Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. Our most recent episode with Dan Wilson was
Speaker 1: our fiftieth full episode Anniversary. To celebrate the anniversary and
Speaker 1: honor the fact that The One You Feed is now
Speaker 1: ranked as the number one philosophy podcast in the world,
Speaker 1: we are rereleasing our most popular episode ever, which was
Speaker 1: our interview with Andrew Solomon. If you've never heard it,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend a full listen, and if you have
Speaker 1: heard it, I truly believe that you will love it
Speaker 1: even more as you listen again, because this one is unbelievable.
Speaker 1: From both Eric and I, I wish to express a
Speaker 1: deep and heartfelt thank you to every listener for your
Speaker 1: dedication and support. The encounter with the things that are dark,
Speaker 1: and that are terrible and that are difficult is just
Speaker 1: exactly the thing that gives when the energy to feed
Speaker 1: the wolf who represents goodness and kindness and virtue. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have
Speaker 1: recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like
Speaker 1: garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think
Speaker 1: ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Our guest today is author Andrew Solomon. Andrew is a
Speaker 1: reagul or contributor to The New Yorker Art Forum and
Speaker 1: the New York Times magazine. In addition, he is the
Speaker 1: author of several books, including The Irony Tower, Soviet Artists
Speaker 1: at a Time of Glass nost also The Noonday Demon,
Speaker 1: and a novel, A Stone Boat. He is the winner
Speaker 1: of the two thousand one National Book Award and a
Speaker 1: Pulitzer Prize finalist. Andrew's newest book is Far from the Tree, Parents,
Speaker 1: Children and the Search for Identity. Hi, Andrew, Welcome to
Speaker 1: the show. What a pleasure to be here. We're We're
Speaker 1: really glad to have you on. I've I'm a big
Speaker 1: fan of both of your books, so this is a real,
Speaker 1: real pleasure for us. So our podcast is based on
Speaker 1: the old parable where there's a grandfather who's talking with
Speaker 1: his grandson and he says, in life, there are two
Speaker 1: wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One
Speaker 1: is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
Speaker 1: love and joy, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like hate and greed and jealousy. And
Speaker 1: the grandson stops and he thinks, and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: your work. I think that the attempt to lead a
Speaker 1: moral life is an urgent business forum for many of us,
Speaker 1: perhaps even for most of us, and that one is
Speaker 1: always trying to get away from exploitation. I think, especially
Speaker 1: as a writer, because there's a great deal of writing
Speaker 1: that is exploitative. My aim is always to write work
Speaker 1: which is actually helpful to people, um to continue to
Speaker 1: be productive somehow of trying to improve and make the
Speaker 1: world better. It sounds a little pompous and arrogant as
Speaker 1: the basis for writing. Partly I just write to describe things,
Speaker 1: but ultimately I think the goal is to do things
Speaker 1: that are moving. And as I've looked at the areas
Speaker 1: in which I work, including this area of psychology and psychiatry,
Speaker 1: I found over and over again that people are often
Speaker 1: working with a real view to somehow making a somehow
Speaker 1: making a better world. And I think that that attempt,
Speaker 1: in all of its urgency, is part of what gives
Speaker 1: human experience its meaning. Great one of the themes that
Speaker 1: shows up in both books that I thought was really interesting,
Speaker 1: and it's something we talked about on this show a lot,
Speaker 1: and it was really about the core question of about
Speaker 1: what should we change in ourselves and what things should
Speaker 1: we accept in ourselves. In Far from the Tree, you
Speaker 1: have a lot of examples of families who took a
Speaker 1: more accepting approach to their kids disabilities versus other families
Speaker 1: who were, you know, uh, trying to change everything they could.
Speaker 1: I'm curious if you could expound a little bit more
Speaker 1: on that that theme. I think that I was looking
Speaker 1: at that particularly in terms of parenting, but everything I
Speaker 1: said about parenting is relevant also to one's attitude toward oneself.
