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4.09 AVERAGE
4.09 AVERAGE
The Noonday Demon review: depression embraced, calmed and then studied…
THE NOONDAY DEMON
By “Andrew Solomon”
The noonday demon digs deep into the personal history of Solomon as he narrates, brilliantly and terrifyingly, his own agonizing experience of depression. He also portrays the pain of others, in different cultures and societies whose lives have been altered by depression and uncovers the historical, social, biological chemical, and medical implications of this crippling disease.
I would start this review as Solomon started this book, with my own, mild yet appalling, encounter with depression: I had fought it before as well the year before. It may have lasted for a couple of months, but then it went away. I got used to the life away from my family and friends and my hometown, studying in a university with people I never knew until this point in my life. I believed that just the way it came, it has lifted and I am over with it. To name it depression at that time was absurd; maybe it was just homesickness at worst, I thought.
Then the next year, I left home again for the university after spending the 3-month summer vacation at home. And just like last year, it started to feel gloomy again. The matters were even worse this time around because a few friends that I had made last year and shared my hostel room with, had left. I was alone again, just like the first time I came here. And soon enough, things started to get ugly bad. Though I was deeply sad and felt empty inside, like the life had been sucked out of me, I now started to have moments where I would get afraid of no reason at all. I would start shaking and I was worried to the most extreme of levels for no reason that I could think of. They were ‘panic attacks’ and ‘anxiety’, I later came to know, but at that time, I knew no medical terms regarding the mental diseases. Like most other people, mental disease, I thought, were the ones that make you crazy; or that depression was a disease too luxurious to have for a boy from a middle-class family like me.
Sure enough, I thought it would pass off like the previous time, and everyone I talked to about this, told me the same thing, which made me believe it even more. But it was also taken so lightly by everyone that after sometime, it started to irritate me; I felt like I was being taken lightly that whatever I said seemed to not bother others. And finally it got the worst, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I, then, against my extreme frugality, which is a symptom of my depression, went to seek a psychiatrist and paid a hefty 3,000PKRs, which as I had feared, worsened my state even more. My mind played this trick on me that no medicine would cure me now because it has gotten so worse, and since antidepressants take time to function, I got played into that trick. Funny though, I asked my friend to come with me to the doctor’s appointment, and when he saw me, he laughed and shrugged that I didn’t look sick at all and that I was ‘completely fine’.
And that’s one of the threatening sides of depression: others can’t see it or believe it, and even you yourself don’t believe it at times as well. But as you go through it while neglecting it, and shrugging it off as something too insignificant to shatter someone as strong as you, you get shattered even worse. It is dark in depths of it and it completely covers you; and through it or rather with it, you see that defeating realities of life in general, but with more harshness and urgency: you will die, there is a lot of suffering, none of it matters, you are pathetic, why is that bagger still alive, why do people laugh, why people can’t see that they are alone, why people are blind to the indifference of everyone. Depression not only banishes you of the worldly joys, but makes you rather devilishly wise to see that everyone are faking theirs as well. “It is not that you are lonely,” writes Solomon, “but that everyone else is too.”
Of course I understood none of these while I was suffering for the 5 months with this disabling disease, because that’s what it did to me: it disabled me. But once I came out of it, slowly, and thank God and me and all those who helped me come out of it, I began to thirst to solve this enigma of depression. I first heard Solomon during the early stages of my depression. I discovered this book and even read some of it, I listened to his talks about depression, but quite frankly, none of it worked for me at that time, just like nothing else at all worked me for. There also remained this lingering fear that this noonday demon would come again, because as the name suggests, it attacks you in the brightness of the day, it does not fear. This worked as a motivator for me to start reading this book, and later I even purchased the paperback copy of it for 1,700PKRs, and I wasn’t bothered at all – where once I measured the route to my university from my hostel to see which is the nearest, even if by a minute or two, so that I could save some 10PKRs on petrol.
