|
1736062
|
one loves and is loved in great pain, and one is alive in the experience of it. It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life;
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
5d1885d
|
I'll tell them all the good things and some difficulties. The parents may never accept what happened to them and yet accept their child. They're two separate things, the parental loss, and the actual person they will almost always end up loving.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
e0558c3
|
This thought runs like a bright golden thread through the dark tapestry of our sorrow. We learn so much from our children--in patience, in humility, in gratitude for other blessings we had accepted before as a matter of course; so much in tolerance; so much in faith--believing and trusting where we cannot see; so much in compassion for our fellow man; and yes, even so much in wisdom about the eternal values in life.
|
|
|
andrew solomon |
|
e8ecb6c
|
when describing children with Down's Syndrome, he called a child 'heart spontaneous'.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
1f771cc
|
For some parents of children with horizontal identities, acceptance reaches its apogee when parents conclude that while they supposed they were pinioned by a great and catastrophic loss of hope, they were in fact falling in love with someone they didn't yet know enough to want.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
6df434c
|
Some people have more highly activated left prefrontal cortexes and some people have more highly activated right prefrontal cortexes. (This has nothing to do with the question of hemispheric dominance that determines whether you are right-handed or left-handed, which occurs in other areas of the brain.) The majority of people have higher left-side activation. People with higher right-side activation tend to experience more negative emotion ..
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
81923ca
|
La depressione e un'incrinatura dell'amore. Per essere capaci di amare dobbiamo essere capaci di disperarci per cio che perdiamo e la depressione e il meccanismo con cui esprimiamo questa disperazione. Quando sopravviene, distrugge il nostro se e finisce per annullare la capacita di donare e di ricevere affetto. E la solitudine interiore, che si manifesta e annienta non solo il legame con gli altri, ma anche la capacita di restare serenamen..
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
0343f6b
|
L'opposto della depressione non e la felicita, ma la vitalita, e la mia vita, mentre scrivo, e pregna di vitalita anche quando e triste. Un giorno o l'altro, il prossimo anno, mi capitera di svegliarmi nuovamente privo di senno: e improbabile che mi mantenga stabile per sempre. Nel frattempo, pero, ho scoperto quella che si chiama anima, una parte di me che non avrei mai immaginato esistesse prima che, un giorno di sette anni fa, l'inferno ..
|
|
vitalità
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
df76512
|
I]f you live abroad any good while, the notion of is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
7c10781
|
Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
ddeb9f3
|
Depression frequently destroys the power of mind over mood.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
7a8d9d4
|
It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
9fa936a
|
parents often confuse the anomaly of developing fast with the objective of developing profoundly.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
3865b36
|
I still remember the moment. I ordered a chicken salad and it tasted like chalk. I knew I was depressed. And I went downhill so fast. That's when I really started drinking. I just did everything to fuck myself up to the bitter end. I would just black out and drink and black out and drink and black out and drink. I always left suicide notes: if I don't wake up, call my mother. I was using alcohol to kill myself. It was the easiest drug I kne..
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
e8f6300
|
If you attach better services to a diagnostic category, some doctors will apply that diagnosis to children from whom it is not entirely appropriate in order to access those services.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
572ce01
|
Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over and I have to grit my teeth to stay on the sidewalk until the light turns green; or I imagine how easily I might cut my wrists; or I taste hungrily the metal tip of a gun in my mouth; or I picture going to sleep and never waking up again. I hate t..
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
d50e62c
|
The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
dcf411d
|
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery.
|
|
self-knowledge
depression
self-discovery
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
741842e
|
This book's conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
cf7dfc6
|
unlike Edith Piaf, I regret everything just because it is finished,
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
484e398
|
The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it. I hope that this basic fact will offer sustenance to those who suffer and will inspire patience and love in those who witness that suffering.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
52fb071
|
Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
73e113d
|
Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
6efe88e
|
I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
2c2f2c5
|
If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children-brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished-I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
a6f2537
|
The cumulative results of the brain's chemical effects are not well understood. In the 1989 edition of the standard Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, for example, one finds this helpful formula: a depression score is equivalent to the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (a compound found in the urine of all people and not apparently affected by depression); minus the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus the level of nore..
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
bf4bf64
|
You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world's diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn't matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
84748d7
|
Hatred does not obliterate love. Indeed, the two are in constant fellowship.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
50cbb4f
|
Without self-discovery," Hahn wrote, extending an idea of Nietzsche's, "a person may still have self-confidence, but it is a self-confidence built on ignorance and it melts in the face of heavy burdens."
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
7caa19e
|
To wage war on depression is to fight against oneself, and it is important to know that in advance of the battles.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
4e3e813
|
Nirvana occurs when you not only look forward to rapture, but also gaze back into the times of anguish and find in them the seeds of your joy. You may not have felt that happiness at the time, but in retrospect it is incontrovertible.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
312dbe8
|
In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
b26118a
|
Depression claims more years than war, cancer, and AIDS put together. Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth. Treatments
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
e10fa1f
|
The passion for such children contains no ego motive of anticipated reciprocity; one is choosing against, in the poet Richard Wilbur's phrase, 'loving things for reasons'. You find beauty and hope in the existence, rather than the achievements, of such a child. Most parenthood entails some struggle to change, educate and improve one's children; people with multiple severe disabilities may not become anything else, and there is a compelling ..
|
|
parenting
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
a220e4b
|
In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all. Depression is a condition that is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not known it.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
1e0183a
|
People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
8b8aadf
|
Having anticipated the onward march of our selfish genes, many of us are unprepared for children who present unfamiliar needs. Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
81e035d
|
Disability scholars Andrienne Asch and Erik Parens, in their seminal discussion of the problem, wrote,'Pre-natal diagnosis reinforces the medical model that disability itself, not societal discrimination against people with disabilities, is the problem to be solved.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
ec517a3
|
If real experience has triggered your descent into depression, you have a human yen to understand it even when you have ceased to experience it; the limited of experience that is achieved with chemical pills is not tantamount to a cure.
|
|
understanding-yourself
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
5ca1b2a
|
It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is "a device for the elicitation of altruism."
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
25b1162
|
Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience,
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
b37ef22
|
Mental illness is real illness
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
e1bf15c
|
Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time. Diagnosis
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |
|
c6a2ead
|
Actually travel is the opposite of depression. Depression is a curling inward, and travel is an opening outward.
|
|
|
Andrew Solomon |