Word: solomonic
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...shadows. Not that there's any shortage of material on the subject. Alongside some noxious self-help manuals, there have been remarkable personal accounts - William Styron's Darkness Visible, A. Alvarez's A Savage God - and excellent academic texts like Kay Redfield Jamison's Night Falls Fast. But Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression (Chatto & Windus; 560 pages) is poised to become the book for a generation that, more than any other, has this "living death" at its core...
...contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times, Solomon interweaves a personal narrative with scientific, philosophical, historical, political and cultural insights into what he describes as "the demon that visits at noon," when one least expects it. The result is an elegantly written, meticulously researched book that is empathetic and enlightening, scholarly and useful...
...When Solomon had his first breakdown six years ago, he was a successful novelist, from a close-knit family, with a wide circle of friends. But shortly before his 31st birthday, "hell came to pay me a surprise visit." What followed is the hard stuff of severe depression. "My whole system seemed to be caving in," he writes. On his way home from the grocery store, he loses control of his bowels and soils himself. Over the following weeks, he becomes near-catatonic, unable to move, talk, eat or sleep. Aware of the ridiculousness of his situation, he nonetheless cannot...
...With psychoanalysis, the support of loved ones and a cocktail of antidepressants, Solomon starts to recover - only to find himself "feeling well enough for suicide." Wishing to end his life with the least possible damage to the people around him, he attempts - unsuccessfully - to become infected with HIV through casual sexual encounters. In a bizarre twist, the knowledge that he might die lifts his depression, which in turn diminishes the wish to die. After eight months, Solomon's first breakdown is quietly over...
...Sermon on the Mount continues: ".... I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these...