Depression a Unseen Silent Killer
Andrew Solomon is a writer on politics, culture and psychology. His 2012 book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children, but also find profound meaning in doing so. Solomon’s startling theory is that diversity is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, and multiple severe disabilities. Woven into these courageous and affirming stories is Solomon’s journey to accepting his own identity, which culminated in his midlife decision, influenced by this research, to become a parent. Solomon’s previous book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, won the 2001 National Book Award for nonfiction. In Solomon's ted talk filmed on October 2013 at TEDxMet he believed, "That the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment." In this sentimental talk writer Andrew Solomon takes you to the darkest corners of his mind during the years he battled depression. That led him to an eye-opening journey across the world to interview others with depression — only to discover that the more he talked, the more people wanted to tell their own stories of depression.
Solomon's main argument for this personal topic was based on his own personal experience and experiment. We know depression through metaphors. Emily Dickinson was able to convey it in language, Goya in an image. Half the purpose of art is to describe such iconic states. Unfortunately for Solomon in 1991, he had a series of losses. His mother died, a relationship he had been in ended, and moved back to the United States from some years abroad. In 1994, three years later, Andrew found himself losing interest in almost everything. Solomon didn't want to do any of the things he had previously wanted to do, and he didn't know why. The specifically stresses, "One of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous". He commented that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They're not very effective.They're extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They're a disaster. As Solomon set out to understand depression, and to interview people who had experienced it, There were people who had sounded as they described it like terribly severe depression who nonetheless had good lives in the interstices between their depressive episodes. And his main goal was to find out what it is that causes some people to be more resilient than other people. One of the first people he interviewed described depression as a slower way of being dead, and when he heard that it reminded him that slow way of being dead can lead to actual deadness, that this is a serious business. A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and we think is that most of us know about those existential questions. What Andrew found was that he though that while he hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, he found a way to love his depression. He loved it because it forced him to find and cling to joy. This ted talk did not have a counterargument do that it a personal case.
Personal Statement: Andrew Solomon's ted talk can relate to the novel The Catcher and Rye in the sense of Holden Caulfield suffered from clinical depression due to the fact that his younger brother Allie had died from the rare disease of Leukemia. He kept the glove that Allie used in the outfield when he played baseball to cope with the mental pain. Holden depression did not cause him to want to commit suicide even though he made a small comment about the topic. But, it affected his social skills more than anything else. Things such as over used cuss words, disrespect, inability to find the good in people, alcoholism, tobacco addiction, sexual awkwardness, and the list goes on. His depression could have been described as a looming cloud that never left him. The death of his brother even cause him to commit almost no effort in school which at a teenage age of sixteen is one of the most important factors during that time. Another contributing factor is also the lack of love Caulfield received back home since he was always sent off to the private schools where he roomed on campus. He could not have attained any love or affection that he so desperately needed. Holden Caulfield was simply a teenager overwhelmed in depression that he could not fight alone.
Solomon's main argument for this personal topic was based on his own personal experience and experiment. We know depression through metaphors. Emily Dickinson was able to convey it in language, Goya in an image. Half the purpose of art is to describe such iconic states. Unfortunately for Solomon in 1991, he had a series of losses. His mother died, a relationship he had been in ended, and moved back to the United States from some years abroad. In 1994, three years later, Andrew found himself losing interest in almost everything. Solomon didn't want to do any of the things he had previously wanted to do, and he didn't know why. The specifically stresses, "One of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous". He commented that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They're not very effective.They're extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They're a disaster. As Solomon set out to understand depression, and to interview people who had experienced it, There were people who had sounded as they described it like terribly severe depression who nonetheless had good lives in the interstices between their depressive episodes. And his main goal was to find out what it is that causes some people to be more resilient than other people. One of the first people he interviewed described depression as a slower way of being dead, and when he heard that it reminded him that slow way of being dead can lead to actual deadness, that this is a serious business. A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and we think is that most of us know about those existential questions. What Andrew found was that he though that while he hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, he found a way to love his depression. He loved it because it forced him to find and cling to joy. This ted talk did not have a counterargument do that it a personal case.
Personal Statement: Andrew Solomon's ted talk can relate to the novel The Catcher and Rye in the sense of Holden Caulfield suffered from clinical depression due to the fact that his younger brother Allie had died from the rare disease of Leukemia. He kept the glove that Allie used in the outfield when he played baseball to cope with the mental pain. Holden depression did not cause him to want to commit suicide even though he made a small comment about the topic. But, it affected his social skills more than anything else. Things such as over used cuss words, disrespect, inability to find the good in people, alcoholism, tobacco addiction, sexual awkwardness, and the list goes on. His depression could have been described as a looming cloud that never left him. The death of his brother even cause him to commit almost no effort in school which at a teenage age of sixteen is one of the most important factors during that time. Another contributing factor is also the lack of love Caulfield received back home since he was always sent off to the private schools where he roomed on campus. He could not have attained any love or affection that he so desperately needed. Holden Caulfield was simply a teenager overwhelmed in depression that he could not fight alone.