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40671f4
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You can exorcise the demons of schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside them. But it's much harder with depressed people because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies.
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Andrew Solomon |
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492288f
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So many people have asked me what to do for depressed friends and relatives, and my answer is actually simple: blunt their isolation. Do it with cups of tea or with long talks or by sitting in a room nearby and staying silent or in whatever way suits the circumstances, but do that. And do it willingly.
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Andrew Solomon |
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825baeb
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its wideness:
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Andrew Solomon |
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12a9def
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There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it,
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Andrew Solomon |
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1bdcd82
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P]laces that seem lovely at first glance may actually be sinister, but places that feel sinister seldom turn out to be lovely.
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Andrew Solomon |
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1f857e4
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A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.
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Andrew Solomon |
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49ca13e
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A crushed hope is suffused with a nobility that mere hopelessness can never know.
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Andrew Solomon |
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2b2fa12
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You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.
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Andrew Solomon |
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1160807
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As organs go, the brain is quite an important one, and its malfunctions should be addressed accordingly. Chemistry
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Andrew Solomon |
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efefdff
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It is my experience that the hard numbers are the ones that lie. The matters that they describe cannot be defined so clearly. The most accurate statement that can be made on the frequency of depression is that it occurs often and, directly or indirectly, affects the lives of everyone. It
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Andrew Solomon |
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0d9243c
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the polar opposite of suffering [is] boredom." I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated. I"
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Andrew Solomon |
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b93d622
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Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals. Depression is not just a lot of pain; but too much pain can compost itself into depression. Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing ea..
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Andrew Solomon |
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34e5a73
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the symptoms of depression cause depression. Loneliness is depressing, but depression also causes loneliness.
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Andrew Solomon |
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87e619b
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An integrated educational system benefits many people with horizontal identities; it likewise helps those who share a classroom with them. Similarly, building a compassionate society benefits not only those who are newly tolerated, but also those who are newly tolerating. Incorporating exceptional people into the social fabric is expensive and time-consuming. The emotional and logistical calisthenics can be draining. Yet if parents often en..
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Andrew Solomon |
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1a0128b
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Prozac doesn't do it unless we help it along. Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.
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Andrew Solomon |
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6dfa5c8
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There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in that spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all the strong emotions
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Andrew Solomon |
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4c86d95
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Realitatea faptului ca trebuia sa imi pun nu una, ci DOUA sosete, si apoi DOI pantofi ma coplesea, si voiam sa ma intorc in pat.
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română
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Andrew Solomon |
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dbd82ce
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em unless you got the money to pay." Fred has been given a regimen of meds for HIV, but he stopped"
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Andrew Solomon |
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13d2401
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No one had forewarned me, however, that if you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised.
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Andrew Solomon |
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f7073b2
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El analfabetismo y la pobreza son discapacidades, como tambien lo son la imbecilidad, la obesidad y la apatia.
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Andrew Solomon |
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45ac4d4
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El analfabetismo y la pobreza son discapacidades, como tambien lo son la imbecilidad, la obesidad y la apatia. La fe es una discapacidad en la medida en que restringe el interes personal; el ateismo es una discapacidad, puesto que es una coraza contra la esperanza. Incluso el poder puede considerarse una discapacidad por el aislamiento al que condena a quienes lo ejercen.
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Andrew Solomon |
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19aebd7
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DEPRESSION IS THE flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.
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Andrew Solomon |
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6f797e5
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A Buddhist scholar once explained to me that most Westerners mistakenly think that Nirvana is what you arrive at when your suffering is over and only an eternity of happiness stretches ahead. But such bliss would always be shadowed by the sorrow of the past and would therefore be imperfect.
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Andrew Solomon |
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0eee59c
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But you are never the same once you have acquired the knowledge that there is no self that will not crumble. We are told to learn self-reliance, but it's tricky if you have no self on which to rely.
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Andrew Solomon |
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4da3f95
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There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.
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writing
parenting
children
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Andrew Solomon |
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9038f1d
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Many coping strategies have a Zen simplicity. Instead of resolving chaos, find beauty and happiness amid chaos. I am reminded of a friend who said that when she found out her husband couldn't fill her needs, she changed her needs;
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Andrew Solomon |
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83b8f50
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I did not want to sit on the roof, though I was also aware that if I didn't allow myself the relief of considering suicide, I would soon explode from within and commit suicide. I felt the fatal tentacles of this despair wrapping themselves around my arms and legs. Soon they would hold the fingers I would need to take the right pills or to pull the trigger, and when I had died, they would be the only motion left. I knew that the voice of rea..