In this book, Solomon doesn’t only talk about depression, he lives with it and lives with all kinds of depression as well. He has written about depression in almost all ways you can even imagine writing about it. He hasn’t only used his own misery with depression as a way to reach to the core of depression, but rather as a motivator to go out and reach people who have suffered from it in almost all walks of life and in almost all other ways, mildly or worse.
As you flip one page after another, you get sucked into this book by the insights it offers through the stories it has to tell. You read Dickenson’s darkly insightful poems about her struggles with depression many years in the past, and also about many characters that are suffering from it now. And slowly your burdens, by the shared knowledge about this disease, seems less awful in comparison; you begin to feel sympathy rather than rage.
Solomon has done a great deal of research and reached out to many people for writing this book in this fulfilling way; and I don’t know this because I read an article about it, or that it is written on the cover on this book, but by reading it. Solomon’s story, after you finish reading, is but only one of the many stories that you read this book. Only such selflessness can bring about a book this healing in nature to a disease otherwise too hard to bear.
In the early four chapters of this book (depression, breakdowns, treatments & alternatives) Solomon quickly attends to the matter at hand: depression. And tries to give the patient, or reader, a sense that he hasn’t actually gone mad and that his suffering is shared by many across the world. And these four chapters are so philosophically insightful and written by Solomon with such kindness that the readers feel understood and therefore loved – here’s the calmness that they sought amidst the chaos that they had been going through.
Solomon was also very much aware that pain or suffering is very subjective; and therefore it is super hard to even come close to the realization that what the other person is going through. But the stories you read in this book horrifies you and brings you to tears at more than one point. While he has done justice to the stories of others by sharing it in such intimate ways with the readers, on the other hand, he has also offered many types of solution to depression and thus, given hope to many that you can come out of it, or at least suffer in a more manageable way until you do.
The following chapters, then, start to expand the topic so much so that the patient’s own misery seems almost bearable. And not only that, these chapters get the readers fascinated as they come to know so much about their disease where until now no one even believed it even existed. You explore about its history, addictions along with depression, about the link between poverty and depression, about suicide and the haunting stories around it, and about the politics regarding depression and politics around its treatment. This extensive knowledge works not as a medicine but a therapy in session.
All of these chapters are thorough and complete in way that you never actually thought about. The way Solomon has approached each chapters and explored its almost every angle is really something you awe at. In the chapter, Suicide, he has been very open and true at the same time, to the story of his own mother’s death, because of cancer, and in some ways, rather her suicide. While at first such suicide, which I won’t spoil, might seem unthinkable even, but as Solomon researches about this utmost saddening act of taking one’s life, and in turn, gives his own explanations about it, it then doesn’t seem so excruciating. You than begin to understand the suicidal people more in depth, and sometimes, even understand their actions.
But through all these chapters, you never for once, feel disengaged or put off in any sense. Although you are learning things that may not be directly related to you, all of it is however related to the disease that you are suffering from. And knowing about all of it doesn’t overwhelm you as you might expect, but rather gives you a more complete and thorough sketch about your suffering and the illness you are suffering from.
These different perspectives and stories about depression is in itself a healing process to the unheard and misunderstood patients of depression. While it may not tell you the secret about how not to get depressed as most of the people and videos on the internet tell you to, but it teaches you, through including you into the circle of these sufferers, a rather important and vital skill: how to suffer in depression or even better how to learn from it.
While you first hate it: the depression, the lifelessness, the lack of energy and interest, your poor diet, the guilt, the weakness, the cries, the loneliness, the hopelessness, the suicidal thoughts, or the life itself with all its grandness, this book first and foremost soothes you, and then teaches you about what is happening to you. And by the end, even invites you to love your depression and learn from the dark wisdoms of it. This book is an education on its own.
But to be able to do this, you need to walk a fine line between sounding wise or sounding a madman, and Solomon does that perfectly. He never tries to side himself against or with depression; against the unbearable and insufferable pains of it or with the insightful and uncommon wisdoms of it. He walks that fine line for the 576 page. And when he does, at the end of the book, declare that he loves his depression, you clearly see what he means – I am grateful for it too now.
