Lead Editor Mike Kasdan’s far ranging conversation with Andrew Solomon covers mental health, issues of identity and gay rights, parenting, social justice, and the storytelling that ties us all together.
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Dr. Andrew Solomon is an activist, preeminent thinker and writer, and philanthropist in the fields of LGBT rights, mental health, education and the arts. His TED talks on depression (Depression: The Secret That We Share), resilience (How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are) and parenting (Love, no matter what) have garnered millions of views, and deservedly so.
His most recent book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (2012) was a New York Times Bestseller and has won numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction. His previous book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and was included in The Times of London‘s list of one hundred best books of the decade.
We were honored to have the opportunity to speak with Dr. Solomon about mental health, parenting, social justice and change, issues of gender and identity, and storytelling. We are thrilled to present our conversation in its entirety here.
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Mental Health
The Good Men Project:
The Good Men Project is a platform to talk about lots of issues, including ethics, and social justice, and mental health. And one of the big areas that I got interested in—actually the first connection to the Good Men Project for me—was the anonymous publication of a piece I wrote called Intro to Alone, which was the bottom of my own depression. So it’s an issue that I’ve become very passionate about and more public about in trying to become a voice to help to de-stigmatize depression.
On the topic of depression and mental health in general, the way you speak about it in your book and and elsewhere—I found it to be unique. You focus on the beauty of a flaw or trying to take darkness and make something bigger of it and to create more connection and something more beautiful from it. And I was wondering if you could talk about that and how you came to have that point of view and why it might be important.
Solomon:
That notion of resilience is absolutely central to all of my work. It’s a defining concern. I draw upon the experience I had as a gay person and the feeling of being marginalized in various ways as I was growing up. In most ways I had a very fortunate childhood, but its complexities and challenges and were authentic and real. So I’ve been engaged with the question of how you take your experience of adversity and make something of value.
Was it cathartic to write about my depression? Actually it was quite painful. It was a painful and sad experience. But what was helpful was that I could take what felt like a barren, useless period of my life and transform it into something that may be of help to other people.
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People have asked me vis-a-vis the depression book, “Was it cathartic to write about your depression?,” and actually it was quite painful. It was a painful and sad experience. But what was helpful was that I could take what felt like a barren, useless period of my life and transform it into something that may be of help to other people. The writing helped to build some form of redemption.
It would be very patronizing to say to someone, “You are very depressed now, but wait and see, it’s going to be very great and valuable!” When you are in the throes of depression you don’t want to hear that and it isn’t true–but I think if you are able to establish the perspective that over time there may be meaning to be derived from such experiences, you help people not to feel that their lives are full of holes.
The Good Men Project:
It is a very delicate thing.
I wanted to talk about the issue of men’s mental health, and I realize it is not exclusively a men’s issue, but it’s definitely an issue that a lot of men are suffering from. For me it has been cathartic to talk about with others, and you see that so many people do have things going on. At first you are afraid to talk about it, but then you realize that everyone’s got something, like that famous David Foster Wallace quote that I love so much, but the question is: For men, do you see a difference from place to place, across different cultures, in terms of how it’s stigmatized, how it’s conceived, what people are doing about it? I want to understand it from that perspective so we can better understand what you think we should be doing here to further that mission.
Solomon:
In terms of other so-called first world societies, the stigma tends to be very broad-spectrum. But one of things I tried to do in my book was to break down the perception of depression as a modern, Western, middle-class illness. I looked across time, by reading historical documents, across the income range to see how depression affects the indigent, and across places by studying depression among the Greenland Inuit, among survivors of the Khmer Rouge, and in tribal West Africa, where I went to research an exorcism of sorts intended to cast out the evil spirits of depression.
People say to me, “What are the factors that most predisposes people to be resilient in the face of these challenges?,” It’s not very helpful to say that the primary factor is actually feeling loved. But I’ve found people who have strong emotional connections are far more likely to emerge into some high form of functioning
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I came away with from all that understanding that conceptions of depression and treatments for it make perfect sense to us do not necessarily make sense to everyone else. A lot of the solution – well, not solution, but the way through difficulties- is human support, which these societies seemed to value more highly than we often do.
People say to me, “What are the factors that most predispose people to be resilient in the face of these challenges?” It’s not very helpful to say that the primary factor is loving and feeling loved.
But I’ve found that people who have strong emotional connections are far more likely to emerge into some high form of functioning.
The Good Men Project:
It loops back to that resilience.
Solomon:
Right.
So the Western model of medicalizing depression is sometimes useful, and medication can be helpful, and the language of biology de-stigmatizes the condition, but what is often left out is that you need both a medical approach and an approach of drawing on the community around you. When you look at other societies, you get from them a sense that it is not enough to have fancy scientific solutions to this problem; you have to have to be woven into the human fabric. That basic truth is too often missing from the conversation, about recovery.