Speaker 1: But I would say that one of the central activities
Speaker 1: of parenting is changing your children. You educate them, You
Speaker 1: teach them a sense of moral values, you try to
Speaker 1: teach them some manners, You try to give them all
Speaker 1: kinds of knowledge they didn't have. Not to change your
Speaker 1: children would be to neglect them terribly. But it's also
Speaker 1: part of the experience of being a parent that you
Speaker 1: have to accept your child for who he is or
Speaker 1: she is, and make him or her feel good about
Speaker 1: who they are or what their identity might be. And
Speaker 1: I think there are some things that obviously need to
Speaker 1: be changed, and there are some things that obviously need
Speaker 1: to be celebrated, and there's a great deal that falls
Speaker 1: in a gray, foggy middle. And I think a lot
Speaker 1: of the time our experience comes down to that old
Speaker 1: Serenity prayer about having the courage to change the things
Speaker 1: that you can um and the forbearance to accept the
Speaker 1: things you can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that wisdom is one of the
Speaker 1: most urgent but elusive pieces of wisdom for people in
Speaker 1: their own formation of an identity and in their parents experience,
Speaker 1: and so often, especially in the families I looked at
Speaker 1: and far from the tree, who are dealing with children
Speaker 1: with various kinds of stigmatized identities. There is the quality
Speaker 1: that the child has, There is the sense that it
Speaker 1: is stigmatized and therefore carries a burden. There are treatments
Speaker 1: of one kind or another. Those treatments are themselves often
Speaker 1: very traumatic, are very difficult, and the balance between the
Speaker 1: treatment um and its costs and the condition and its
Speaker 1: costs needs constantly to be assessed and assessed and reassessed
Speaker 1: over and over again. That gray area is such a challenge,
Speaker 1: and the wisdom to know the right thing is is
Speaker 1: so difficult and so much a matter of understanding and
Speaker 1: knowing yourself. One of the things that you talked about
Speaker 1: that you said in the book, you're talking about the
Speaker 1: story of Lucy Greeley, who had multiple facial reconstruction surgeries,
Speaker 1: and you you you use her as an example to
Speaker 1: say she kept trying to constantly change herself. And you
Speaker 1: said that people who know their condition to be irreversible
Speaker 1: are often happier than people who believe it can be changed,
Speaker 1: That hope can be the cornerstone of misery. Can you
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about that, people who know
Speaker 1: that their condition is irreversible are that are able to
Speaker 1: start the process of accommodating it. If you know that
Speaker 1: there's nothing that you can do about having a lost
Speaker 1: part of your leg, or having whatever the other debilitating
Speaker 1: condition is that you might have, you figure out how
Speaker 1: to live a good life with that condition. If you
Speaker 1: have a condition which is easily fixable, you easily fix it,
Speaker 1: and then you do a pretty good job of living
Speaker 1: once it's fixed. But a lot of people have conditions
Speaker 1: which might be fixable or might not be fixable, and
Speaker 1: that might be somewhat fixable but not fully fixable, where
Speaker 1: there's a lot of vagueness, and those people tend to
Speaker 1: live all the time with a sense that their condition
Speaker 1: requires them one way or another and to keep trying
Speaker 1: to fix it. And they keep trying, and often the
Speaker 1: fix doesn't happen at all, or it doesn't happen in
Speaker 1: a sufficient degree, and so those people end up terribly frustrated.
Speaker 1: So I look, for example, at the experience of people
Speaker 1: with Down syndrome. You can't actually make the Down syndrome
Speaker 1: go away at this point. You can have strategies of
Speaker 1: early intervention that are helpful to people who wish to
Speaker 1: function well despite their Down syndrome, and responsible parents pursue
Speaker 1: those options. It's pretty clear with down syndrome what the
Speaker 1: things are that help people, and what the things are
Speaker 1: that don't help people, and what the extent of the
Speaker 1: fix can be. But you get to autism and you
Speaker 1: discover that there are all kinds of usually rather Charlotte
Speaker 1: and like people marketing all kinds of peculiar strategies that
Speaker 1: they claim if brought about a complete remission of autism.
Speaker 1: There are people who are falling into the hands of
Speaker 1: those practitioners. But there's also solid science which seems to
Speaker 1: suggest that certain interventions are helpful to certain people to
Speaker 1: certain degrees. And so the autism parent is left thinking
Speaker 1: is this real? Is this fake? Should I be pursuing
Speaker 1: some sort of improvement? Should I not be? If I
Speaker 1: don't try to get my child therapies that will help him,
Speaker 1: in mind neglecting my child. If I do get my
Speaker 1: child these therapies, are the therapies themselves so traumatic as
Speaker 1: to be more destructive than they wrant for the amount
Speaker 1: of improvement they'll bring about. And because autism is such
Speaker 1: a heterogeneous condition, how people will respond to a given
Speaker 1: treatment is very difficult to know ahead of time, And
Speaker 1: for every treatment that someone says has been a miracle,
Speaker 1: there's someone else saying that the pursuit of it was
Speaker 1: a tragedy. There's a great example in the book where
Speaker 1: you're talking about two women who have autistic children of
Speaker 1: a fairly similar functioning level, and one is a fairly
Speaker 1: wealthy woman and who is tired and frustrated and doesn't
Speaker 1: enjoy being with her. You know it is stressed out
Speaker 1: by yourself, and because she's always trying to fix him.