The amount of research and effort put into this book is more than worthy of appreciation or awards. As you have suffered from depression, and while you are suffering from it, to write the accounts of you painful experiences and to have the courage to listen to the even more horrifying stories of others take some courage that not everyone possesses. Or to go through the burdensome work of extensive research about this topic while being crippled by depression is profoundly incredible.
But I will say this, that in doing so, Solomon felt joy and found purpose, not only to understand his own misery but to help others understand theirs. This is a service both to oneself and also a rare one to those who can’t help themselves. It was a service to me!
An Excerpt:
“Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills.”
“To regret my depression would be to regret the most fundamental part of myself.”
This is such a complete, groundbreaking, preaching, and vital book for all those who suffer from depression, which is most of us today. Solomon has put years of his life into writing this book and it serves us in the best way possible. Such books are rare; rare because only few are successful at dissolving the reader into its pages and put them back out after they have finished reading, as a more aware person about the thesis that they started reading this book for; it consoles you wholly. Thank you, Solomon – thank you for understanding me and in turn making me capable of understanding myself. Your book is fully and well received.
My praise for the novel:
Consoling, complete, and powerful; I am specifically better because of this book.
A rare masterpiece!
Rating: 5/5 *****
A review by: Ejaz Hussain
August 29, 2019
THE NOONDAY DEMON
By “Andrew Solomon”
The noonday demon digs deep into the personal history of Solomon as he narrates, brilliantly and terrifyingly, his own agonizing experience of depression. He also portrays the pain of others, in different cultures and societies whose lives have been altered by depression and uncovers the historical, social, biological chemical, and medical implications of this crippling disease.
I would start this review as Solomon started this book, with my own, mild yet appalling, encounter with depression: I had fought it before as well the year before. It may have lasted for a couple of months, but then it went away. I got used to the life away from my family and friends and my hometown, studying in a university with people I never knew until this point in my life. I believed that just the way it came, it has lifted and I am over with it. To name it depression at that time was absurd; maybe it was just homesickness at worst, I thought.
Then the next year, I left home again for the university after spending the 3-month summer vacation at home. And just like last year, it started to feel gloomy again. The matters were even worse this time around because a few friends that I had made last year and shared my hostel room with, had left. I was alone again, just like the first time I came here. And soon enough, things started to get ugly bad. Though I was deeply sad and felt empty inside, like the life had been sucked out of me, I now started to have moments where I would get afraid of no reason at all. I would start shaking and I was worried to the most extreme of levels for no reason that I could think of. They were ‘panic attacks’ and ‘anxiety’, I later came to know, but at that time, I knew no medical terms regarding the mental diseases. Like most other people, mental disease, I thought, were the ones that make you crazy; or that depression was a disease too luxurious to have for a boy from a middle-class family like me.
Sure enough, I thought it would pass off like the previous time, and everyone I talked to about this, told me the same thing, which made me believe it even more. But it was also taken so lightly by everyone that after sometime, it started to irritate me; I felt like I was being taken lightly that whatever I said seemed to not bother others. And finally it got the worst, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I, then, against my extreme frugality, which is a symptom of my depression, went to seek a psychiatrist and paid a hefty 3,000PKRs, which as I had feared, worsened my state even more. My mind played this trick on me that no medicine would cure me now because it has gotten so worse, and since antidepressants take time to function, I got played into that trick. Funny though, I asked my friend to come with me to the doctor’s appointment, and when he saw me, he laughed and shrugged that I didn’t look sick at all and that I was ‘completely fine’.
