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Re: Noonday Demon - Very grim, is it true??

Posted by PsychoSage on March 1, 2004, at 20:49:29

In reply to Re: Noonday Demon - Very grim, is it true??, posted by redmaryjane on March 1, 2004, at 20:00:12

> I'm sorry to say this, but I feel like Solomon is right on. I loved that book and recommend it to everyone. I don't know if we are in for a life filled with meds, but we are in for a life of struggle. I know that is true as a middle aged woman and mother of two. That's life. But I wouldn't despair, there are much worse things to come your way. I think that it takes many years to realize depression. I didn't recognize it until well into my thirties, as a younger adult it was all seen as situational or as anxiety. Now that I am older things have surely changed. I think that Andrew Solomon is right on.
>

I have read whatever they let you see on amazon.com in the preview, and I have come across Andrew Solomon in the New Yorker at the beginning of 1998 during my 2nd year at university. He wrote an article on depression, and I read it right after my first diagnosis at 19 and first trial on zoloft. He introduced me to Dr. Kay Jamison in this article and to the panoply of medications out there for anxious depressives. I will fondly remember this essay because it was the first of many bridges that would lead me to finding my own experience in the actual and personal experiences of others whether they are authors and writers or people I have met personally. For the first time I learned there were narratives to tell about this biochemical problem. Depression was more than something my doctor told me I had. It was more than a list of symptoms on pfizer's website or in a questionaire/the DSM given during intake.

I really enjoyed Dr. Jamison's _An Unquiet Mind_. Basically, she says she found life, hope and survival in lithium and doesn't wish to erase her manic depression. Much to my satisifaction she replied to a short note I sent her about enjoying her memoir and relating to some of her frustrations. It was terse, but she confirmed the receipt my note which simply expressed my gratitude and was written during a period of quasi-madness. To read and understand madness while experiencing madness is like being in the calm and peaceful eye of a hurricane before the rain and winds return.

Solomon is a writer who is more literary than journalist to me, so it is good to keep in mind that not every moment in his life is torture. The man graduated from Yale and has had a successful career amidst all of his troubles and episodes.

I came across Solomon in the afterword of a book called _Bertram Cope's Year_, and my professor [at an elite university of which Yale is not much better than] found him to be a rambling, incompetent critic. He made his assessment based on that afterword alone, but perhaps Solomon's style may not necessarily be conducive toward overcoming the false or poor beliefs about ourselves and our negative life conditions that we find to be pervasive and presume to be permenant.

Remember again that he has a good life also, so he is magnifying his illness. These authors can open your heart and hold a flashlight up to your pain through their own travails, but they have great careers and plenty of solid personal relationships that dance around their respective illnesses almost indifferently. Some are fortunate enough to have lives that can overshadow their disease. They would never even be able to write their books well and enjoy the praise they receive for simply doing so if the disease did not go into remission.

I personally wouldn't mind a long life where the ratio of good to bad is 1:1. That is better than many. I will tell you what has been told to me by those who have survived terrible episodes of illness: Keep on keeping on!


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