Speaker 1: And then you you describe another woman who's of a
Speaker 1: much lower social economic status, who has no faith that
Speaker 1: she can fix him. You say, because she could never
Speaker 1: fix her own life. And she's a lot more she
Speaker 1: enjoys him and has a lot more a lot more
Speaker 1: time with him that that is pleasant, and she's less
Speaker 1: sort of run out by it. It was important to
Speaker 1: me never to suggest, by any means that it's easier
Speaker 1: to deal with any of the conditions I was looking
Speaker 1: at if you're poor, Being poor makes everything more difficult
Speaker 1: than it is for people who have got greater means.
Speaker 1: Who are poor don't get the same respect, care, they
Speaker 1: don't get the same assistance or support, um, they don't
Speaker 1: get the same opportunities. That being said, people who are
Speaker 1: more privileged tend to be more perfectionistic and often experience
Speaker 1: these children as imperfect and often throw themselves into trying
Speaker 1: to fix them. And often, back to the theme that
Speaker 1: we were talking about a moment ago, what these children
Speaker 1: really require is not to be fixed, but to be
Speaker 1: accepted and you and to be celebrated. And sometimes that's
Speaker 1: very difficult for people who keep thinking, but there's something
Speaker 1: wrong with my child, and I need to make it right.
Speaker 1: And it comes more readily to people who think my
Speaker 1: child is who my child is, and I just have
Speaker 1: to deal with what I've been given. What I liked
Speaker 1: a lot in the book is you're not. You don't
Speaker 1: really come down on either side of that debate. You're not.
Speaker 1: You're not suggesting anything one way or the other. You're
Speaker 1: just sort of exposing the different options and challenges out there.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that's so interesting about the
Speaker 1: book is it's a book about people who have different
Speaker 1: identities of of all sorts, but a lot of them
Speaker 1: are considered disability, whether it be deafness, down syndrome, autism,
Speaker 1: and uh. But what comes through in the book over
Speaker 1: and over is the joy that some of those parents
Speaker 1: find in that. And you say that the main thing
Speaker 1: that drives whether the parents are joyful and how able
Speaker 1: they are to love their children is their ability to
Speaker 1: find meaning in what's happening. One of the mothers whom
Speaker 1: I interviewed said to me, will always give us these
Speaker 1: little sayings like God doesn't give you any more than
Speaker 1: you can handle. But children like ours are not preordained
Speaker 1: as a gift. There a gift because that's what we
Speaker 1: have chosen. And I believe that people make those choices
Speaker 1: all the time. I believe that people who have these children,
Speaker 1: who have these extraordinary identities or characteristics, really have to
Speaker 1: decide relatively early on. Am I going to suffer with
Speaker 1: this and have a very difficult time with it? Or
Speaker 1: am I going to um am a organism? How say?
Speaker 1: This isn't what I would have chosen, This isn't what
Speaker 1: I wanted, This isn't what I had in mind when
Speaker 1: I set out to have children. But it will allow
Speaker 1: me to grow and to learn and to have in
Speaker 1: some sense of richer life than I would have had
Speaker 1: without it. And I was impressed at how often people
Speaker 1: really do make that decision, and how often they conform
Speaker 1: to it, which is not to say that their lives
Speaker 1: are necessarily easy, or that given everything to do over again,
Speaker 1: they would have chosen these experience says, But one story
Speaker 1: after the next really dwelt on the sense that dealing
Speaker 1: with disabled people had made people kinder and more tolerant,
Speaker 1: and more open and more generous in all kinds of
Speaker 1: profound ways. And I remember one mother who had a
Speaker 1: child with Down syndrome, and who had ended up spending
Speaker 1: most of her life working to improve educational opportunities for
Speaker 1: kids with d S, saying to me, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: for our son, I wish I could make it go away,
Speaker 1: because it's a difficult way to be in the world,
Speaker 1: and I would like to give him an easier life.
