Bonus Re-Release: Andrew Solomon

our interview with Andrew Solomon. If you've never heard it, I highly recommend a full listen, and if you have heard it, I truly believe that you will love it even more as you listen again, because this one is unbelievable. From both Eric and I, I wish to express a deep and heartfelt thank you to every listener for your dedication and support. The encounter with the things that are dark, and that are terrible and that are difficult is just exactly the thing that gives when the energy to feed

the wolf who represents goodness and kindness and virtue. Welcome to the One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Welcome to the show. Our guest today is author Andrew Solomon. Andrew is a reagul or contributor to The New Yorker Art Forum and

the New York Times magazine. In addition, he is the author of several books, including The Irony Tower, Soviet Artists at a Time of Glass nost also The Noonday Demon, and a novel, A Stone Boat. He is the winner of the two thousand one National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Andrew's newest book is Far from the Tree, Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Hi, Andrew, Welcome to the show. What a pleasure to be here. We're We're

really glad to have you on. I've I'm a big fan of both of your books, so this is a real, real pleasure for us. So our podcast is based on the old parable where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and love and joy, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like hate and greed and jealousy. And the grandson stops and he thinks, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. I think that the attempt to lead a moral life is an urgent business forum for many of us, perhaps even for most of us, and that one is

always trying to get away from exploitation. I think, especially as a writer, because there's a great deal of writing that is exploitative. My aim is always to write work which is actually helpful to people, um to continue to be productive somehow of trying to improve and make the world better. It sounds a little pompous and arrogant as the basis for writing. Partly I just write to describe things, but ultimately I think the goal is to do things

that are moving. And as I've looked at the areas in which I work, including this area of psychology and psychiatry, I found over and over again that people are often working with a real view to somehow making a somehow making a better world. And I think that that attempt, in all of its urgency, is part of what gives

human experience its meaning. Great one of the themes that shows up in both books that I thought was really interesting, and it's something we talked about on this show a lot, and it was really about the core question of about what should we change in ourselves and what things should

we accept in ourselves. In Far from the Tree, you have a lot of examples of families who took a more accepting approach to their kids disabilities versus other families who were, you know, uh, trying to change everything they could. I'm curious if you could expound a little bit more on that that theme. I think that I was looking at that particularly in terms of parenting, but everything I said about parenting is relevant also to one's attitude toward oneself.

But I would say that one of the central activities of parenting is changing your children. You educate them, You teach them a sense of moral values, you try to teach them some manners, You try to give them all kinds of knowledge they didn't have. Not to change your children would be to neglect them terribly. But it's also part of the experience of being a parent that you have to accept your child for who he is or she is, and make him or her feel good about

who they are or what their identity might be. And I think there are some things that obviously need to be changed, and there are some things that obviously need to be celebrated, and there's a great deal that falls in a gray, foggy middle. And I think a lot of the time our experience comes down to that old Serenity prayer about having the courage to change the things that you can um and the forbearance to accept the things you can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.

And I feel like that wisdom is one of the most urgent but elusive pieces of wisdom for people in their own formation of an identity and in their parents experience, and so often, especially in the families I looked at and far from the tree, who are dealing with children with various kinds of stigmatized identities. There is the quality that the child has, There is the sense that it is stigmatized and therefore carries a burden. There are treatments

of one kind or another. Those treatments are themselves often very traumatic, are very difficult, and the balance between the treatment um and its costs and the condition and its costs needs constantly to be assessed and assessed and reassessed over and over again. That gray area is such a challenge, and the wisdom to know the right thing is is so difficult and so much a matter of understanding and

knowing yourself. One of the things that you talked about that you said in the book, you're talking about the story of Lucy Greeley, who had multiple facial reconstruction surgeries, and you you you use her as an example to say she kept trying to constantly change herself. And you said that people who know their condition to be irreversible are often happier than people who believe it can be changed,

