The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

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.

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• Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory
• The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
• Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
• About Love: Reinventing Romance for our Times
• The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love
• Front of the Class: How Tourette Syndrome Made Me the Teacher I Never Had
• The Day The Voices Stopped: A Memoir of Madness and Hope
• Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
• Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy