Depression mania!

The links between poverty and depression aren't just a problem in the U.S., either. Solomon also traveled to Greenland to study the illness among the closeknit Inuit, who, he says, have a depression rate as high as 80 percent. Greenlanders have universal free healthcare, education and unemployment benefits. But they also live in a freezing climate in which the sun disappears entirely for three months each winter, everyday life is filled with stories of suicides, tragic deaths in snowstorms and iceberg-filled seas, and the traditional culture has a "taboo on talking about yourself."

Solomon reports that a few of the Inuit women he met have begun talking about their problems with therapists and each other and have found some relief. One Inuit woman told him "she had found the cure for sadness, which was to hear of the sadness of others."

All this appears to bolster Solomon's claim that the salutary effect of talking about depression holds true even outside the confessional climate of contemporary America. But is it possible that in this country, where the prevalence of everything from memoirs to talk shows to support groups sometimes makes the topic of depression (and antidepressants) seem inescapable, we've gone too far? Will all of this attention help suffering people feel better and function better, or will it encourage them to stay permanently depressed, or at least permanently identified with depression, as a "community" clustered around the disorder flourishes?

These are knotty questions even an exhaustive book like Solomon's can't answer. For his part, he preaches a two-part gospel: First, antidepressants, about which his only ambivalence concerns the sexual side effects they produce (delayed or nonexistent orgasm and lowered libido, in most people), and talk therapy -- on a grandly ambitious scale.

It's the second half of his agenda that's more intriguing: an activist anti-depression movement akin to the environmental movement. "We must start doing small things to lower the level of socio-emotional pollution," Solomon writes. "We must look for faith (in anything: God or the self or something in between) and structure. We must help the disenfranchised whose suffering undermines so much of the world's joy -- for the sake both of those huddled masses and of the privileged people who lack profound motivation in their own lives. We must practice the business of love, and we must teach it too."

In a way, Solomon's book, like his life, embodies the contradictions of depression's new high profile. It's the work of a man who meets the stereotype of the seemingly idle, pampered depressed person, the sort of perpetual patient who talks at length and in detail about himself and his problems. It would be all too easy to dismiss him out of hand. And yet it takes someone like Solomon -- articulate, well connected and never bored with the minutiae of a disease that, let's face it, tends to make its victims tragically boring -- to be the kind of tireless advocate and booster that depressed people require. Certainly less well-off sufferers need every last iota of the energy they recover from the disease just to put their lives back together. By helping the "disenfranchised," as Solomon hints, the rich and aimless depressed may find yet another kind of cure. And if the floodlight directed on depression's more privileged victims dispels some of the darkness surrounding the less glamorous ones, then maybe it's not such a bad thing after all.

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