Keeping it simple: March 2019

Friday, March 22, 2019

The Noonday Demon: an Anatomy of Depression Andrew Solomon/edit 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

The Noonday Demon: an Anatomy of Depression
Andrew Solomon

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/may/06/booksonhealth.medicalscience

Depression is the flaw in love.

To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair,' says Andrew Solomon

life loses its meaning; the 'only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance'.

numbness with vitality, wretchedness with poetry, lovelessness with passion, fear with exuberance, slack-jawed horror with wit and tenderness, deadly silence with this fervent outpouring of words.

(mood, he writes, 'is a frontier like deep ocean or deep space').

grief is like a humble angel that leaves us with a clear sense of our own depth; depression is the (noonday) demon that leaves you appalled.

Major depression is the stuff of breakdowns, not rust, but the startling collapse of the whole system.

the arid pain of total violation'. As you fall towards this living death, he says, the first thing that goes from you is happiness. The next is the sadness that led you here. Then your sense of humour, the belief in and capacity for love. You smell sour to your self, and thinned. Your face comes apart in the mirror. You have no ability to trust, to touch, to grieve: 'Eventually, you are simply absence.'

There were many days when he couldn't move, couldn't swing his legs out of bed, couldn't control his bodily functions; he could only lie in a corner and weep. He wanted to die but didn't have the energy to kill himself.

He offers a set of simple instructions to other sufferers

(listen to people who love you, seek out memories, block out terrible thoughts as they approach, be brave, exercise, eat).

'Words are strong and love is the other way forwards.'

The poor feel it (but, although depression cuts across all the classes, treatment of it does not), as do the the war-torn.

I didn't have the energy to wash the dishes or take a shower,

But while 'living death is not pretty, unlike dead death, it offers the hope for amelioration'.

What are the boundaries of identity,

Medicine might release a sufferer from the trap, but it does not reinvent him or her.

the self exists in the narrow space where the world and our choices come together.'

the authenticity, even the

gift,of his endured pain.

He believes his own grief &
darkness have shown him the
'acreage and reach' of his soul.

depression, 'like sex, retains an unquenchable aura of mystery.

It is new every time'.

It is 'fire in the blood';

it nearly kills him but it produces from him words and poetry that he would not otherwise have uttered, and teaches him a better way of living and loving.