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The Noonday Demon
An Atlas of Depression
Andrew Solomon examines depression as an illness, a lived ordeal, a cultural category, and a public problem. Beginning with his own severe depressive episodes, he moves outward through interviews with other sufferers, clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and people working within religious or traditional healing systems. The result combines memoir, reportage, medical history, social analysis, and philosophical inquiry. Rather than offering a single explanation, Solomon studies the interaction of biology, experience, poverty, stigma, treatment, family relationships, and individual will. He considers medication, psychotherapy, alternative approaches, suicide, addiction, political responses, and the unequal conditions under which people seek care. The book’s central achievement is its refusal to reduce depression either to ordinary sadness or to a purely chemical malfunction. It presents the condition as at once bodily and psychological, private and social—an experience that can erode…