Andrew Solomon: Depressie, het geheim dat we allemaal delen

“Het tegendeel van depressie is niet geluk, maar vitaliteit, en het was vitaliteit die me op dat moment leek te ontglippen.” In een talk die zowel welsprekend als ontredderend is, neemt schrijver Andrew Solomon je mee naar de donkerste hoeken van zijn geest tijdens de jaren dat hij tegen depressie vocht.
Dat leidde hem naar een verhelderende reis over de hele wereld voor interviews met anderen met depressie — om tot zijn verbazing te ontdekken dat, hoe meer hij erover sprak, hoe meer mensen hun eigen verhalen kwijt wilden. (Gefilmd op TEDxMet.)

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“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.” In a talk equal parts eloquent and devastating, writer Andrew Solomon takes you to the darkest corners of his mind during the years he battled depression. That led him to an eye-opening journey across the world to interview others with depression — only to discover that, to his surprise, the more he talked, the more people wanted to tell their own stories.

Andrew Solomon’s newest book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children, but also find profound meaning in doing so. Solomon’s startling proposition is that diversity is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender.
While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, as are the struggles toward compassion and the triumphs of love Solomon documents in every chapter. Woven into these courageous and affirming stories is Solomon’s journey to accepting his own identity, which culminated in his midlife decision, influenced by this research, to become a parent.
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