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The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

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Martyrdom in Humanity's Ongoing Emotional Jihad

By Christopher Caldwell
Posted Thursday, June 21, 2001, at 4:58 PM ET

Dear Jim,

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Maybe the things that puzzled you about Solomon's research were the same things that puzzled me. For one, the big reporting trips to Senegal, Greenland, and Cambodia don't add much. I wrote a couple days ago that Solomon had only one agenda: to attack those who don't think of depression as a real disease. But what gets his goat even more than those who dismiss depression is those who see it as another name for the self-indulgence of a bored leisure class. If the victims of the Khmer Rouge have it, he seems to be saying, it's not that.

In this sense, the reporting trips don't support--and even undermine--his point. The African visit describes a folkloric cure--interesting enough but inessential, hardly worth the schlep on journalistic terms. On the other two visits, Solomon describes populations whose "depression" is so hard to disentangle from other factors--in Greenland, isolation and the sun's disappearance for months on end; in Cambodia, a calamity of violence to which only a handful of episodes in history bear comparison--that it's not clear that whatever these people suffer from is the same disease Solomon has. If it is, then "disease" is the wrong word for it.

The weak link in this book is Solomon's interviewing. One is constantly reading passages and saying: People don't talk like this. A woman whose religion helps her keep depression at bay says, "The liturgy is like the wooden slats of a box; the texts of the Bible and especially of the Psalter are considered to be an extremely good box for holding experience. Going to church is a set of attentional practices that move you forward spiritually." Other passages are even more marked by technical terms used with inhuman precision and dependent clauses dropped into matter-of-fact statements with inhuman tidiness.

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I find myself surprised that Solomon is a novelist. As I mentioned on Tuesday, he has an excellent, interesting mind (or brain ... although it seems to matter less and less the more I read), but it's not a literary mind. The poetry he's chosen to include here adds little, either because it's bad (whether it comes from Jane Kenyon or his schizo-affective friend Angel Starkey) or because it's overly familiar ("Dover Beach") and simply shoehorned in. Virginia Woolf may have her place in a book on depression, but I distrust Solomon's claim to "love" her writing--a follow-the-leader enthusiasm that probably no one unaffectedly has.

Still, The Noonday Demon is not an anthology but an exposition, and as an exposition, it's rewarding. I had a hard time following Solomon's argument about the uses of grief until I recalled E.O. Wilson's old evolutionist speculation on why all societies have homosexuality. As I recall, it was that there were a lot of jobs for which the chief in a hunter-gatherer tribe would need a manly man who could be trusted not to sleep with the chief's wife. In this light, the depressive--who teaches his fellow men to value one another through the depths to which loss drives him--is not just a recurring type but an important figure. One begins to see the source of the sneaking pride in being a depressive that you and I detected in Solomon. There's something to be said for martyrdom in humanity's ongoing emotional jihad.

Best,
Chris

the book club:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6

Martyrdom in Humanity's Ongoing Emotional Jihad

By Christopher Caldwell
Posted Thursday, June 21, 2001, at 4:58 PM ET

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This week, Slate's Book Clubbers wade into Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Click here for an explanation of our format, here to read an excerpt, and here to buy the book.

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Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: One line in the piece "The chemical fetishism of newsweekly readers--the scientific folklore that depression's relationship to low serotonin, say, is as straightforward as diabetes's to low blood sugar--richly deserves such a slap" got a lot of attention. A couple of readers talked about diabetes and depression, here and here, and Mangar also took issue, below. Cato the Censor was more interested in the idea of taking pride in depression: "Contracting tuberculosis, for example, would not be occasion for pride because Keats shared this disease." Some readers gave their personal stories, below and here.]

If the idea that there's something else to depression besides just chemicals was a radical idea, a refreshing slap in the face, then mental health would look a lot different. We would be seeing a slow invasion of counselors (who talk to people and work on changing their thinking) into a world dominated by psychiatrist (who generally prescribe and monitor medication). In fact, it's a damn sight harder to get 15 minutes with a psychiatrist than an hour with a counselor, and medication is generally considered a "good adjunct" or "facilitator" to the work of therapy. Sure, meds help, but you're not likely to find a good psychiatrist who doesn't prescribe a healthy dose of counseling along with their Zoloft.

I'm curious to see where the writers come from on their pending discussion of evolution and depression. I have yet to read a convincing argument about the "use" of depression in an evolutionary sense. I've read some perfectly preposterous ones in the meantime, such as the "superorganism" concept put forth by Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle.

--Mangar

(To reply, click here.)

I am one of those chronically depressed people who the author writes about. I've been depressed since childhood, have attempted suicide, seen dozens of therapists, battled drug addiction, and have been prescribed levels of anti-depressants that are listed as overdoses in the medical literature. So I qualify as depressed, and yet have no interest in reading this book.

There are several reasons for this. One of the hallmarks of depression is despair. We depressives do not go in for self-help books---why bother? Anecdotes about fellow sufferers are of no interest to me. The fact that other people are equally miserable does nothing to make me feel better. If anything, it makes me feel worse. Anyhow, in my case, I feel that discussions about depression are irrelevant. Born with a congenital bone disease that has left me dwarfish and deformed, I have never had a girlfriend (or boyfriend) and nobody wants to hire me, despite my job skills. Frankly, faced with a lifetime of loneliness, ridicule, poverty and misery, depression seems to be the only sane attitude to have. And I suspect that many other depressed people feel the same way.

--Steinmetz

(To reply, click here.)

In my case (45 years old and suffering increasingly severe bouts of depression since early childhood) there is absolutely a direct relationship between events of significant loss and major depression. I don't suggest or believe this is true for all depressed people, but it's the foundational element of my trouble. And one more thing, related: I can easily name for you the one overwhelming emotion, or feeling, or whatever you want to call the thing depression is/has been for me, and that's this: Terror. Pure, horrific, terror, so unrelievedly painful I would repeat to myself (during episodes, one as long as 10 months) "I just can't believe this is happening to me."

--Dian

(To reply, click here.)

(6/21)

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