![]() I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. I do not love experiencing my depression, but I love the depression itself. ![]() ''Curiously enough, I love my depression. And, even more rhapsodically, in the concluding pages of the book's final chapter, ''Hope'': ![]() Its history has been as much theological and psychological as medical though contemporary thinking has almost totally medicalized depression, and its treatment today is far more likely to be pharmacological than any religious or psychoanalytic ritual involving ''talk,'' there is still a nature/nurture debate about its origins: is depression genetically inherited, or is it provoked by one's environment, childhood, gender, politics, misfortune?Īs Andrew Solomon suggests in this exhaustively researched, provocative and often deeply moving survey of depression, depression is ''usually the consequence of a genetic vulnerability activated by external stress.'' For Solomon, for whom depression has been far more than an academic subject, the most useful vocabulary is often metaphorical: depression is a tree choked and smothered by a parasitic vine, yielding only ''a few desperate little budding sticks of oak'' depression is ''like feeling your clothing slowly turning into wood on your body'' it's ''like trying to watch TV through terrible static'' ''like going blind'' ''like going deaf.'' In Emily Dickinson's yet more eloquent words, depression is ''a funeral in the brain.'' Yet paradoxically, and here is where the foreignness of mental illness is most pointed, those afflicted with depression are often ambivalent about it, as no one is ambivalent about physical illness: ''It was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul,'' Solomon declares. Their minds, or brains, must have ''caused'' their ailments, since we have only the testimony of the afflicted to bear witness to what is ''ill'' in their lives.ĭepression, more poetically known as ''melancholia'' until the 17th century, has surely always been with our species, like the so-called common cold and that elusive malady, the flu. No one takes pride in visiting this country with its imprecise, ever shifting borders and murky language its frequent mimicry, as in nightmare parody, of ''normal'' behavior its myriad terrifying symptoms that seem, to the healthy, simply ''all in the head.'' Our common-sense culture can generously accommodate physically ill individuals, but the mentally ill can be suspected of exaggerating, even of imagining, their own problems. If illness is a foreign country, mental illness is a yet more foreign country, one with a special stigma.
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