The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

by Andrew Solomon

Becoming depressed is like going blind, the darkness at first gradual, then encompassing; it is like going deaf, hearing less and less until a terrible silence is all around you, until you cannot make any sound of your own to penetrate the quiet.

Killing myself, like dressing myself, was much too elaborate an agenda to enter my mind; I did not spend hours imagining how I would do such a thing.

“Melancholia ends up in loss of meaning . . . I become silent and I die,” Julia Kristeva

Emily Dickinson wrote perhaps the most eloquent description of a breakdown ever committed to the page: I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading—treading—till it seemed That Sense was breaking through— And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum— Kept beating—beating—till I thought My Mind was going numb— And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space—began to toll, As if the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, here— And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down— And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing—then—

and I had so few problems by comparison, except that I couldn’t turn over again, until a few hours later, when my father or a friend would come in and help to hoist my feet back up onto the bed.

would lie in the safety of the bed and feel ridiculous.

There was a sadness and a terrible loneliness as I contemplated what was lost.

It was hellishly embarrassing to tell people I was depressed, when my life seemed to have so much good and love and material comfort in it;

Kay Jamison

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I was, most of the time, too upset by everything to be upset by anything in particular;

Traditionally, a line has been drawn between the endogenous and reactive models of depression, the endogenous starting at random from within, while the reactive is an extreme response to a sad situation.

that beyond a certain point, depression “takes off on its own steam” and becomes random and endogenous, dissociated from life events.

It is clear that stress drives up rates of depression. The biggest stress is humiliation; the second is loss.

That’s what a breakdown is like at that stage: one step forward, two steps back, two steps forward, one step back. A box step, if you will.

If you have never experienced anxiety, think of it as the opposite of peace. All the peace—inward and outward—was stripped from my life at that moment.

“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.”

Insofar as depression and anxiety are genetically determined, they share a single set of genes (which are tied to the genes for alcoholism).

Jane Kenyon, a poet who suffered severe depression through much of her life, has written about the emergence: . . . With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends, to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back to my desk, books, and chair.

I did not want to sit on the roof, though I was also aware that if I didn’t allow myself the relief of considering suicide, I would soon explode from within and commit suicide.

The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental.

When you’re so far down that love seems almost meaningless, vanity and a sense of obligation can save your life.

Slowly, I’ve learned to take people for who they are. Some friends can process a severe depression right up front, and some can’t.

I didn’t have the questions to ask until I had lost the person of whom I would have liked to ask them.

I had had anxiety, which is sheer terror; this was much more full of hatred, anguish, guilt, self-loathing. I have never in my life felt so temporary.

Depression, which comes at you with the gale force of a breakdown, leaves gradually, quietly. My first breakdown was over.

It seemed better to float with the down than to fight it. I think you have to let go and understand that the world will be re-created and may never again resemble what you knew previously.

“I had always been proud of being Jewish and drawn to things religious. After that big depression, I felt that if I believed hard enough, things might come about that would save the world. I had to sink so low there was nothing to believe in but God. I was slightly embarrassed to find myself drawn to religion; but it was right. It’s right that no matter how bad the week, there’s that service every Friday.

The story of her suicide taught me patience.

“Never real and always true,”

I knew that eternal sadness, though very much within me, did not mitigate the happiness.

We are told to learn self-reliance, but it’s tricky if you have no self on which to rely.

It was the tree and the vine all over again. If you see a little shoot coming out of the ground and recognize it as the shoot of a heavy vine, you can pull it out of the ground with your thumb and forefinger and all will be well. If you wait until the vine has got a firm hold on the tree, you need to have saws and perhaps an ax and a shovel to get rid of the thing and dig out the roots. It is unlikely that you can remove the vine without breaking some of the branches of the tree.

realizing that in order to follow the main points you need to keep paying attention; but your mind wanders a bit and then you can’t quite make sense of what is being said when you return to it.

Happens all the time with me nowdays

If you can knock out your depression, you can live in wonderful peace with the real-world problems you may have to confront, which always seem minimal by comparison.

I need people I date to be a little able to take care of themselves, because me taking care of me takes a lot of energy, and I can’t be responsible for every little hurt feeling someone has.

Isn’t that a terrible way to feel about love? It’s hard to manage professionally too—the short-lived jobs, the gaps in between them. Who wants to hear about your hopes for your new medication? How can you ask that anyone understand?

the dogs provide me with my only really numinous moments.”

Ditto

She complained that even visits to the doctor made her feel bad. “It’s hard to be honest with him about how I’m feeling because I don’t want to let him down.”

Ditto

The whole day thus far has been an exercise in FORCING myself to do the tiniest things and trying to evaluate how serious my situation is—Am I really depressed? Am I just lazy? Is this anxiety from too much coffee or from too much antidepressant? The self-assessment process itself made me start to weep.

Ditto

She has been plucked out of me by an evil witch and replaced by a horrid girl!

“I can’t keep picking up my life again,”

when I wake up and realize that they are not in the same world as I, I feel that strange despair, something beyond ordinary sadness and closely akin, for a moment, to the anguish of depression.

Or is it just a part of life, to keep living in all the ways we cannot stand?

The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.

but you must push hard enough if you really want to get out.

Psychoanalysis is a form of treatment in which specific techniques are used to unearth the early trauma that has occasioned neurosis.

we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand.

“Take notes,” wrote Virginia Woolf in The Years, “and the pain goes away.”

Therapy allows a person to make sense of the new self he has attained on medication, and to accept the loss of self that occurred during a breakdown.

For each of my eleven, I rehearsed the litany of my woes, until it seemed that I was reciting a monologue from someone else’s play.