Speaker 1: But speaking for myself, while I would never have believed
Speaker 1: twenty six years ago when he was born that I
Speaker 1: could come to such a point I have for him,
Speaker 1: I would make it go away in an instant. But
Speaker 1: for me it's given me so much richer and so
Speaker 1: much more purposeful a life than i'd ever otherwise have had.
Speaker 1: That speaking for myself, I wouldn't give it up for
Speaker 1: anything in the world. You know, one thing that I
Speaker 1: think is a real can be a real poison in
Speaker 1: our culture and in our minds, is comparing ourselves to
Speaker 1: other things. And in the book The Noonday Demon uh
Speaker 1: an Atlas of depression, where you you talk about your
Speaker 1: own depression and you study depression in a lot of
Speaker 1: different circumstances, you reference the harm that the emergence of supermodels,
Speaker 1: did you know, the cultural emergence of supermodels did to
Speaker 1: women's views of themselves? And then you talk about something
Speaker 1: uh similar version of that, a psychological supermodel that we
Speaker 1: all seem to think we need to aspire to. And
Speaker 1: I think I'd like to ask you to talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more about that in the context of depression,
Speaker 1: and also in the context of families who have a
Speaker 1: child who is different and their initial it's not meeting
Speaker 1: the standard that they had expected or hoped for. Well,
Speaker 1: in depression, I think there's the problem that people believe
Speaker 1: that the appropriate way for them to live is in
Speaker 1: a state of sort of constant rapture um. You know,
Speaker 1: you look at the representations of happiness that occur in
Speaker 1: a great deal of daytime television and popular culture of
Speaker 1: various kinds, and there's a suggestion all the time that
Speaker 1: you should be happy. And I don't think people especially
Speaker 1: expected to be happy, or at least not to be
Speaker 1: happy that much of the time, even forty or fifty
Speaker 1: years ago. And I think this notion somehow in a
Speaker 1: celebrity culture. For all that we see celebrities going through
Speaker 1: complete meltdowns and falling to pieces, we still see a
Speaker 1: lot of them and somehow having these wonderful, perfect lives,
Speaker 1: and we feel like, if my life isn't wonderful and perfect,
Speaker 1: I've failed. Now it's hard enough to deal with the
Speaker 1: fact that you're depressed, or with the fact that you're
Speaker 1: struggling in any of a broad variety of other ways
Speaker 1: without having the sense it's a humiliation not to be
Speaker 1: perfect and not to be completely and perfectly happy. And
Speaker 1: because people have seen these images of extreme happiness that
Speaker 1: keep being represented to us, people often blame themselves and
Speaker 1: have a sense of enormous failure in connection with their
Speaker 1: own depression. So they're both depressed and feel like failures
Speaker 1: for being depressed. And I think that's a very unfortunate
Speaker 1: and very painful layering that takes place in looking at
Speaker 1: how that applies to the families that was interviewing and
Speaker 1: far from the tree. With all of their engagements with
Speaker 1: these unusual and extraordinary children. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: the time the parents had a vision for their own lives,
Speaker 1: which was for everything to go perfectly. And then they
Speaker 1: have a child who is, in the eyes of the world,
Speaker 1: damaged and not as good as a child was not
Speaker 1: affected by one of these conditions, and they find it
Speaker 1: shameful and they feel somehow responsible for it, and they
Speaker 1: feel embarrassed for it. Well, that gives them, the parents,
Speaker 1: a much less robust and positive life than they would
Speaker 1: have had otherwise. But additionally it gives their children a
Speaker 1: much lower level of self esteem. And there's a constant
Speaker 1: struggle that I think goes on between these parents and
Speaker 1: these children, in which the parents are hopefully moving toward
Speaker 1: um out of the outrage they often feel at the
Speaker 1: time of diagnosis, through the bewilderment that usually follows the outrage,
Speaker 1: into the acceptance which is really necessary for them to
Speaker 1: lead an okay life, and onward to celebration. And the
Speaker 1: movement through those four stages, and they aren't completely linear.
Speaker 1: You can get to the point of celebration and then
Speaker 1: you have a setback and you're outraged all over again.
Speaker 1: But the movement through those stages with acceptance and celebration
Speaker 1: as the end goal, is a way of rising. I
Speaker 1: think to the occasion of saying, I will not insist
Speaker 1: on the supermodel vision of what my family should look like.