That hope can be the cornerstone of misery. Can you talk a little bit more about that, people who know that their condition is irreversible are that are able to start the process of accommodating it. If you know that there's nothing that you can do about having a lost part of your leg, or having whatever the other debilitating condition is that you might have, you figure out how

to live a good life with that condition. If you have a condition which is easily fixable, you easily fix it, and then you do a pretty good job of living once it's fixed. But a lot of people have conditions which might be fixable or might not be fixable, and that might be somewhat fixable but not fully fixable, where there's a lot of vagueness, and those people tend to live all the time with a sense that their condition requires them one way or another and to keep trying

to fix it. And they keep trying, and often the fix doesn't happen at all, or it doesn't happen in a sufficient degree, and so those people end up terribly frustrated. So I look, for example, at the experience of people with Down syndrome. You can't actually make the Down syndrome go away at this point. You can have strategies of early intervention that are helpful to people who wish to function well despite their Down syndrome, and responsible parents pursue

those options. It's pretty clear with down syndrome what the things are that help people, and what the things are that don't help people, and what the extent of the fix can be. But you get to autism and you discover that there are all kinds of usually rather Charlotte and like people marketing all kinds of peculiar strategies that they claim if brought about a complete remission of autism. There are people who are falling into the hands of

those practitioners. But there's also solid science which seems to suggest that certain interventions are helpful to certain people to certain degrees. And so the autism parent is left thinking is this real? Is this fake? Should I be pursuing some sort of improvement? Should I not be? If I don't try to get my child therapies that will help him,

in mind neglecting my child. If I do get my child these therapies, are the therapies themselves so traumatic as to be more destructive than they wrant for the amount of improvement they'll bring about. And because autism is such a heterogeneous condition, how people will respond to a given treatment is very difficult to know ahead of time, And for every treatment that someone says has been a miracle, there's someone else saying that the pursuit of it was

a tragedy. There's a great example in the book where you're talking about two women who have autistic children of a fairly similar functioning level, and one is a fairly wealthy woman and who is tired and frustrated and doesn't enjoy being with her. You know it is stressed out by yourself, and because she's always trying to fix him. And then you you describe another woman who's of a much lower social economic status, who has no faith that she can fix him. You say, because she could never

fix her own life. And she's a lot more she enjoys him and has a lot more a lot more time with him that that is pleasant, and she's less sort of run out by it. It was important to me never to suggest, by any means that it's easier to deal with any of the conditions I was looking at if you're poor, Being poor makes everything more difficult than it is for people who have got greater means. Who are poor don't get the same respect, care, they don't get the same assistance or support, um, they don't

get the same opportunities. That being said, people who are more privileged tend to be more perfectionistic and often experience these children as imperfect and often throw themselves into trying to fix them. And often, back to the theme that we were talking about a moment ago, what these children really require is not to be fixed, but to be

accepted and you and to be celebrated. And sometimes that's very difficult for people who keep thinking, but there's something wrong with my child, and I need to make it right. And it comes more readily to people who think my child is who my child is, and I just have to deal with what I've been given. What I liked a lot in the book is you're not. You don't really come down on either side of that debate. You're not.

You're not suggesting anything one way or the other. You're just sort of exposing the different options and challenges out there. And one of the things that's so interesting about the book is it's a book about people who have different identities of of all sorts, but a lot of them are considered disability, whether it be deafness, down syndrome, autism, and uh. But what comes through in the book over and over is the joy that some of those parents

find in that. And you say that the main thing that drives whether the parents are joyful and how able they are to love their children is their ability to find meaning in what's happening. One of the mothers whom I interviewed said to me, will always give us these little sayings like God doesn't give you any more than you can handle. But children like ours are not preordained as a gift. There a gift because that's what we have chosen. And I believe that people make those choices

all the time. I believe that people who have these children, who have these extraordinary identities or characteristics, really have to decide relatively early on. Am I going to suffer with this and have a very difficult time with it? Or am I going to um am a organism? How say? This isn't what I would have chosen, This isn't what I wanted, This isn't what I had in mind when

