Are We Really Ready for Honesty?

Andrew Solomon is hands down one of the brightest figures and most articulate voices influencing the call to obliterate the stigma of mental illness. He also happens to be one of my favorite writers. I found his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression to be the most enlightening, comprehensive, and ultimately uplifting books I’ve read on the subject of depression.

Yes, I did say uplifting. What I liked is that he was not rallying around a cure—although he did manage to cover nearly every therapy and treatment imaginable—and he isn’t a doctor or a person selling a therapy or a medication or an answer. It was good to read such an eloquent and incisive narrative from someone personally marred by the claws of depression who managed to bounce back with enough moxie to put together this massive, far-reaching book. And he’s an outstanding storyteller whose fierce intelligence enriches every subject he explores.

So much of what I found moving about The Noonday Demon had to do with how accurately he describes the experience of depression. If you know what it feels like, you probably also know how difficult it is to describe. He brings the physical into it in a way that I’ve never forgotten:

It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone, and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.

Sharing the wisdom he gleaned from traveling around the world to research depression, Solomon also provides a view of mental illness from what feels like every possible angle and cultural perspective. Because he’s also lived it, he gets how complex it is, how the way the world relates to it is a big part of the problem of surviving it.

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.

Living Far Outside of Normal

Solomon wrote about his own crippling depression in The Noonday Demon, and in his more recent book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, about what it means to be an outsider. In Far From the Tree, he shares the stories of people, many children, who face tremendous, extraordinary challenges such as genetic disorders and gender reassignments. He talks to the parents of kids who have been convicted of murder, dives into some of the debate in the deaf community around preserving a deaf culture, and he forges theories about identity formation among those who exist far outside the circle of “normal.”

Solomon happens to be steadfast in his examination of difference, and especially interested in people who live with stigma. I find his outspokenness and insight about mental illness and depression far surpassed others when I read The Noonday Demon in 2000. Now his influence is even stronger. He’s become a role model for change, encouraging people to be real, open and honest about mental health matters. For the most part, I’ve always thought easier said than done, but I feel more convicted about the importance of speaking up every time I listen to him talk.

Coming Out of A Different Closet

“The only path to liberty is openness,” Solomon has said in many interviews and TED talks. But one of things I like about him is that he admits that he is in a unique and fortunate position. “I have the ability to be open. I don’t have a job to lose. I have an accepting set of friends and family. If I’m not going to talk openly about it, how can I expect anyone else to do so?”

And to those of us who are not in that fortunate position, who aren’t ready to tell the world about their struggles with mental illness, he is very clearly and passionately committed to educating people about the realities. “There is a sense of failure attached to these conditions. People are very alone in having depression. There is a sense of it being shameful. And the only way it will to cease to be shameful is for people to be open and to talk about it.”

When asked what was the best thing to do for the gay rights movement, Harvey Milk told activists to go out and tell people, talk about being gay, let others know that you exist and let them see that you’re human. Solomon parallels Milk’s advice for those who feel forced to remain secretive about mental illness. “I had been in the closet as a gay person when I was growing up and I found it very, very painful. I decided when I came out of that closet I wasn’t going to get into any other closets, and I haven’t been in any since then.”

Depression Is Just One Part of Who You Are

It’s all about identity for him, whether it’s as a gay man or a man who suffers from debilitating depression, and the courage to have a fundamental sense of who we are without being discouraged—or fatally disrupted—by this illness. Recognizing the importance of integrating the experience of depression into the rest of our lives, without being totally defined by it, Solomon appears to be on a mission to empower others to do the same. To finally feel the freedom that comes from acknowledging what we struggle with without being ashamed, doesn’t that sound like great recompense to the hard work of struggling with emotional and psychological pain that often feels endless?

The real question is, even if it is the best possible outcome, how many are of us are really ready for the task?

More on the subject of talking honestly at The Guardian.