And that’s one of the threatening sides of depression: others can’t see it or believe it, and even you yourself don’t believe it at times as well. But as you go through it while neglecting it, and shrugging it off as something too insignificant to shatter someone as strong as you, you get shattered even worse. It is dark in depths of it and it completely covers you; and through it or rather with it, you see that defeating realities of life in general, but with more harshness and urgency: you will die, there is a lot of suffering, none of it matters, you are pathetic, why is that bagger still alive, why do people laugh, why people can’t see that they are alone, why people are blind to the indifference of everyone. Depression not only banishes you of the worldly joys, but makes you rather devilishly wise to see that everyone are faking theirs as well. “It is not that you are lonely,” writes Solomon, “but that everyone else is too.”
Of course I understood none of these while I was suffering for the 5 months with this disabling disease, because that’s what it did to me: it disabled me. But once I came out of it, slowly, and thank God and me and all those who helped me come out of it, I began to thirst to solve this enigma of depression. I first heard Solomon during the early stages of my depression. I discovered this book and even read some of it, I listened to his talks about depression, but quite frankly, none of it worked for me at that time, just like nothing else at all worked me for. There also remained this lingering fear that this noonday demon would come again, because as the name suggests, it attacks you in the brightness of the day, it does not fear. This worked as a motivator for me to start reading this book, and later I even purchased the paperback copy of it for 1,700PKRs, and I wasn’t bothered at all – where once I measured the route to my university from my hostel to see which is the nearest, even if by a minute or two, so that I could save some 10PKRs on petrol.
In this book, Solomon doesn’t only talk about depression, he lives with it and lives with all kinds of depression as well. He has written about depression in almost all ways you can even imagine writing about it. He hasn’t only used his own misery with depression as a way to reach to the core of depression, but rather as a motivator to go out and reach people who have suffered from it in almost all walks of life and in almost all other ways, mildly or worse.
As you flip one page after another, you get sucked into this book by the insights it offers through the stories it has to tell. You read Dickenson’s darkly insightful poems about her struggles with depression many years in the past, and also about many characters that are suffering from it now. And slowly your burdens, by the shared knowledge about this disease, seems less awful in comparison; you begin to feel sympathy rather than rage.
Solomon has done a great deal of research and reached out to many people for writing this book in this fulfilling way; and I don’t know this because I read an article about it, or that it is written on the cover on this book, but by reading it. Solomon’s story, after you finish reading, is but only one of the many stories that you read this book. Only such selflessness can bring about a book this healing in nature to a disease otherwise too hard to bear.
In the early four chapters of this book (depression, breakdowns, treatments & alternatives) Solomon quickly attends to the matter at hand: depression. And tries to give the patient, or reader, a sense that he hasn’t actually gone mad and that his suffering is shared by many across the world. And these four chapters are so philosophically insightful and written by Solomon with such kindness that the readers feel understood and therefore loved – here’s the calmness that they sought amidst the chaos that they had been going through.
Solomon was also very much aware that pain or suffering is very subjective; and therefore it is super hard to even come close to the realization that what the other person is going through. But the stories you read in this book horrifies you and brings you to tears at more than one point. While he has done justice to the stories of others by sharing it in such intimate ways with the readers, on the other hand, he has also offered many types of solution to depression and thus, given hope to many that you can come out of it, or at least suffer in a more manageable way until you do.
The following chapters, then, start to expand the topic so much so that the patient’s own misery seems almost bearable. And not only that, these chapters get the readers fascinated as they come to know so much about their disease where until now no one even believed it even existed. You explore about its history, addictions along with depression, about the link between poverty and depression, about suicide and the haunting stories around it, and about the politics regarding depression and politics around its treatment. This extensive knowledge works not as a medicine but a therapy in session.
All of these chapters are thorough and complete in way that you never actually thought about. The way Solomon has approached each chapters and explored its almost every angle is really something you awe at. In the chapter, Suicide, he has been very open and true at the same time, to the story of his own mother’s death, because of cancer, and in some ways, rather her suicide. While at first such suicide, which I won’t spoil, might seem unthinkable even, but as Solomon researches about this utmost saddening act of taking one’s life, and in turn, gives his own explanations about it, it then doesn’t seem so excruciating. You than begin to understand the suicidal people more in depth, and sometimes, even understand their actions.