I set out to have children. But it will allow me to grow and to learn and to have in some sense of richer life than I would have had

without it. And I was impressed at how often people really do make that decision, and how often they conform to it, which is not to say that their lives are necessarily easy, or that given everything to do over again, they would have chosen these experience says, But one story after the next really dwelt on the sense that dealing with disabled people had made people kinder and more tolerant, and more open and more generous in all kinds of

profound ways. And I remember one mother who had a child with Down syndrome, and who had ended up spending most of her life working to improve educational opportunities for kids with d S, saying to me, Um, you know, for our son, I wish I could make it go away, because it's a difficult way to be in the world, and I would like to give him an easier life.

But speaking for myself, while I would never have believed twenty six years ago when he was born that I could come to such a point I have for him, I would make it go away in an instant. But for me it's given me so much richer and so much more purposeful a life than i'd ever otherwise have had. That speaking for myself, I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world. You know, one thing that I think is a real can be a real poison in our culture and in our minds, is comparing ourselves to

other things. And in the book The Noonday Demon uh an Atlas of depression, where you you talk about your own depression and you study depression in a lot of different circumstances, you reference the harm that the emergence of supermodels, did you know, the cultural emergence of supermodels did to women's views of themselves? And then you talk about something uh similar version of that, a psychological supermodel that we

all seem to think we need to aspire to. And I think I'd like to ask you to talk a little bit more about that in the context of depression, and also in the context of families who have a child who is different and their initial it's not meeting the standard that they had expected or hoped for. Well, in depression, I think there's the problem that people believe that the appropriate way for them to live is in

a state of sort of constant rapture um. You know, you look at the representations of happiness that occur in a great deal of daytime television and popular culture of various kinds, and there's a suggestion all the time that you should be happy. And I don't think people especially expected to be happy, or at least not to be happy that much of the time, even forty or fifty years ago. And I think this notion somehow in a

celebrity culture. For all that we see celebrities going through complete meltdowns and falling to pieces, we still see a lot of them and somehow having these wonderful, perfect lives, and we feel like, if my life isn't wonderful and perfect, I've failed. Now it's hard enough to deal with the fact that you're depressed, or with the fact that you're struggling in any of a broad variety of other ways without having the sense it's a humiliation not to be

perfect and not to be completely and perfectly happy. And because people have seen these images of extreme happiness that keep being represented to us, people often blame themselves and have a sense of enormous failure in connection with their own depression. So they're both depressed and feel like failures for being depressed. And I think that's a very unfortunate and very painful layering that takes place in looking at how that applies to the families that was interviewing and

far from the tree. With all of their engagements with these unusual and extraordinary children. I think a lot of the time the parents had a vision for their own lives, which was for everything to go perfectly. And then they have a child who is, in the eyes of the world, damaged and not as good as a child was not affected by one of these conditions, and they find it shameful and they feel somehow responsible for it, and they

feel embarrassed for it. Well, that gives them, the parents, a much less robust and positive life than they would have had otherwise. But additionally it gives their children a

much lower level of self esteem. And there's a constant struggle that I think goes on between these parents and these children, in which the parents are hopefully moving toward um out of the outrage they often feel at the time of diagnosis, through the bewilderment that usually follows the outrage, into the acceptance which is really necessary for them to lead an okay life, and onward to celebration. And the movement through those four stages, and they aren't completely linear.

You can get to the point of celebration and then you have a setback and you're outraged all over again. But the movement through those stages with acceptance and celebration as the end goal, is a way of rising. I think to the occasion of saying, I will not insist on the supermodel vision of what my family should look like. I will not insist on the supermodel vision of what

my own moods and character should be like. I will rather live authentically in my own experience, find as much happiness as I am able to find, and be grateful for the happiness I found, and live in the compass of it. Excellent. So I'd like to switch now and talk a little bit more about the Noonday Demon, the book about depression, and I had talked to you before the show about reading a section of it. Could you uh go ahead and walk us through that or read

