Depression mania!

"Checking for depression among the indigent," as Solomon puts it, "is like checking for emphysema among coal miners." A chronic sense of despair may strike a poor and barely educated person as a fitting response to a life vulnerable to both the caprices of impersonal forces and sudden violence. "If this is how all your friends are," one therapist told Solomon, "it has a certain terrible normality to it. You attribute your pain to external things and, believing these externals can't change, you assume that nothing internal can." That's no doubt why welfare recipients have a rate of depression three times the national average, according to Solomon.

We don't hear those people's stories. Poor depressed people suffer in silence, often without a full understanding of what's happening to them. More educated and economically stable depressed people realize what's wrong, get the best available care and usually get better. Depression, as Solomon puts it, "is a thing that a certain class has the luxury of articulating and addressing."

It's these articulate middle-class people who have become the public face of the disease. That media-savvy spokespeople like Solomon have helped create a thriving cultural cottage industry around depression is, to say the least, ironic. The most isolating of illnesses, a disorder that turns its sufferers into notoriously self-absorbed shells of their former selves, is taking on all the hallmarks of a cultural movement, one in which writers play a key role. Since William Styron's "Darkness Visible" appeared in 1990, the publishing industry has offered us many depression memoirs -- 1999's "Where the Roots Reach for Water" is just one example. This season, Solomon's book is joined by an anthology, "Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression," edited by Nell Casey, which includes essays by Lauren Slater, Kay Redfield Jamison and Martha Manning. Depression's new literary visibility is not limited to the written word, either. In a recent sold-out event sponsored by the hip New York series called the Moth (in which writers and actors tell lightly rehearsed stories), an upbeat crowd packed the nightclub Nell's for "An Evening of Stories on Depression," at which Solomon was the final speaker.

Solomon is himself a sort of poster child for many of the contradictions in this new trend: He has been through extreme, debilitating depression, but he's living what looks to be a very visibly fabulous lifestyle, in which he gets plenty of attention as a result of his illness. He's a writer who lives in Manhattan (author of the novel "A Stone Boat" and a nonfiction book, "The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost") and has published his work in the New Yorker, including an account of his first breakdown in 1999 that received a flood of mail and became the germ of "The Noonday Demon." He's also independently wealthy -- the heir to a pharmaceuticals fortune -- and frequently refers to his Yale and Oxford degrees. His media appearances include a recent turn in the New York Times Home section in which he showed off the grand, landmark townhouse he has lovingly decorated in an eclectic style that includes "silk brocaded sofas, doges' lanterns, Russian paintings, polar bear rugs and Chinese dragon robes"; he lives there with his "staff of two."

"The Noonday Demon" presents itself as a be-all and end-all on depression. There are fact-filled chapters on treatments (Solomon is, no surprise, vehemently pro-antidepressant, though he advocates using them along with talk therapy), suicide, addiction, how depression affects different populations and more. Solomon fills plenty of pages of "The Noonday Demon" with the details of his own illness -- he's been through three breakdowns and now depends on a perpetually evolving regime of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication to stay well -- and his expensive, globe-trotting search for the best possible care.

Next Page: The invisible lives of the depressed poor

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