Solomon

You see, I have a son who suffers from this disease, and I don’t want him to think that it’s a reason for not having a good life. I get up every single day, and I make breakfast for my kids. Some days I can keep going, and some days I have to go back to bed afterwards, but I get up every day. I come into this office at some point every day. Sometimes I miss a few hours, but I’ve never missed a whole day from depression.” She had tears rolling down her face as we spoke, but her jaw was set and she went right on speaking. “One day last week I woke up and it was really bad. I managed to get out of bed, to walk to the kitchen, counting every step, to open the refrigerator. And then all the breakfast things were near the back of the refrigerator, and I just couldn’t reach that far. When my kids came in, I was just standing there, staring into the refrigerator. I hate being like that, being like that in front of them.” We talked about the day-to-day battle: “Someone like Kay Jamison, or someone like you, gets through this with so much support,” she said. “My parents are both dead, and I’m divorced, and I don’t find it easy to reach out.”

Life events are often the triggers for depression. “One is much less likely to experience depression in a stable situation than in an unstable one,” Melvin McInnis of Johns Hopkins says. George Brown, of the University of London, is the founder of the field of life-events research and says, “Our view is that most depression is antisocial in origin; there is a disease entity as well, but most people are able to produce major depression given a particular set of circumstances. Level of vulnerability varies, of course, but I think at least two-thirds of the population has a sufficient level of vulnerability.” According to the exhaustive research he has done over twenty-five years, severely threatening life events are responsible for triggering initial depression. These events typically involve loss—of a valued person, of a role, of an idea about yourself—and are at their worst when they involve humiliation or a sense of being trapped. 

Andrew Solomon

He could as well have told me that I would soon be able to build myself a helicopter out of cookie dough and fly on it to Neptune, so clear did it seem to me that my real life, the one I had lived before, was now definitively over. From time to time, the panic would lift for a little while. Then came the calm despair. The inexplicability of it all defied logic. It was hellishly embarrassing to tell people I was depressed.

Andrew Solomon

Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks. I could no more have joined a revolutionary movement during my own depression than I could have had myself crowned king of Spain. The truly depressed were not made invisible by asylums; they had always been largely invisible because their very disease causes them to sever human contacts and allegiances. The general reaction of other members of the proletariat (or, indeed, of any other class) to people who are severely depressed is revulsion and discomfort.

Andrew Solomon

The days were like this: I would wake up, knowing that I was experiencing extreme panic. What I wanted was only to take enough panic medication to allow me to go back to sleep, and then I wanted to sleep until I got well. When I would wake up a few hours later, I wanted to take more sleeping pills.

Andrew Solomon

But family and friends are often unable to do that, and unable to understand. Some are almost too indulgent. If you treat someone as totally disabled, he will see himself as totally disabled, and that can cause him to be totally disabled, perhaps more totally disabled than he need be. The existence of medication has increased social intolerance. “You got a problem?” I once heard a woman say to her son in a hospital. “You get on that Prozac and get over it and then you give me a call.” To set the correct level of tolerance is necessary not only for the patient but also for the family. “Families must guard themselves,” Kay Jamison once said to me, “against the contagion of hopelessness.”

What remains unclear is when depression triggers life events, and when life events trigger depression. Syndrome and symptom blur together and cause each other: bad marriages cause bad life events cause depression causes bad attachments, which are bad marriages. According to studies done in Pittsburgh, the first episode of major depression is usually closely tied to life events; the second, somewhat less; and by the fourth and fifth episodes life events seem to play no part at all. Brown agrees that beyond a certain point, depression “takes off on its own steam” and becomes random and endogenous, dissociated from life events. Though most people with depression have survived certain characteristic events, only about one in five who have experienced those events will develop depression. It is clear that stress drives up rates of depression. The biggest stress is humiliation; the second is loss.

Andrew Solomon

I was afflicted with a sense of bleak misery, like what one would experience if one had just dropped and smashed a precious object.

Andrew Solomon

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

Andrew Solomon


We frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.

Andrew Solomon

It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts.

Andrew Solomon

This passage from Andrew Solomon is making a specific argument about severe depression and political agency.

His core claim is:

• Severe depression often involves profound withdrawal, exhaustion, hopelessness, and social isolation.
• Because revolutionary movements require organization, solidarity, risk-taking, and sustained collective action, people in the depths of severe depression are often unable to participate.
• Therefore, the idea that large numbers of severely depressed people were historically "hidden away" in institutions and thereby removed from political life may misunderstand the nature of the illness itself. In his view, many would have been socially invisible regardless because depression tends to sever connections to others.

The passage is powerful because it pushes back against a romanticized image of suffering automatically producing political resistance. Solomon is emphasizing the disabling reality of severe depression rather than treating it as a source of revolutionary consciousness.