Speaker 1: I will not insist on the supermodel vision of what
Speaker 1: my own moods and character should be like. I will
Speaker 1: rather live authentically in my own experience, find as much
Speaker 1: happiness as I am able to find, and be grateful
Speaker 1: for the happiness I found, and live in the compass
Speaker 1: of it. Excellent. So I'd like to switch now and
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about the Noonday Demon, the
Speaker 1: book about depression, and I had talked to you before
Speaker 1: the show about reading a section of it. Could you
Speaker 1: uh go ahead and walk us through that or read
Speaker 1: that force? Some people seem to give in to their depression.
Speaker 1: Others seem to battle it. Since depression is highly demotivating,
Speaker 1: it takes a certain survivor impulse to keep going through
Speaker 1: the depression, not to cave into it. A sense of
Speaker 1: humor is the best indicator that you will recover. It
Speaker 1: is often the best indicator that people will love you.
Speaker 1: Sustain that, and you have hope. Of course, it can
Speaker 1: be hard to sustain a sense of humor during an
Speaker 1: experience that is really not so funny, it is urgently
Speaker 1: necessary to do so. The most important thing to remember
Speaker 1: during a depression is this, You do not get the
Speaker 1: time back. It is not tacked on at the end
Speaker 1: of your life to make up for the disaster years.
Speaker 1: Whatever time is eaten by a depression is gone forever.
Speaker 1: The minutes that are ticking by as you experience the
Speaker 1: illness are minutes you will never know again. No matter
Speaker 1: how bad you feel. You have to do everything you
Speaker 1: can to keep living, even if all you can do
Speaker 1: for the moment is to breathe, wait it out, and
Speaker 1: occupy the time of waiting as fully as you possibly can.
Speaker 1: That's why big piece of advice to depress people, hold
Speaker 1: onto time. Don't wish your life away. Even the minutes
Speaker 1: when you feel you are going to explode, our minutes
Speaker 1: of your life, and you will never get those minutes again.
Speaker 1: Thank you. That's a really beautiful, beautiful section, and I
Speaker 1: think it goes back a little bit to the idea
Speaker 1: of to some extent, if we're always wishing we were
Speaker 1: somewhere else, and severe severe depression is a is a
Speaker 1: different story. But the mild depression is often, at least
Speaker 1: for me, accompanied by that desire that I was somewhere else,
Speaker 1: doing something else, someone else, and I'm missing the moments
Speaker 1: of my life that are in front of me, regardless
Speaker 1: of how they may appear, they are they are my life.
Speaker 1: And I like the way you you put that a lot. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think you know, depression is inherently painful. It's not
Speaker 1: painful because of social prejudice. It's not painful because of
Speaker 1: your own attitude toward it. It is inherently painful, and
Speaker 1: most of us really don't like painful experiences and would
Speaker 1: like to avoid them. But I've met people who have
Speaker 1: said that they went through a period of years when
Speaker 1: they were dysthymic, which is to say they had milder depression,
Speaker 1: or when they were in and out of depression. Andrew said,
Speaker 1: I just spent all of that time wishing that things
Speaker 1: were different, and now I realized I wasted a big
Speaker 1: part of my youth in that enterprise. And I sometimes
Speaker 1: say when I talked to people about the pursuit of treatment,
Speaker 1: people will say, well, you know, I really was considering
Speaker 1: getting some kind of treatment, But I think I'm going
Speaker 1: to be able to beat this on my own, and
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna stick it out. And if it's still
Speaker 1: not working out that well in six months, then maybe
Speaker 1: I'll talk to someone and I say, look in, um,
Speaker 1: in six months, you're going to be twenty nine and
Speaker 1: you'll never be twenty eight again, and you will have
Speaker 1: lost six months at being twenty eight to this project
Speaker 1: of duking it out on your own. So why don't
Speaker 1: you try to avail yourself of whatever treatments there are
Speaker 1: to get as well as you're able to get, as
Speaker 1: quickly as you're able to get there, Because otherwise, the
Speaker 1: longer you put it off, aside from the treatment, implications
Speaker 1: of its possibly escalating. But the longer you put it off,
Speaker 1: the longer it's going to be that you've missed a
Speaker 1: chunk out of your life. And when you're feeling well again,
Speaker 1: you'll regret that you missed half of the year you
Speaker 1: were twenty eight. Right. I was curious to ask you
Speaker 1: you you wrote The Noonday Demon. Has it been ten
Speaker 1: years since it was published? I came out in two
Speaker 1: thousand one, Okay, so it's been it's been longer than that.