But through all these chapters, you never for once, feel disengaged or put off in any sense. Although you are learning things that may not be directly related to you, all of it is however related to the disease that you are suffering from. And knowing about all of it doesn’t overwhelm you as you might expect, but rather gives you a more complete and thorough sketch about your suffering and the illness you are suffering from.
These different perspectives and stories about depression is in itself a healing process to the unheard and misunderstood patients of depression. While it may not tell you the secret about how not to get depressed as most of the people and videos on the internet tell you to, but it teaches you, through including you into the circle of these sufferers, a rather important and vital skill: how to suffer in depression or even better how to learn from it.
While you first hate it: the depression, the lifelessness, the lack of energy and interest, your poor diet, the guilt, the weakness, the cries, the loneliness, the hopelessness, the suicidal thoughts, or the life itself with all its grandness, this book first and foremost soothes you, and then teaches you about what is happening to you. And by the end, even invites you to love your depression and learn from the dark wisdoms of it. This book is an education on its own.
But to be able to do this, you need to walk a fine line between sounding wise or sounding a madman, and Solomon does that perfectly. He never tries to side himself against or with depression; against the unbearable and insufferable pains of it or with the insightful and uncommon wisdoms of it. He walks that fine line for the 576 page. And when he does, at the end of the book, declare that he loves his depression, you clearly see what he means – I am grateful for it too now.
The amount of research and effort put into this book is more than worthy of appreciation or awards. As you have suffered from depression, and while you are suffering from it, to write the accounts of you painful experiences and to have the courage to listen to the even more horrifying stories of others take some courage that not everyone possesses. Or to go through the burdensome work of extensive research about this topic while being crippled by depression is profoundly incredible.
But I will say this, that in doing so, Solomon felt joy and found purpose, not only to understand his own misery but to help others understand theirs. This is a service both to oneself and also a rare one to those who can’t help themselves. It was a service to me!
An Excerpt:
“Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills.”
“To regret my depression would be to regret the most fundamental part of myself.”
This is such a complete, groundbreaking, preaching, and vital book for all those who suffer from depression, which is most of us today. Solomon has put years of his life into writing this book and it serves us in the best way possible. Such books are rare; rare because only few are successful at dissolving the reader into its pages and put them back out after they have finished reading, as a more aware person about the thesis that they started reading this book for; it consoles you wholly. Thank you, Solomon – thank you for understanding me and in turn making me capable of understanding myself. Your book is fully and well received.
My praise for the novel:
Consoling, complete, and powerful; I am specifically better because of this book.
A rare masterpiece!
Rating: 5/5 *****
A review by: Ejaz Hussain
August 29, 2019
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I'm giving this a three as a sign that I've spent longer with it than I imagined I would yet never finished it officially. It's a book good enough that it's inspired me to pick it up from libraries and LibGen at various points to chew over individual chapters. I finally picked it up from a bookstore last week. Trying to actually finish the book, I ran into a wall. Like any Atlas, Noonday Demon covers territory the traveller doesn't need explained. On the one hand seeing one's experience of depression validated and affirmed is a reassuring reading experience. But, on the other, these experiences sit in tension with so many discordant ones unrelated to my own and my family's struggles with mental illness.
In Noonday Demon, Solomon convincingly argues depression exists and is constrained on many levels of human experience. It is not just a biological, psychological, cultural, or spiritual state of being, but some horrendous hodgepodge of all of these parts of existence. To Solomon, depression distorts. It makes the individual's relation to reality more tenuous. The book is filled with story's of people truly disabled by the disease. This is the book's key strength. It breaks down what an all-encompassing experience mental illness is and why that makes it so difficult to talk to in our superficial wellness culture. We reference it, use it as a metaphor, express sympathy for those suffering from it, but rarely do we sit with it and let it speak. Solomon does just that and that's worthwhile. It's a consideration of mental illness done in a more thoughtful way than most.