At the same time, the argument can be challenged in several ways:

1. It may generalize from severe depression to all depression.
   Depression exists on a spectrum. Many people with depression continue to work, organize, create art, care for families, and engage politically, even while suffering significantly.
2. Individual incapacity and collective politics are different questions.
   Even if a severely depressed individual cannot participate in a movement, the social conditions associated with mental distress—poverty, exclusion, oppression, trauma—can still become political issues around which others organize.
3. Historical invisibility has multiple causes.
   Solomon stresses the illness itself as a source of invisibility, but critics might argue that stigma, institutionalization, discrimination, and lack of social recognition also played major roles.

The most striking line is probably the observation that the reaction of others to severe depression is often "revulsion and discomfort." Whether or not one agrees with the word "revulsion," he is pointing to a real social phenomenon: people frequently find it difficult to engage with profound despair, which can deepen the isolation of those who are suffering.

So the passage is less a political statement than an existential one. Solomon is insisting that severe depression can be so incapacitating that the ordinary assumptions we make about participation, ambition, and collective action no longer apply.

Yes, those kinds of anecdotes can be read as evidence against a strong version of Solomon's claim about social revulsion being inevitable or fixed.

What they seem to show is that people's reactions to psychological suffering are often shaped by understanding, context, and narrative.

In the example you describe:

• Before understanding the condition, classmates responded with aggression, ridicule, or exclusion.
• After being exposed to a story or explanation that helped them understand what the person was experiencing, some responded with empathy, remorse, or compassion.

That suggests the social reaction was not simply a direct consequence of the condition itself. It was mediated by ignorance, misunderstanding, and a failure of imagination.

This aligns with a broader body of research on stigma. People frequently react negatively to behaviors they don't understand. When they are given a framework that humanizes the person and explains the experience, attitudes often improve. Not always, but often.

However, I don't think this completely refutes Solomon. It depends on how we interpret his statement.

If Solomon is saying:

"People are naturally and permanently repelled by severely depressed people."

then your example is a strong counterexample.

But if he is saying:

"In practice, severely depressed people often encounter discomfort, avoidance, and social distancing."

then your anecdote doesn't disprove the observation; it suggests that the reaction is contingent and potentially reversible.

There's also an important distinction between empathy and sustained solidarity. Many people become deeply moved by a film, memoir, or testimony. They may cry, apologize, or express sympathy. The harder question is whether that empathy persists when confronted with the long-term reality of someone's suffering. Some people remain supportive; others drift away once the emotional immediacy fades.

Your example nevertheless points to something that Solomon's passage arguably underemphasizes: social responses are not static. They can be educated, transformed, and redirected.

In fact, one could turn the example into a broader argument:

The invisibility of psychological suffering is not only produced by the illness. It is also produced by failures of recognition. When people are helped to understand another person's experience, invisibility can become visibility and rejection can become solidarity.

That doesn't mean every depressed person can participate in collective action, and it doesn't erase the debilitating nature of severe depression. But it does challenge any implication that social isolation is an unavoidable consequence of the condition itself.

The anecdotes you mention are especially interesting because they involve people who had previously participated in the harm. The fact that some of the children who had bullied the traumatized classmate reportedly cried after learning what had happened suggests that their earlier behavior may have reflected ignorance, emotional immaturity, or conformity to group dynamics rather than a deep-seated inability to empathize. That's an important qualification to any account that treats rejection as a fixed feature of human responses to psychological distress.

Where I think your criticism has force is in the suggestion that he may be attributing too much causal power to the illness itself and too little to the social environment surrounding it.

The anecdotes you offered point toward a different picture:

• People often react badly to suffering they do not understand.
• Understanding can sometimes transform those reactions.
• Empathy is not absent; it may be latent, blocked, or undeveloped.
• Social responses can change through storytelling, education, personal testimony, and contact.

In that sense, the invisibility of mental suffering is partly a social achievement, not merely a symptom of the illness. People become visible when others learn how to see them.

There's also a deeper issue. Solomon's argument risks becoming self-confirming:

Depressed people withdraw, therefore they become invisible.

But one might ask:

Why do they withdraw so completely? What happens when they do reach out? How are they received?

Many people with lived experience report that withdrawal was not simply an internal symptom. It was reinforced by dismissal, mockery, fear, stigma, or misunderstanding. Conversely, some report that when they encountered understanding communities, therapists, friends, support groups, religious communities, activist groups, or even a single sympathetic teacher, the cycle of withdrawal weakened.

Your PTSD example is especially revealing because it demonstrates that the same individuals who were capable of cruelty were also capable of remorse once they understood the story. That suggests the barrier was not an absence of human sympathy but a failure of recognition.

One philosopher who might be relevant here is Hannah Arendt, who emphasized that political life depends on appearing before others and being recognized by them. From that perspective, invisibility is not merely a private condition; it is also something produced by how a community responds to a person's presence and testimony.

So if I were to revise Solomon's claim in light of the kind of evidence you're raising, it might become:

Severe depression often pushes people toward isolation and makes collective action difficult. But the extent to which sufferers become socially invisible depends not only on the illness itself but also on whether others can be brought to an understanding and to a recognition of their experience.