The Noonday Demon

Summary

A wide-ranging "atlas" of depression that braids Solomon's own breakdowns with reporting on neuroscience, pharmacology, history, and cross-cultural treatments 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.