Unfortunately, this does not make up for the fact that the actual reading experience is quite the slog. Solomon has this bad tic that when he's run out of things to say about a given facet of the illness, he'll quote some doctor he interviewed at so and so institution. The expert take is sometimes enlightening, sometimes blah, but it always stands in weird contrast to the more narrative driven descriptions of the disease he's trying to work out.
This book has a lot of highlights, though, even if it overall is a lot to get through. The chapter on how cultural expectations of wellness and illness control what we identify as depression is a stand out. Looking at an Inuit population in Greenland, he notices how many symptoms of depression are woven into the daily life of the people. They simply have bigger fish, literally, to fry. The quiet suffering that never gets named, does get named by Solomon, and he explores how even cultures most reticent to discussing their feelings and interior lives invent ritual to manage emotions.
Overall, I liked what I got out of it which was a sensitive and detailed portrait of a horrible condition. I liked Solomon's careful prose and compassionate analysis. I didn't like how much the book is bogged down by filler in the name of rendering the most full picture of depression. It's sometimes a struggle for Solomon to get out of the medical weeds and get back to the book's bread and butter, personal narratives of lives lost and regained over and over again to a disease that, as the book clearly shows, we are just beginning as a species to understand the complexity of.
In Noonday Demon, Solomon convincingly argues depression exists and is constrained on many levels of human experience. It is not just a biological, psychological, cultural, or spiritual state of being, but some horrendous hodgepodge of all of these parts of existence. To Solomon, depression distorts. It makes the individual's relation to reality more tenuous. The book is filled with story's of people truly disabled by the disease. This is the book's key strength. It breaks down what an all-encompassing experience mental illness is and why that makes it so difficult to talk to in our superficial wellness culture. We reference it, use it as a metaphor, express sympathy for those suffering from it, but rarely do we sit with it and let it speak. Solomon does just that and that's worthwhile. It's a consideration of mental illness done in a more thoughtful way than most.
Unfortunately, this does not make up for the fact that the actual reading experience is quite the slog. Solomon has this bad tic that when he's run out of things to say about a given facet of the illness, he'll quote some doctor he interviewed at so and so institution. The expert take is sometimes enlightening, sometimes blah, but it always stands in weird contrast to the more narrative driven descriptions of the disease he's trying to work out.
This book has a lot of highlights, though, even if it overall is a lot to get through. The chapter on how cultural expectations of wellness and illness control what we identify as depression is a stand out. Looking at an Inuit population in Greenland, he notices how many symptoms of depression are woven into the daily life of the people. They simply have bigger fish, literally, to fry. The quiet suffering that never gets named, does get named by Solomon, and he explores how even cultures most reticent to discussing their feelings and interior lives invent ritual to manage emotions.
Overall, I liked what I got out of it which was a sensitive and detailed portrait of a horrible condition. I liked Solomon's careful prose and compassionate analysis. I didn't like how much the book is bogged down by filler in the name of rendering the most full picture of depression. It's sometimes a struggle for Solomon to get out of the medical weeds and get back to the book's bread and butter, personal narratives of lives lost and regained over and over again to a disease that, as the book clearly shows, we are just beginning as a species to understand the complexity of.
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
O recomand celor care nu au avut niciodată depresie și care nu cunosc persoane cu boli psihice. Este o carte care te face mai puțin ignorant. Te face să îți înghiți cuvintele atunci când ești pe cale să îi spui unui om depresiv că "Și tu te simți trist câteodată." sau că "Nu este suficient de puternic".
Chiar dacă nu am avut niciun episod depresiv, am cunoscut persoane care se confruntă cu astfel de probleme și am avut probleme legate de anxietate. Mă regăsesc într-o foarte mică măsură în această carte, dar știu că este o carte de care România are nevoie. L-am rugat pe doctorul meu să îmi trateze anxietatea și am fost refuzată. Acest lucru a rezultat într-un nou atac de panică. Îmi doresc ca doctorul meu să citească această carte și să trateze corespunzător pacienții cu astfel de probleme.
