Andrew Solomon, PhD, is an American writer and speaker on diverse fields of research such as depression and suicide, identity politics, and culture. His book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
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The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms.
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Author and essayist Andrew Solomon has written on a widely divergent range of topics, including Soviet artists, Libyan governance, childrearing, and the politics of the deaf. For this event, his famously obsessive attention focused on the topic of sleep.
Some fifteen per cent of women suffer from depression during pregnancy, and the use of antidepressants in expectant women is on the rise.
A survivor of the Pol Pot's death squads teaches an American to handle depression.
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When a friend first presented to me the arguments for gay marriage, in 1994, I thought the whole idea was ridiculous. In the face of staggering prejudice against us, marriage felt so remote as to be irrelevant.
Every forty seconds, someone commits suicide. In the United States, it is the tenth most common cause of death in people over ten years of age, far more common than death by homicide or aneurysm or aids.
The wish to hurt others is tied not to autism but to psychopathy, which manifests in a deficiency or absence of empathy and remorse. Some autistic people may not recognize why they cause distress; psychopaths don’t care that they cause distress.
Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent.
The pattern of highly accomplished and successful people committing suicide is transfixing. It assures the rest of us that a life of accolades is not all that it’s cracked up to be and that achieving more will not make us happier.
Far From the Tree is a revolutionary new book by Andrew Solomon that tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so.
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