Award-Winning Author To Appear at Book Signing

Andrew Solomon, best-selling author of the Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, will provide a thought-provoking look at the psyche of the depressed patient and his rationale for writing his book at APA’s 2002 annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Solomon will be at the booth of the American Psychiatric Foundation in the APA Resource Center, located in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, on Saturday, May 18, from 10 a.m. to noon. A book signing will follow each 15-minute talk.

Solomon used his personal struggles as the starting point for his comprehensive exploration of a medical condition that devastates the lives of millions. The book review in the New England of Journal of Medicine said that “Solomon writes about depression, loneliness, and his loss of belief in a capacity for love with humor, vitality, and passion.”

The Noonday Demon has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2001.

Traveling the globe to understand the disease that disrupted his life, Solomon interviewed those affected by depression, as well as those who treat or study it, in places as diverse as Greenland, Senegal, and Cambodia. The book explores the history, chemistry, and experiential reality of depression while examining medical, psychodynamic, and alternative treatments. It also examines the origins of our modern understanding of depression. Former NIMH director Steven Hyman, M.D., wrote in Neuron that “the reader is left with a remarkably enriched view of the effects of depression on humanity.”

Solomon was born in New York and studied at Yale University and then at Jesus College in Cambridge, England. He first described his personal struggle with depression in 1998, when he wrote “The Anatomy of Melancholy” for the New Yorker. In the month that the article was published, Solomon received more than a thousand letters from Americans suffering from depression. The piece has been anthologized in many books and has been used as course material at many medical schools. ▪