that force? Some people seem to give in to their depression. Others seem to battle it. Since depression is highly demotivating, it takes a certain survivor impulse to keep going through the depression, not to cave into it. A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover. It is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that, and you have hope. Of course, it can be hard to sustain a sense of humor during an experience that is really not so funny, it is urgently

necessary to do so. The most important thing to remember during a depression is this, You do not get the time back. It is not tacked on at the end of your life to make up for the disaster years. Whatever time is eaten by a depression is gone forever. The minutes that are ticking by as you experience the illness are minutes you will never know again. No matter

how bad you feel. You have to do everything you can to keep living, even if all you can do for the moment is to breathe, wait it out, and occupy the time of waiting as fully as you possibly can. That's why big piece of advice to depress people, hold onto time. Don't wish your life away. Even the minutes when you feel you are going to explode, our minutes of your life, and you will never get those minutes again.

Thank you. That's a really beautiful, beautiful section, and I think it goes back a little bit to the idea of to some extent, if we're always wishing we were somewhere else, and severe severe depression is a is a different story. But the mild depression is often, at least for me, accompanied by that desire that I was somewhere else, doing something else, someone else, and I'm missing the moments of my life that are in front of me, regardless of how they may appear, they are they are my life.

And I like the way you you put that a lot. Yes, I think you know, depression is inherently painful. It's not painful because of social prejudice. It's not painful because of your own attitude toward it. It is inherently painful, and most of us really don't like painful experiences and would like to avoid them. But I've met people who have said that they went through a period of years when they were dysthymic, which is to say they had milder depression,

or when they were in and out of depression. Andrew said, I just spent all of that time wishing that things were different, and now I realized I wasted a big part of my youth in that enterprise. And I sometimes say when I talked to people about the pursuit of treatment, people will say, well, you know, I really was considering getting some kind of treatment, But I think I'm going to be able to beat this on my own, and

I'm just gonna stick it out. And if it's still not working out that well in six months, then maybe I'll talk to someone and I say, look in, um, in six months, you're going to be twenty nine and you'll never be twenty eight again, and you will have lost six months at being twenty eight to this project

of duking it out on your own. So why don't you try to avail yourself of whatever treatments there are to get as well as you're able to get, as quickly as you're able to get there, Because otherwise, the longer you put it off, aside from the treatment, implications of its possibly escalating. But the longer you put it off, the longer it's going to be that you've missed a chunk out of your life. And when you're feeling well again, you'll regret that you missed half of the year you

were twenty eight. Right. I was curious to ask you you you wrote The Noonday Demon. Has it been ten years since it was published? I came out in two thousand one, Okay, so it's been it's been longer than that. I was curious if you have any thoughts about how treatment for depression has improved and changed since you wrote

the book. I've actually just finished writing an epilogue for the book that will be in a new edition of it, to bring it up to date, partly to bring up to date my own experience and that of the people in the book, but also to look at treatment. There has not been dramatic advancement in the area of antidepressant medication. The big insights about neurotransmitters that drove the development of

the popular antidepressants remain the primary insights for psychopharmacology. Where there has been a certain amount of progress is in the treatment of so called treatment resistant depression for people who fail all of what were previously our existing technologies. Ketamine, which was long sold on the streets as special kum, is now increasingly being used, still on a very experimental basis,

for people with acute, refractory, unrelenting depression. And they found that many people who have been suicidal for an extended period of time will, after a single infusion of ketamine intravenously have that depression remit um. It often remits within a few hours um and so that's an extraordinary effect because the antidepressant medications we have take weeks and weeks

to work. Unfortunately, ketamine is a substance of abuse, and the effects that it has are effects that can have many unwanted downstream effects, So it's not really a practical line of treatment, and the improvement it induces usually ust only a week to ten days, occasionally to two weeks,

so it's not really a practical means of treatment. But the fact that it works sets up an understanding of other pathways than the ones we know for the treatment of depression and hopefully will be applicable, and there are a number of things that are in development now that would operate on the same pathways as ketamine. The other I think really major advance is the advent of deep brain stimulation, which was pioneered by Helen Mayburg and Emery.

