Fromans Folio: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

"Depression is when nothing matters. Sadness is when everything matters." - Gloria Steinem

Every once in a while you encounter a book in which the author seems to capture the thoughts fluttering around in your brain, smack them on the page and give them shape and form. For me, Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression is just such a book.

A tour de force of cultural and anthropological exploration, The Noonday Demon is by Solomon's own admission, the kind of book he wished had been in existence when he encountered his first bought of serious depression. [He also had a major episode while writing the book].

I've been reading a number of books on depression in the last while in order to make some sense of my own experiences with this condition. Life breeds such attempts to understand one's own dabilitation and the victories over them. Is it sadness or depression? How do we reconcile ourselves to life's essential meaninglessness? Why do humans, versus other animals, appear to have a sense of their own emotional existence? Solomon dives in and swims the murky waters of inquiry, giving his own unique take on all these questions and more.

The book is apologetically huge in scope, as true a cross sectional overview of a subject as I have ever encountered. Solomon examines depression in various contexts such as Breakdowns, Treatments, Populations, Addiction, Suicide, History, Politics and Evolution, just to name a few.

Yet as objective as Noonday Demon is in some respects, it is also a searingly personal work. Solomon spares little detail in examining his own experience of depression and the behaviors it drove and vice versa. Solomon seems so hellbent on driving for empathy and understanding of depression's cruelty, that it is at times difficult to read his extremely intimate level of revelation. Certainly, Solomon's description of his mother's suicide is one of the most touching yet terrifying things I have ever read.

This is a book I would recommend to anyone, without reservation, whether they or anyone in their lives had experienced depression or not. I think that time will eventually consider this a vital volume of work in future, perhaps one of the 21st century's greatest.

Yes it's that good. And Fromans is gettin' on the bandwagon now y'all.