Book Reviews

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Solomon, Andrew. New York: Scribner, 2001. (Hardback, 576 pages, $28.00)

As its title implies, this book approaches depression from all directions, from historical and medical terms to social, political, and economic impact. The reader learns about the growing importance of depression, an ancient malady that is steadily increasing throughout the world. Mr. Solomon travels to Greenland, Senegal, and Cambodia to report how depression is viewed and treated in various cultures, as well as in Western society. Numerous treatment modalities are surveyed: from our standard drugs, psychotherapy, and ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) to the many experimental and alternative therapies, including sleep deprivation, psychosurgery, and homeopathy. In fact, in the chapter entitled “Alternatives to Treatment,” Mr. Solomon discusses support groups, citing DRADA as one of the organizations facilitating such groups (though DRADA considers support groups as supplemental to professional treatment). Mr. Solomon notes that DRADA “publishes a particularly good newsletter called Smooth Sailing.”

Noonday Demon, like William Styron’s Darkness Visible and Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, is a memoir of the author’s illness, the details of daily strains and anguish that turn everyday living into unrelenting challenge, distress, and despair. The book is lengthy, reflecting the monumental amount of research done in preparation. Yet the author’s articulate style and wit continue to intrigue the reader through the myriad of issues addressed, including suicide, addiction, and treatment.

Mr. Solomon uses anecdotes from his own life and the lives of hundreds of people he interviewed while writing the book. He does not judge, yet he is not afraid to expound his theories. For instance, in the chapter on suicide, Mr. Solomon distinguishes between “wanting to be dead, wanting to die, and wanting to kill yourself. Most people from time to time wished to be dead, null, beyond sorrow. In depression, many want to die to undertake the active change from where they are, to be freed from the affliction on consciousness. To want to kill yourself, however, requires . . . a great deal of energy and a strong will in addition to a belief in the permanence of the present bad moment and at least a touch of impulsivity.” Mr. Solomon is able to verbalize what many other people suffering with the illness are not.
At times, Mr. Solomon seems to purposely shock and titillate the reader. Although perhaps cathartic for him, the details of his family’s euthanasia assistance for his mother, a cancer patient who killed herself at age 58, contributes nothing to a book on depression. Perhaps this section would be more appropriate in another New Yorker article—like the one that launched the writing of this book.

The Noonday Demon has a broad appeal not only to mental health professionals and others touched by the illness, but to the general population as well. In fact, the book won the 2001 nonfiction National Book Award. Mr. Solomon ends his book with a chapter on hope. He notes, “the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality, and my life as I write this is vital, even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again…Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely and sometimes against the moment’s reason, to be alive.”

By Marion Ehrlich

Ed. note: Sallie Mink and David Seaman contributed to this review.

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