Nu este o carte care te ajută să te vindeci de depresie, nu aduce informații noi decât într-o mică măsură, dar te face să deschizi ochii. Te face să înțelegi că depresia este reală, te face să iei depresia în considerare și să te ții la distanță de ea. Este ca și cum ai citi o carte despre cancerul de piele...nu te vindecă, nu îți aduce informații suplimentare, dar te face să te gândești de două ori înainte să mergi la plajă fără cremă de protecție.
Cred că dacă citești această carte atunci când treci printr-o depresie gravă te afunzi mai adânc în starea ta, asta presupunând că ești în stare să citești ceva. Cred totuși că ultimul capitol este foarte bine structurat și că ajută întrucâtva atunci când demonul de la miezul zilei începe să pună stăpânire pe mintea ta.
Știu că aceasta este o carte puternică și o carte care poate schimba lumea, dar are si tendința de a te face puțin mai deprimat și puțin mai trist. Statisticile despre depresie și suicid nu te fac deloc să te simți mai bine. O să am grijă cui recomand această carte și cui nu. Totuși, recunosc că lumea are nevoie de ea.
Chiar dacă nu am avut niciun episod depresiv, am cunoscut persoane care se confruntă cu astfel de probleme și am avut probleme legate de anxietate. Mă regăsesc într-o foarte mică măsură în această carte, dar știu că este o carte de care România are nevoie. L-am rugat pe doctorul meu să îmi trateze anxietatea și am fost refuzată. Acest lucru a rezultat într-un nou atac de panică. Îmi doresc ca doctorul meu să citească această carte și să trateze corespunzător pacienții cu astfel de probleme.
Nu este o carte care te ajută să te vindeci de depresie, nu aduce informații noi decât într-o mică măsură, dar te face să deschizi ochii. Te face să înțelegi că depresia este reală, te face să iei depresia în considerare și să te ții la distanță de ea. Este ca și cum ai citi o carte despre cancerul de piele...nu te vindecă, nu îți aduce informații suplimentare, dar te face să te gândești de două ori înainte să mergi la plajă fără cremă de protecție.
Cred că dacă citești această carte atunci când treci printr-o depresie gravă te afunzi mai adânc în starea ta, asta presupunând că ești în stare să citești ceva. Cred totuși că ultimul capitol este foarte bine structurat și că ajută întrucâtva atunci când demonul de la miezul zilei începe să pună stăpânire pe mintea ta.
Știu că aceasta este o carte puternică și o carte care poate schimba lumea, dar are si tendința de a te face puțin mai deprimat și puțin mai trist. Statisticile despre depresie și suicid nu te fac deloc să te simți mai bine. O să am grijă cui recomand această carte și cui nu. Totuși, recunosc că lumea are nevoie de ea.
Comprehensive, academic, and fiercely personal and human to an extent that made it hard to read sometimes.
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
"The Noonday Demon" is a book that people who suffer from depression should consider reading. The author, Andrew Solomon, while not a psychologist/psychiatrist/medical professional has suffered from major depression for most of his life and he talks about his journey through the ups and downs. He includes interviews with other people who all fall on different places on the mental health spectrum. One of the things his book deals with that many others in the field don't is the link between depression and poverty, which I felt was important to include. The other good point about this book is that the author discusses the differences in how men and women suffer from depression, which was very illuminating for me as most books don't go into a detailed description of gender and depression.
Some readers who have a more acute/situational/mild depression will read the author's story and reflect that they do have a lot to be grateful for, because depression in its most extreme form can cause many things a person wouldn't expect, such as loss of a sense of humour or losing the ability to become happy at anything. The one drawback to this book for me was that it was a doorstopper and felt at times like a slog to get through, but there were useful nuggets sprinkled between each section.
