Metablog

Welcome to part two of this three part series on depression. (Index to other parts.) This would be part of part 1 except that Wordpress decided it wanted to cut off my post after it was halfway through.

Solomon, of course, faces severe apathy at the worst of his depression. I think the extent of this is best illustrated by a quote from the book:

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This is part one of a three part series on depression. (Index to other parts.)

I’ve not been very active recently on this blog. I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve had the same problem with my other interests and chores, too. They’ve mostly been remaining undone.

I have had a low level of energy, true. I’ve had trouble focusing. But those are just symptoms, too. What is the cause? How can I make sense of this state? Is it ADHD? Is it depression?

For a long time, I thought it was ADHD. So many of the symptoms fit. But the remedies don’t seem to, and the accounts of people with ADHD didn’t really strike a chord with me at all. So after a while, I began to suspect that depression would more accurately describe my problem. (Especially after I was diagnosed with depression by a psychiatrist.)

So, a few days ago, I had a truly marvelous and unprecented idea. Why not read about depression? After all, I realized, I really didn’t know that much about it. Despite having lived with it since I was a teenager, I had somehow never actually read any book about it. So I strolled over to Barnes and Noble to take a look.

I picked up a book called The Noonday Demon, by Andrew Solomon. I read a couple dozen pages, and found it compelling enough to buy. (At $17 for ~550 pages, it’s not a bad value, either.) Solomon writes quite poetically, and though I found his anecdotes tended to draw on a bit excessively, they did a good job of illustrating what it feels like to go through depression. His factual writing is elegant and interesting, and taught me quite a bit about depression that I’m very glad to know.

(If you’re interested in the book, you might like to know that it covers, primarily, unipolar major depression, with many mentions and a few discussions of bipolar disorder. It doesn’t really cover atypical depression or dysthymia.)

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