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Andrew Solomon |
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4374ed8
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unhappiness very much. Few can cope with the idea of depression divorced from external reality. Many would prefer to think that if you're suffering, it's with reason and subject to logical resolution. A
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Andrew Solomon |
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b9f22b9
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Most people don't like one another's unhappiness very much. Few can cope with the idea of depression divorced from external reality. Many would prefer to think that if you're suffering, it's with reason and subject to logical resolution. A
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Andrew Solomon |
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088d556
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I was walking down the street today," she said, "and I thought, I am probably dying. And then I thought, should we have cherries or pears at lunch? And the two things felt too much the same."
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Andrew Solomon |
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fd0685c
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When I had the third breakdown, the mini-breakdown, I was in the late stages of writing this book. Since I could not cope with communication of any kind during that period, I put an auto-response message on my E-mail that said I was temporarily unreachable, and a similar message on my answering machine. Acquaintances who had suffered depression knew what to make of these outgoing messages. They wasted no time. I had dozens and dozens of cal..
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Andrew Solomon |
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a56787d
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Mothering requires two impulses- the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away.
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Andrew Solomon |
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672d4ba
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Ma simt tot timpul ca si cum fiecare ar vrea o bucatica din mine.
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depresie
română
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Andrew Solomon |
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07f96fb
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the happy endings of tragedies have a dignity beyond the happy endings of comedies, that they not only transcend the mawkishness to which Howells alludes, but also produce a contentment more cherished than one untempered by suffering. Sometimes, people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy, but you can keep yourself open more to sorrow's richness than to unmediated despair. Tragedies with ha..
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Andrew Solomon |
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5ac033f
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I think all love is one-third projection and one-third acceptance and never more than one-third knowledge and insight.
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Andrew Solomon |
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f250d2b
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Psychosis is a gross disturbance in an individual's ability to distinguish self from reality. For schizophrenics, the membrane between imagination and reality is so porous that having an idea and having an experience are not particularly different.
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Andrew Solomon |
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e7c7713
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The danger is that being pushed towards early specialisation can leave children believing that they have only one way to succeed...Prodigies who don't make it will have worked insanely hard on something that can longer sustain them, after having neglected skills needed to pursue any other kind of life.
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Andrew Solomon |
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49e6af1
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Disability is not predictive of the happiness of either the parent or the child, which reflects the larger puzzle that people who have won the lottery are, in the long run and on average, only marginally happier than amputees--people in each category having adjusted rather quickly to their new normal.
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Andrew Solomon |
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c319186
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Up to two hundred genes can be implicated in autism, and some evidence suggests that you need several to manifest the syndrome. Sometimes, epistatic, or modifier, genes influence the expression of primary genes; sometimes environmental factors influence the expression of these genes. The closer the relationship between genotype and phenotype, the easier it is to discern. In autism, some people with a share genotype don't share a phenotype, ..
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Andrew Solomon |
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0a41474
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The cliche about autism is that the syndrome impedes the ability to love, and I began this research interested in how much a parent could contrive to love a child who could not return the affection. Autistic children often seem to inhabit a world on which external cues have limited impact; they may seem to be neither comforted by nor engaged with their parents are not motivated to gratify them.
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Andrew Solomon |
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c481e43
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The trauma of Down's syndrome is that it is present prenatally and can therefore undermine the early stages of bonding. The challenge of autism is that it sets in or is detected in the toddler years, and so transfigures the child to whom parents have already bonded. The shock of schizophrenia is that it manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood, and parents must accept that the child they have known and loved for more than a decade m..
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Andrew Solomon |
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59ef0b5
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These are astonishingly early processes. The
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Andrew Solomon |
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20aa3dc
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it. Block out the terrible thoughts that invade your mind. I
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Andrew Solomon |
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285a911
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Some opponents of (cochlear) implants have proposed that people make their own choice when they turn eighteen. Even putting aside the neural issues that make this impractical, it is a flawed proposition. At eighteen, you are choosing not simply between being deaf and being hearing, but between the culture you have known and the life you have not.
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Andrew Solomon |