The Noonday Demon

WITH A NEW EPILOGUE BY THE AUTHORLike Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, The Noonday Demon digs deep into personal history, as Andrew Solomon narrates, brilliantly and terrifyingly, his own agonising experience of depression. Solomon also portrays the pain of others, in different cultures and societies whose lives have been shattered by depression and uncovers the historical, social, biological, chemical and medical implications of this crippling disease. He takes us through the halls of mental hospitals where some of his subjects have been imprisoned for decades; into the research labs; to the burdened and afflicted poor, rural and urban. He talks to faith healers and voyages around the world in a quest for folk wisdom. He analyses the medications of today as well as reviewing the politics of diagnosis and treatment and, perhaps most significantly, he looks at the vital role of will and love in the process of recovery.**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

This extraordinarily moving, shocking and eye-opening work is set to become the classic text on the subject of depression, mental illness and the way we live now, for the literary market - the book that knocks even William Styron's Darkness Visible out of the water. Like Kay Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, it digs deep and painfully into personal experience, but it also looks at the much wider picture - the historical, social, biological, chemical, pharmaceutical and medical aspects and implications of the disease - broadening the scope immeasurably. What is crucial is that Solomon has not only experienced what he is writing about firsthand, and describes the experience from the inside terrifyingly and brilliantly, but also that he has researched ever aspect of depression, from the historical treatment and study of 'melancholy' as far back as the Greeks and Romans (who believed that cauliflower was good for depression), right through to the side effects of the pharmaceutical cocktails of the present day, case histories of people in and out of mental hospitals, faith healers, the power of suggestion, as well as the implications for the future of Western society. He also writes like a dream.