Quotes from Andrew Solomon

In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.

To take medication as part of the battle is to battle fiercely, and to refuse it would be as ludicrously self-destructive as entering a modern war on horseback. It is not weak to take medications; it does not mean that you can't cope with your personal life; it is courageous. Nor is it weak to seek help from a wise therapist.

You say that you really don't want to get sick again. But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but with discontinuation of medication: "Well, I sure hope you get off sometime soon," they say.

present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge.

I deplore the cynics who keep suffering patients from the essentially benign cures that might give them back their lives.

It is this acute awareness of transience and limitation that constitutes mild depression.

A patient may say that he has spent certain months suffering major depression, but this is a way of imposing measurement on the immeasurable. All that one can really say for certain is that one has known major depression, and that one does or does not happen to be experiencing it at any given present moment.

I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated.

Life, which had until then seemed to be a solid surface upon which I stood, went suddenly soft and yielding, and I began to slip through it.

To look deep into your child's eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood's self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon.

Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control.

These are astonishingly early processes. The

Ability is a tyranny of the majority. If most people could flap their arms and fly, the inability to do so would be a disability.

As we talked, I came to understand that hope is like a happy childhood; it equips its beneficiaries to deal with the traumas that inevitably ensue. It is experienced as primal love. (p.15)

I think that while I hated being depressed, and I would hate to be depressed again, I found a way to love my depression. I love it because it has forced me to find and cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living and that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture.

I told my mother that she was not going anywhere and that I would remember her for a good long time because she was going to go on reminding me of herself.

it. Block out the terrible thoughts that invade your mind. I

There is a Russian expression: if you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead. While life is not only about pain, the experience of pain, which is particular in its intensity, is one of the surest signs of the life force.

Depression as described in DSM-IV is the leading cause of disability in the United States and abroad for persons over the age of five. Worldwide, including the developing world, depression accounts for more of the disease burden, as calculated by premature death plus

Returning from distress by gradual degrees gives sense to affliction itself.

healthy life-years lost to disability, than anything else but heart disease. Depression claims more years than war, cancer, and AIDS put together. Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth.

Some opponents of (cochlear) implants have proposed that people make their own choice when they turn eighteen. Even putting aside the neural issues that make this impractical, it is a flawed proposition. At eighteen, you are choosing not simply between being deaf and being hearing, but between the culture you have known and the life you have not.

I had to know the stories these women had to tell," she explained, "because I wanted to understand very specifically what each one had to vanquish.

Those, disabled people, however, may be angered by the prospect of interventions that would make them function more like non-disabled people without mitigating the hard reality of their disabling condition. Some may even curse the contraptions that keep them going.