The noonday demon: The anatomy of depression - Andrew Solomon

Like Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, The Noonday Demon digs deep into personal history, as Andrew Solomon narrates, brilliantly and terrifyingly, his own agonizing 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 in the United States, where the mad have been confined 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 analyzes 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.