The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Andrew Solomon

Simon and Schuster, May 19, 2015 - Biography & Autobiography - 688 pages

The Noonday Demon is Andrew Solomon’s National Book Award-winning, bestselling, and transformative masterpiece on depression—“the book for a generation, elegantly written, meticulously researched, empathetic, and enlightening” (Time)—now with a major new chapter covering recently introduced and novel treatments, suicide and anti-depressants, pregnancy and depression, and much more.

The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers, and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease as well as the reasons for hope. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications and treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations—around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - mirrani - LibraryThing

This book was part of a reading challenge for me, but I also chose it because I wanted to better understand what my best friend goes through when she suffers her periods of depression. I ended up with ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Eye_Gee - LibraryThing

An interesting mix of research and memoir. It includes descriptions of the author's own experience of depression, and those of many people he interviewed in the course of writing the book. He also ...

Contents

• A Note on Method: 11
• Breakdowns: 39
• Treatments: 101
• Alternatives: 135
• Populations: 173
• Addiction: 217
• Suicide: 243
• History: 285
• Poverty: 335
• Since: 445

About the author

Andrew Solomon is a professor of psychology at Columbia University, president of PEN American Center, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, NPR, and The New York Times Magazine. A lecturer and activist, he is the author of Far and Away: Essays from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years; the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which has won thirty additional national awards; and The Noonday Demon; An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been published in twenty-four languages. He has also written a novel, A Stone Boat, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award and The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost. His TED talks have been viewed over ten million times. He lives in New York and London and is a dual national. For more information, visit the author's website at AndrewSolomon.com.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression; Scribner classics
• Author: Andrew Solomon
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 2015
• ISBN: 1501123882, 9781501123887
• Length: 688 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / General; Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs; Health & Fitness / General; Psychology / Emotions; Psychology / Mental Health; Psychology / Psychopathology / Depression