Speaker 1: I was curious if you have any thoughts about how
Speaker 1: treatment for depression has improved and changed since you wrote
Speaker 1: the book. I've actually just finished writing an epilogue for
Speaker 1: the book that will be in a new edition of it,
Speaker 1: to bring it up to date, partly to bring up
Speaker 1: to date my own experience and that of the people
Speaker 1: in the book, but also to look at treatment. There
Speaker 1: has not been dramatic advancement in the area of antidepressant medication.
Speaker 1: The big insights about neurotransmitters that drove the development of
Speaker 1: the popular antidepressants remain the primary insights for psychopharmacology. Where
Speaker 1: there has been a certain amount of progress is in
Speaker 1: the treatment of so called treatment resistant depression for people
Speaker 1: who fail all of what were previously our existing technologies. Ketamine,
Speaker 1: which was long sold on the streets as special kum,
Speaker 1: is now increasingly being used, still on a very experimental basis,
Speaker 1: for people with acute, refractory, unrelenting depression. And they found
Speaker 1: that many people who have been suicidal for an extended
Speaker 1: period of time will, after a single infusion of ketamine
Speaker 1: intravenously have that depression remit um. It often remits within
Speaker 1: a few hours um and so that's an extraordinary effect
Speaker 1: because the antidepressant medications we have take weeks and weeks
Speaker 1: to work. Unfortunately, ketamine is a substance of abuse, and
Speaker 1: the effects that it has are effects that can have
Speaker 1: many unwanted downstream effects, So it's not really a practical
Speaker 1: line of treatment, and the improvement it induces usually ust
Speaker 1: only a week to ten days, occasionally to two weeks,
Speaker 1: so it's not really a practical means of treatment. But
Speaker 1: the fact that it works sets up an understanding of
Speaker 1: other pathways than the ones we know for the treatment
Speaker 1: of depression and hopefully will be applicable, and there are
Speaker 1: a number of things that are in development now that
Speaker 1: would operate on the same pathways as ketamine. The other
Speaker 1: I think really major advance is the advent of deep
Speaker 1: brain stimulation, which was pioneered by Helen Mayburg and Emery.
Speaker 1: It's a surgical process in which a little electrode like
Speaker 1: the ones that are used for the treatment of Parkinson's disease,
Speaker 1: is actually implanted quite deep in the brain and connected
Speaker 1: to a battery pack, which sends a constant electrical signal
Speaker 1: to the area, and it changes the activity of something
Speaker 1: called Broca's area twenty five in the brain which had
Speaker 1: not previously been associated with depression or really much studied
Speaker 1: at all, but which Mayburgh's an imaging specialists had designated
Speaker 1: as the locus of a lot of disregulation and depressed patients.
Speaker 1: It's obviously an invasive brain surgery. It's done only for
Speaker 1: people who have extreme, extreme depression that's been unresponsive to
Speaker 1: psychotherapy and medication and electroshock or electro convulsive treatment and
Speaker 1: so on and so forth. But but for the people
Speaker 1: in whom it's worked, it's been quite remarkable. Um. There
Speaker 1: is a wonderful description of member working with a patient.
Speaker 1: The patients have to remain conscious while it's being done
Speaker 1: because their consciousness can help to help them to respond
Speaker 1: if something is going wrong in the way that it's
Speaker 1: being inserted. And she puts the device in and then
Speaker 1: she turns it on and she never tells them when
Speaker 1: she's turning it on. And she had one patient on
Speaker 1: the operating table. She turned on the device and he
Speaker 1: suddenly looked at her and said, what did you just do?
Speaker 1: And she said why? And he said, all my life
Speaker 1: I've been locked in a room with a thousand screaming
Speaker 1: children and they've just left the building, so it's extraordinary work. Again,
Speaker 1: it's not practical for a broad range of people, but
Speaker 1: I think there's a feeling that it may provide insights
Speaker 1: that will ultimately be applicable to a larger range of people.
Speaker 1: There does seem to be a lot more um, you know,
Speaker 1: transcranial direct stimulation and other other ways that are emerging
Speaker 1: that appear to be less invasive than that, but follow
Speaker 1: some principles around stimulating neurons via electricity. That seems seemed
Speaker 1: to be a lot more studies around that. I was
Speaker 1: curious about how, and it's going to be in your epilogue,
Speaker 1: but how has your depression been since you published the book.