Other sections include the history of depression and how mental illness was treated historically, depression from an evolutionary standpoint, the pharmaceutical aspects of drugs that are used to treat depression, and other treatments such as electroshock therapy, surgeries, and EMDR among other techniques. For those who prefer more scientific chapters, they will also benefit from this book.
It's a different kind of reading experience than the prescriptive "how to" books of which people who suffer from depression have read in the thousands. Rather than telling the reader "This is how to get over depression", it's unique to hear from the perspective of someone who has firsthand knowledge of depression rather than a mental health professional who, although they certainly do offer useful strategies and advice in their own texts and are basing this on years of experience with depressed people in the field, may be at a loss to convincingly take the reader's hand, squeeze it gently and say "I know your pain because I deal with it every single day, too."
While you won't get any coping mechanisms or strategies or points for moving forward, Andrew Solomon's books may help you understand more about your depression and if nothing else, give you the important perspective to show that you are definitely not alone with this disease, you should absolutely take it seriously and take steps to help yourself, and that if you're taking steps to help yourself, there IS light at the end of the tunnel.
Some readers who have a more acute/situational/mild depression will read the author's story and reflect that they do have a lot to be grateful for, because depression in its most extreme form can cause many things a person wouldn't expect, such as loss of a sense of humour or losing the ability to become happy at anything. The one drawback to this book for me was that it was a doorstopper and felt at times like a slog to get through, but there were useful nuggets sprinkled between each section.
Other sections include the history of depression and how mental illness was treated historically, depression from an evolutionary standpoint, the pharmaceutical aspects of drugs that are used to treat depression, and other treatments such as electroshock therapy, surgeries, and EMDR among other techniques. For those who prefer more scientific chapters, they will also benefit from this book.
It's a different kind of reading experience than the prescriptive "how to" books of which people who suffer from depression have read in the thousands. Rather than telling the reader "This is how to get over depression", it's unique to hear from the perspective of someone who has firsthand knowledge of depression rather than a mental health professional who, although they certainly do offer useful strategies and advice in their own texts and are basing this on years of experience with depressed people in the field, may be at a loss to convincingly take the reader's hand, squeeze it gently and say "I know your pain because I deal with it every single day, too."
While you won't get any coping mechanisms or strategies or points for moving forward, Andrew Solomon's books may help you understand more about your depression and if nothing else, give you the important perspective to show that you are definitely not alone with this disease, you should absolutely take it seriously and take steps to help yourself, and that if you're taking steps to help yourself, there IS light at the end of the tunnel.
„Depresia este punctul nevralgic al iubirii. Pentru a fi făpturi care iubesc, trebuie să fim făpturi care pot cădea pradă disperării din cauza unei pierderi, iar depresia e mecanismul acelei disperări. Când se instalează, degradează eul şi, în cele din urmă, eclipsează capacitatea de a da ori de a primi afecţiune. E lăuntrica noastră singurătate manifestă. Ea distruge nu numai legătura cu ceilalţi, ci şi capacitatea de a fi împăcat când eşti doar cu tine însuţi. Iubirea, chiar dacă nu are rolul de a ne păzi de depresie, este ceea ce protejează mintea şi o apără de sine. Medicamentele şi psihoterapia pot să regenereze această protecţie, făcând să fie mai uşor să iubeşti şi să fii iubit, şi de aceea dau roade. Când sunt în dispoziţie bună, unii se iubesc pe ei înşişi, unii îi iubesc pe alţii, unii iubesc munca, iar unii îl iubesc pe Dumnezeu: oricare dintre aceste obiecte ale pasiunii poate furniza acel sens vital al scopului, care este opusul depresiei. Iubirea uită din când în când de noi, iar noi uităm de iubire. În depresie, devine de la sine înţeles lipsa de scop a oricărei iniţiative şi a fiecărei emoţii, lipsa de sens a vieţii înseşi. Singurul sentiment ce rămâne în această stare lipsită de iubire este lipsa de importanţă.”
emotional
informative
medium-paced