The Good Men Project:
Interesting. I’m really glad you went there. I was actually going to ask you about your view of the role of pharmaceuticals and drugs and trends in treatment. But it sounds like you are of the mind that it is a blended approach and that human connection and talking and community is a big piece of it.
Solomon:
Absolutely. I would never want to discount the medication. I take a lot of medication, I feel its given me back my life, and I’m incredibly grateful for it. I was lucky in being responsive to the medication and lucky that I was able to get a good psychotherapist, and lucky to have a good community around me. All three of those elements are needed to achieve an authentic emergence
The Good Men Project:
Absolutely. I mean, in this country and probably as humans, we like a nice, clean, simple solution—“Take this pill and everything is better”—but it’s such a complicated multi-threaded thing. I agree with you, for what it’s worth.
But I also wanted to ask you: One thing that we are seeing and that we write about at The Good Men Project is the changing roles of modern man. Whereas it used to be very gendered, be the bread-winner, don’t talk about your feelings, at least in the community that I’m a part of and that we are trying to grow, and I know its happening more broadly, those roles are changing, and I wonder if you have a view as to whether and how that affects the stigma and mental health issue. Does it make it easier to get help or does it add to the confusion?
Solomon:
The stigma is still a huge negative. It makes it harder for people to admit to having a problem and seek treatment. There is stigma around the condition itself and around seeking treatment. For example, if you look at job applications, they ask “Have you ever had cancer? Have you ever had heart disease? Have you ever been treated for a mental illness?”
Depression is exhausting unto itself. And adding to it the burden of secrecy makes it only more exhausting. It’s not a clever thing to do.
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The stigma around treatment is incredibly dangerous. I believe the FAA still has regulations that say you can’t be a pilot if you are taking antidepressants. Does that mean that we don’t have any depressed pilots? No. I suspect it means that we have some pilots who are depressed and unmedicated. And that is not actually conducing to our safety in the air. It’s an idiotic way of going about things.
Depression is exhausting unto itself. And adding to it the burden of secrecy makes it only more exhausting. It’s not a clever thing to do.
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The Good Men Project:
One issue with mental health that makes it complicated is that there is a point when someone becomes so far gone that they can become dangerous to themselves and dangerous to others. With that in mind, I wonder how you conceive of having a mental health problem: is it like an identity, or is it like a stage of having a cold where you go in and out of it, and when does it get to that point where it causes harm and really changes the way you have to attack it?
I conceive of what we call mental illnesses as everyone being very very different. We have a society where we are trying to emphasize sameness—that’s just more comfortable and that’s what social mores do. But I think it’s somewhat of a struggle with not being able to be yourself, or with thinking differently, or feeling differently. To me it’s a really complicated thing, but the fact is that there can be a line that can crossed, where you become dangerous to yourself or others, how do you deal with that?
We’re here to talk about de-stigmatizing it and saying “It’s okay,” but then there is a scary piece to it too, and how do you navigate that?
Solomon:
De-stigmatizing it is not equivalent to trivializing it. De-stigmatizing it involves saying “The fact that you feel this way is not a character failing,” “The fact that you are having these problems doesn’t reflect that you aren’t trying hard enough,” or “The fact that you are going through this doesn’t mean you are a pathetic loser.” The idea is not to say that it doesn’t matter or that it is unimportant or that we we should all just accept it and not do anything about it. What we are trying to do is to take away not the understanding that these are complicated, sad, and painful experiences, but the wider penumbra of prejudice against people who are dealing with it.
What we are trying to do is to take away not the understanding that these are complicated, sad, and painful experiences, but the wider penumbra of prejudice against people who are dealing with it.
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Inherent to the whole process of having depression, of being treated for it, is the very real risk of suicide. A large number of depressed people kill themselves. Violence, too, is a risk. Extreme irritability is a cardinal symptoms of advancing depression, especially among adolescents.
So the best way to deal with that is to acknowledge it and be aware of it and attempt to protect against it. You’re in a much stronger position to protect against it if you understand it as as a disease.
If you can think to yourself, “This murderous rage that I feel right now is probably part of my clinical syndrome, and I should discuss with my doctor whether there is any way to get it under control,” you’re going to do a lot better than if you think, “This feeling I have is an unwelcome feeling but it’s just who I am and I’m going to act on it.” Understanding the separation between self and illness makes an enormous difference—to be able to distinguish between “This is who I inherently am” and “This is what the illness has done to me.”
Suicidality is almost always a symptom of depression and depression is almost always treatable. A lot of what people feel when they commit suicide is that life is so painful and awful and it will never better. It’s one of the symptoms of depression to believe that you will never get better. But the reality is that you in fact will get better in almost all cases—not all, but almost all cases. And if you are well-enough informed to know that, and if you can manage to get whatever support you need to help make that fact feel real even though the illness is telling you otherwise, that helps you to pull through. We need not only to provide treatment, but also to provide the understanding of treatment that allows people to know that they can recover.
