The noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon
“I have turned, with an increasingly fine attention, to love. Love is the other way forward. They need to go together for: by themselves pills are a weak poison, love a blunt knife, insight a rope that snaps under too much strain. With the lot of them, if you are lucky, you can save the tree from the vine.” page 30
“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, a depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades oneself and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. Is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with one's self.” page 15
“If one imagines a soul of iron that withers with grief and rusts with mild depression then major depression is the startling collapse of the whole structure... You go along the gradual path with the sudden trigger of motion then you get to a place that is genuinely different. It takes time for rusting iron frame building to collapse, but the rest is ceaselessly powdering the solid, thinning it, eviscerating it. The collapse, the matter how abrupt it may feel is accumulative consequence of decay. It is nonetheless a highly dramatic and visibly different event. It is a long time from the 1st rain to the point when rust has eaten through an iron girder. Sometimes the rusting is that such key points that the collapse seems total, but more often it is partial: this section collapses, knocks that section, shifts the balance in a dramatic way.” Page 17
“it is not pleasant to experience decay, to find yourself exposed to the ravages of an almost daily rain, and to know that you're turning into something feeble, that more and more of you will blow off with the 1st strong wind, making you less and less. ” page 17
“Major depression is a birth and death... page 17
"The birth and death that constitute depression occur at once. I returned, not long ago, we would in which I had played as a child and saw an oak, 100 years dignified, in whose shade I used to play with my brother. in 20 years, a huge vine had attached itself to this confident tree in nearly smothered it. It was hard to say where the tree left off in the mind began. The vine had twisted itself so entirely around the scaffolding of tree branches that it's leaves seen from a distance to be the leaves of the tree; only up close could you see how few living oak branches were left, and how a few desperate little budding sticks of oaks stuck like a row of thumbs up the massive trunk, their leaves continuing to photosynthesize in the ignorant way of mechanical biology.” Page 18
“Fresh from a major depression in which I have hardly been able to take on board the idea of other people's problems, I emphasized with that tree. My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered that oak; it had been a sucking name that wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I.” page 18
“I have said that depression is both a birth and death. The vine is what is born. The death is one's own decay, and cracking of the branches that support this misery. The thing that goes is happiness. You cannot gain pleasure from anything... But soon other emotions follow happiness into oblivion: your sense of humor; your belief in an capacity for love. Your mind is leached until you see dimwitted even to yourself.” 19
“Drug therapy hacks through the vines. You can feel it happening, the medication seems to be poisoning the parasite so that bit by bit it withers away. You feel the weight going, feel the weight of the branches can recover much of their natural bent. Until you have gotten rid of the fine, cannot think about what has been lost. But even with the line gone, you may still have few leaves and shallow roots, and the rebuilding of yourself cannot be achieved with any drugs that now exist...rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time.” Page 19
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