The Noonday Demon

Summary

A wide ranging atlas of depression that braids Solomon's own breakdowns with reporting on neuroscience, pharmacology, history, and treatments across cultures from Senegal to Cambodia. He interviews patients, doctors, and policymakers while examining poverty, addiction, and suicide as faces of the same disorder. The book became a touchstone in mental health writing for its candor and its insistence that depression is at once biological, social, and existential.