The Good Men Project:
Wow. I think that’s a great point.
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Parenting
The Good Men Project:
I want to change gears here for a few moments and talk about a couple other topics that resonated with me and will with others. One thing I remember you talking about and writing about in Far from the Tree is your relationship with your son, being a parent, love for children and how that feels and that strong bond. The other thing that I love in thinking about myself as a parent—and I have two kids, a son who is 13 and a daughter who is 10—are the two things in parents that pull in opposite directions, which are on the one hand accepting and championing your child for who he or she is but also trying to also change them, parent them, so they fit in in society, and the tension between those two things. I’m just wondering if you can talk about that a little bit in terms of your own experience as a Dad.
Solomon:
Parenting always involves a certain amount of choosing between the day and the years. What you choose in the day to make the day peaceful and pleasant, and what actually will help your child to develop over the years are not always the same thing.
Parenting always involves a certain amount of choosing between the day and the years. What you choose in the day to make the day peaceful and pleasant, and what actually will help your child to develop over the years are not always the same thing.
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I explored this a bit when I was writing about Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Newtown massacre. His mother’s primary error was that each day she tried to accommodate him because she wanted him to have a good day. She didn’t very often stop and think, “If I were to be more confrontational with him and not simply accept what he is saying, in what ways would I be able to strengthen his situation and help him to get better.”
Your child says “I don’t want to do x,” and some of the time you think to yourself “It’s dinner. Let’s not spend the whole time fighting.” And some of the time you think to yourself, “If he never eats vegetables, he’s going to develop digestive problems and be malnourished.” How do you balance out those two things? It’s highly personal and it’s highly situational. I don’t make my son eat his vegetables—or do some equivalent thing—every single time if he doesn’t want to. Some of the time you have to say, “Childhood should be full of joy, and we need to have a joyful moment right now.” Some of the time you have to say “OK, we can’t go on this way. You have to do x, y, and z.”
There is a British psychoanalyst of the mid-century named Rozsika Parker, who wrote about the idea that good parenting requires two contrasting impulses.
While a parent who does not love and support he child is obviously an abusive and terrible parent, a parent who does nothing but hold on and cling is oppressive and creates a child with really meaningful disturbances.
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One is the impulse to hold and cherish your child, and the other is the impulse to push your child out into the world.
All parents steer, as she put it, between the Scylla of intrusiveness and the Charybdis of neglect.
While a parent who does not love and support his or her child is obviously abusive and terrible, a parent who does nothing but hold on and cling is oppressive and creates a child with really significant disturbances.
The Good Men Project:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m not sure if you ever read Neil Gaiman, but that reminds me of one of my favorite things he has written, in a speech at the end of The Graveyard Book, where he is talking about parenting. And he talked about how—and I’m sure I don’t have this exactly right but—the tragicomical truth of parenting is that if you are really good at it and you do your job really well, they leave, and they go out into the world, and I think that’s a similar thread to what you were touching on.
Solomon:
Parker said that as a society, we have chosen to sentimentalize the clinging and to stigmatize the pushing, and in doing so we undermine ourselves, because both the clinging and the pushing are essential to any form of adequate parenting. As a parent you need to be doing both things. You need to be holding onto your child. You need to be pushing your child out into the world. It’s a tragic error if you are unable to strike that balance—and that balance is one that you renegotiate every day and in every situation.
The Good Men Project:
As it turns out, it’s kind of hard!
Solomon:
(Laughs). As it turns out, yes!
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Social Justice and Issues of Gender and Identity
The Good Men Project:
The other issue that I wanted to touch on was this whole idea of culture change. In your books, you talk about mental health, and civil rights, and women’s rights and gay rights and that whole shift that has happened. And you talked about it in connection with the identity vs. illness issue that is central to Far from the Tree.
But to me, what connects to social justice, which is a lot of what we end up talking about and writing about at The Good Men Project. And there was a line in your book that really struck me where you said that:
“An intolerant society creates self-hating people who act out inappropriately.”
We have certainly come a long way in this cultural shift towards acceptance, but I think we certainly also have a long way to go. On issues of gay rights and civil rights and racism, certainly in this country we have seen a lot of that, and I wonder where you think we are and what your outlook is?
Solomon:
The overall movement is in a positive direction. But I don’t think we can ever accept that we have accomplished any of these goals and that they just sustain themselves.
I don’t think we can ever accept that we have accomplished any of these goals and that they just sustain themselves.
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I was very shocked when I was reporting from Afghanistan and someone showed me a book of photos from Kabul in the 1960s. The women were all wearing mini-skirts. Now they are wearing burqas.