Speaker 1: The sense that my depression was so disabling that it
Speaker 1: was destroying my life is now well and truly behind me,
Speaker 1: but it requires constant management. I'm on permanent medication and
Speaker 1: in permanent therapy, and when life gets very stressful, I
Speaker 1: have up kicks and surges of it. Again. I tried
Speaker 1: to make some changes in my medication to get away
Speaker 1: from some side effects out eight or nine years ago
Speaker 1: with catastrophic effects, and went into a really severe depression
Speaker 1: and had to cancel various plans that I had and
Speaker 1: was unable to function really for a little while, and
Speaker 1: then I managed to pull out of that. UM. I
Speaker 1: had something of a depression when I published Far from
Speaker 1: the Tree. I had worked on the book for eleven years.
Speaker 1: I found the idea of letting it go out into
Speaker 1: the world sort of terrifying. UM. I was under an
Speaker 1: enorsement of stress. I then developed a physical problem with
Speaker 1: partial hearing loss UM sensory neural hearing loss. I have
Speaker 1: had some of my hearing and my left ear come back,
Speaker 1: but my hearing is permanently compromised. There. I found the
Speaker 1: mix of feeling like my hearing was going and feeling
Speaker 1: like I was in this terribly self exposing business of
Speaker 1: putting my book in the world really overwhelming, and I
Speaker 1: found myself getting incredibly anxious in the way that I
Speaker 1: had when I was depressed, and feeling over and over
Speaker 1: again as though I couldn't get through UM this day,
Speaker 1: I couldn't get through the next day, I couldn't get
Speaker 1: through the day after that. I think I have the
Speaker 1: advantage now of having leaved through a number of depressive episodes,
Speaker 1: and so even when I'm feeling my worst, there's some
Speaker 1: rational piece of me that knows you will feel better
Speaker 1: and it won't take that long and you just have
Speaker 1: to ride this out. But it lasted for quite a while,
Speaker 1: and it was really very horrible. And in a sense,
Speaker 1: when you've been feeling all right for a long time,
Speaker 1: you forget how physical and how horrible it is. You
Speaker 1: forget that you lie there in that state of line panic,
Speaker 1: unable to sleep for days at a time, or doing
Speaker 1: nothing but sleep for days at a time. You forget
Speaker 1: the sense that you're completely helpless in the clutches of it.
Speaker 1: And I found which was interesting to me. Now that
Speaker 1: I'm through that episode, I can talk about it very cavalierly,
Speaker 1: but while it was going on, it felt shameful and
Speaker 1: it was very hard for me to speak about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of good points in what you
Speaker 1: said there. I think one of the things I've learned
Speaker 1: to do is treat recurrent symptoms of depress and I
Speaker 1: haven't had it to the disabling sense that you describe,
Speaker 1: but as I've learned to sort of tell myself, I've
Speaker 1: got the emotional flu, it's a lot like having the flu.
Speaker 1: I'm like, Okay, this is just gonna go it's something
Speaker 1: that comes I don't need to reevaluate the entire context
Speaker 1: of my life at this moment. I don't need to
Speaker 1: make a big deal out of it. I just need
Speaker 1: to write it out and that's been really helpful for
Speaker 1: me over time. And one of the things that I
Speaker 1: like a lot there at the end that you said
Speaker 1: is is that it still is when we're in the
Speaker 1: midst of it. It is still very difficult and very
Speaker 1: shameful feeling. It's easier to talk about it outside of it,
Speaker 1: but thank you for the work you're doing in talking
Speaker 1: about it, because people not talking about it and hiding
Speaker 1: it is one of the worst ways to handle mental illness.
Speaker 1: For sure. Yes, it is definitely one of the worst
Speaker 1: ways to handle it. And I think, as I said
Speaker 1: earlier in the program, that that burden of secrecy adds
Speaker 1: to the burden of the disease, and that the burden
Speaker 1: of dealing with both of them at the same time
Speaker 1: is utterly overwhelming. I always think about the gay activist
Speaker 1: Harvey Milk, who, when he was asked by a younger
Speaker 1: gay mom what he could do to help the calls,
Speaker 1: Harvey Milk said, go out and tell someone. And I
Speaker 1: think there has been, in general, a great deal more
Speaker 1: openness about mental illness, and that as more and more
Speaker 1: people speak about it more and more openly, the stigma
Speaker 1: associated with it gets less. As I said, lessening the
Speaker 1: stigma doesn't take away the pain of the condition, but
Speaker 1: not having to deal with the sense of inadequacy that
Speaker 1: often comes with having depression is definitely astride forward. Definitely.
