about how all their friends are probably depressed too is thinking that they are a lone freak.
As they say, "Representation matters".
Depression, because of its many heads and forms, could be called the cancer of the soul. Yet, cancer fails to truly enter one arena that forms around depression: the socio-political. If Trump and Congress were to renew their war on cancer tomorrow, there would be no change in deaths for quite some time. If Trump and Congress were to start a war on depression, they would be able to save millions of souls and thousands of lives in a few days. The existential stresses and value systems that capitalism engenders is a natural depression-carcinogen. Cancer victims, except for a few behavior-based cancers victims, are rarely treated the same way for coming into contact with an unlucky substance. In this Western, Christianized society, we blame those whom we make sick:
The world will always have skin cancer as long as UVA light is coming from the sky, but Western society is one of the only society that holds your skin to a UVA spotlight and blames you when your skin rebels.
The Noonday Demon is the best book I have read on depression. It is concise- each of the 500 pages is used to its fullest effect- and it is logical. It builds the case that this amorphous, vicious concept of depression is an interconnected, manageable whole. It connects the different permutations to the different treatments to the different victims and the social scaffolding that does or does not treat them.
If you are looking to upgrade your understanding of depression, mental health, or just the world, I strongly recommend you pick it up.
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