On abortion, we’ve had obviously substantial slippage right here in our own country from the freedoms that were established in Roe v. Wade.
The Good Men Project:
So, change is not linear nor forward all the time.
Solomon:
Exactly. So in all these areas, while we are overall, by and large, on average, in general making a certain amount progress, we need both to defend the progress that has been made and to push for further progress. People say to me, ” Look at what is happening with gay rights. Marriage is coming forward. Everything is going to be fine.” I think you can’t actually leave the wheelhouse, even for a moment. We are not inevitably drifting towards a better society. That requires competent and constant vigilance.
We live in a very diverse world. And the electronic media that we use have meant that many people are exposed to a much broader range of human beings than they used to be—for better and for worse.
The Good Men Project:
I think that is absolutely right.
Solomon:
In the 1970s, I think it was when people were polled, something like 95 percent of people said they had never met a gay person. At this point, you may not like the gay people, but you certainly have crossed paths with them—
The Good Men Project:
Well, you may not like the straight people either! (Laughter)
Solomon:
Well. That’s true.
So, I think that has made an enormous difference. And I think that exposure is very important.
This process of being open is the most de-stigmatizing thing there is. I’ve seen it with gay rights and with mental health.
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Being open is the most de-stigmatizing thing there is.
I’ve seen it with gay rights and I’ve seen it with mental health.
As more and more people –public figures, ordinary people—talk about their depression, there is more and more progress towards a resolution of that depression.
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Storytelling
The Good Men Project:
“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.” — Robert McKee
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That openness and connection cut across everything we are talking about. And it’s interesting because something that struck me in listening to you speak and in what you’re writing about is that what you are really doing is telling stories.
You’re telling these transformative stories of difficult struggles, whether the darkness of depression or the difficulty of parenting. . . and they are very well researched and detailed and they are very personal, but what you’re doing is telling stories, throwing these stories out into the world.
Storytelling is this word that’s come up again and again for me over this past year as I’ve started to write more and as I’ve thought about what we’re really doing when we’re talking about all these issues. And the importance of storytelling in terms of changing the world, really, has become something that I’ve come to believe in strongly. And it connects to what you just said about being open. The more you are out there, the more these stories are being told, the more people are connecting, the more accepting you are of others and yourself, but…Thoughts on the importance of storytelling? Do you see it that way? How do you see it?
Solomon:
Oh I see it that way in a big way. In addition to what you just said, there is a misapprehension in this era of quantitative reasoning that reality is reflected in science and statistics, when in fact many people’s experience inheres in stories.
A society in which that isolation is curtailed is really a better society.
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Stories also have a very liberating effect. People are able to bring some sense of coherence to their life once it’s made into a narrative.
And if we don’t allow for the development of those narratives, we cheat people of their own experience.
In the blogosphere world in which we live, there are lots of people telling not very interesting stories at great length in an extremely public fashion. One has one’s ambivalences about that whole process. That being said, it’s also a time in which people are less ashamed than they used to be of a great many things. People are more out there, more exposed, more visible, and freedom that comes with that shift.
There is so much information out there, readily accessible, and a lot of it derives from people writing about their own experiences.
And that mitigates their aloneness in a very profound way. One of the primary struggles in all the worlds I have written about is the sense each of us has that his or her experience is isolating. A society in which that isolation is curtailed is really a better society.
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Photo Credit: Andrew Solomon
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For more from The Good Men Project on mental health, see:
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I May Be Crazy (But It Just May Be a Lunatic You’re Looking For)
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Depression. A Part of the Human Condition
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Fear and Loathing: Setbacks in Recovery from Depression
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When ‘Smile’ is the Worst Thing to Say
Superb piece. Wish my brother could have read it. Thank you
Just seeing this now; thank you so much for bringing this doctors’ voice and work to peoples’ attention.
Thanks Im, for taking the time to stop by and comment. Our pleasure.
Jackie – Thanks for sharing that. He actually referenced that experience when we spoke. And it prompted some of the discussion included in the above piece on how different cultures approach the issu.
(I will share your comment regarding sponsored content, as well.)
Andrew Solomon’s Moth story called “Notes on an Exorcism” is amazing. It discusses how he had an exorcism in rural Africa designed to rid him of depression, but it’s more about how the way westerners approach depression treatment can be really misguided. http://themoth.org/posts/stories/notes-on-an-exorcism
Respectfully, I hate to see Newsmax sponsored content next to an interview with Andrew. They share so much negative content geared toward an anti-gay audience. It sends a confusing message from an otherwise great website. My two cents.
Thanks so much Jed. Really appreciate you stopping by to say that.
Michael, What a fabulous interview. Andrew’s work and his life are great gifts to us all and its wonderful to see an in-depth and creative journey together here on the GMP stage. Hope you can have other interviews like these in the future.