Speaker 1: It's it's that Buddhist idea of there's going to be pain,
Speaker 1: but we layer all these level layers of suffering on
Speaker 1: top of it. Those the suffering being I shouldn't be
Speaker 1: having this, there's something wrong with me for having this,
Speaker 1: and versus just the actual pain is plenty. If you
Speaker 1: just leave it at then you have a few different
Speaker 1: lines that I'm going to read that sort of get
Speaker 1: to making the best out of these situations. You you say,
Speaker 1: at one point, we all have our darkness, and the
Speaker 1: trick is making something exalted out of it. You also
Speaker 1: say it takes an active will to grow from loss.
Speaker 1: The disruption provides the opportunity for growth, not the growth itself.
Speaker 1: And then you also say, if you banish the dragons,
Speaker 1: you banish the heroes. Can you talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about that as a as a way to wrap the
Speaker 1: show up. Well, I think that people, I say, if
Speaker 1: you banish the dragons, you manage the heroes, and people
Speaker 1: become attached to the heroic strain and their own lives.
Speaker 1: At least that's more or less. I think that there's
Speaker 1: something this is, and I think there is the feeling
Speaker 1: that while none of us choose our specific adversities, that
Speaker 1: the experience of surviving whenever the adversities are that comes along,
Speaker 1: that come along give us a sense of resilience and
Speaker 1: give us a sense of power that living through happy
Speaker 1: and joyful experiences on its own can't bring. And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of intimacy with others and the experience of
Speaker 1: adversity and in managing to live through the experience of adversity.
Speaker 1: So there are many people who, for example, faced with
Speaker 1: having children with these differences and disabilities that I've written about,
Speaker 1: um really find that they become more attached to those
Speaker 1: children by virtue of the time they've been with them.
Speaker 1: There's a sociologist who once said that we not only
Speaker 1: care for our children because we love them, but also
Speaker 1: love them because we care for them, and that that
Speaker 1: process of taking care of our children is in fact
Speaker 1: immensely bombed, and our experience of difficulty altogether is where
Speaker 1: we come to know ourselves. UM. A life that is
Speaker 1: only luxury and pleasure tends to feel rather hollow and empty. UM. So,
Speaker 1: as I say, you want to get away from often
Speaker 1: from the specific adversity you're conquering. But I certainly feel
Speaker 1: when I look at my own children and think about
Speaker 1: what I want for them, that in any single instance
Speaker 1: I would spare them from an adversity or a painful experience.
Speaker 1: I try all the time to give them the best
Speaker 1: life I could, and yet I feel if I were
Speaker 1: able to protect them entirely from adversity, and if they
Speaker 1: never had a painful experience, I would not be doing
Speaker 1: a good job as a father. Because part of the
Speaker 1: job as a parent is to teach them resilience, and
Speaker 1: they can only learn resilience through the experience of difficulty.
Speaker 1: So you constantly want, in your own life and in
Speaker 1: the lives of your children to protect them, but also
Speaker 1: to engage with those difficult moments and to find whatever
Speaker 1: meaning there is buried in them, and to grow from them.
Speaker 1: Is there anything you'd like to add on the topic.
Speaker 1: Of the parable before we wrap up. I think it's
Speaker 1: a very powerful and very beautiful um parable. And I've
Speaker 1: talked a lot in this program about choices, a choice
Speaker 1: that we make about how to experience our own lives,
Speaker 1: and I think those choices are choices about which wolf
Speaker 1: you feed. And I think we have those choices all
Speaker 1: the time. And I think often in some strange sense,
Speaker 1: one wolf feeds the other. That the the encounter with
Speaker 1: the things that are dark and that are terrible and
Speaker 1: that are difficult, um is just exactly the thing that
Speaker 1: gives when the energy to feed the wolf who represents
Speaker 1: goodness and kindness and virtue excellent. That is a great
Speaker 1: way to end. Well, thank you very much Andrew for
Speaker 1: for being on the show. Congrats on your recent success
Speaker 1: with some of the awards that Far from the Tree
Speaker 1: has won. And uh, I thank you for the books
Speaker 1: my out there. They've been personally valuable to me. So thanks,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for a pleasure to be with you. Okay,
Speaker 1: bye bye. You can learn more about Andrew Solomon and
Speaker 1: this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Andrew.
Speaker 1: For more information, You can also text the word wolf
Speaker 1: to four four one four four