It's a surgical process in which a little electrode like the ones that are used for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, is actually implanted quite deep in the brain and connected to a battery pack, which sends a constant electrical signal to the area, and it changes the activity of something called Broca's area twenty five in the brain which had not previously been associated with depression or really much studied at all, but which Mayburgh's an imaging specialists had designated

as the locus of a lot of disregulation and depressed patients. It's obviously an invasive brain surgery. It's done only for people who have extreme, extreme depression that's been unresponsive to psychotherapy and medication and electroshock or electro convulsive treatment and so on and so forth. But but for the people in whom it's worked, it's been quite remarkable. Um. There is a wonderful description of member working with a patient.

The patients have to remain conscious while it's being done because their consciousness can help to help them to respond if something is going wrong in the way that it's being inserted. And she puts the device in and then she turns it on and she never tells them when she's turning it on. And she had one patient on the operating table. She turned on the device and he suddenly looked at her and said, what did you just do?

And she said why? And he said, all my life I've been locked in a room with a thousand screaming children and they've just left the building, so it's extraordinary work. Again, it's not practical for a broad range of people, but I think there's a feeling that it may provide insights that will ultimately be applicable to a larger range of people.

There does seem to be a lot more um, you know, transcranial direct stimulation and other other ways that are emerging that appear to be less invasive than that, but follow some principles around stimulating neurons via electricity. That seems seemed to be a lot more studies around that. I was curious about how, and it's going to be in your epilogue, but how has your depression been since you published the book.

The sense that my depression was so disabling that it was destroying my life is now well and truly behind me, but it requires constant management. I'm on permanent medication and in permanent therapy, and when life gets very stressful, I

have up kicks and surges of it. Again. I tried to make some changes in my medication to get away from some side effects out eight or nine years ago with catastrophic effects, and went into a really severe depression and had to cancel various plans that I had and was unable to function really for a little while, and then I managed to pull out of that. UM. I had something of a depression when I published Far from the Tree. I had worked on the book for eleven years.

I found the idea of letting it go out into the world sort of terrifying. UM. I was under an enorsement of stress. I then developed a physical problem with partial hearing loss UM sensory neural hearing loss. I have had some of my hearing and my left ear come back,

but my hearing is permanently compromised. There. I found the mix of feeling like my hearing was going and feeling like I was in this terribly self exposing business of putting my book in the world really overwhelming, and I found myself getting incredibly anxious in the way that I had when I was depressed, and feeling over and over again as though I couldn't get through UM this day, I couldn't get through the next day, I couldn't get

through the day after that. I think I have the advantage now of having leaved through a number of depressive episodes, and so even when I'm feeling my worst, there's some rational piece of me that knows you will feel better and it won't take that long and you just have to ride this out. But it lasted for quite a while, and it was really very horrible. And in a sense, when you've been feeling all right for a long time,

you forget how physical and how horrible it is. You forget that you lie there in that state of line panic, unable to sleep for days at a time, or doing nothing but sleep for days at a time. You forget the sense that you're completely helpless in the clutches of it. And I found which was interesting to me. Now that I'm through that episode, I can talk about it very cavalierly, but while it was going on, it felt shameful and

it was very hard for me to speak about it. Yeah, there are a lot of good points in what you said there. I think one of the things I've learned to do is treat recurrent symptoms of depress and I haven't had it to the disabling sense that you describe, but as I've learned to sort of tell myself, I've got the emotional flu, it's a lot like having the flu. I'm like, Okay, this is just gonna go it's something that comes I don't need to reevaluate the entire context

of my life at this moment. I don't need to make a big deal out of it. I just need to write it out and that's been really helpful for me over time. And one of the things that I like a lot there at the end that you said is is that it still is when we're in the midst of it. It is still very difficult and very

shameful feeling. It's easier to talk about it outside of it, but thank you for the work you're doing in talking about it, because people not talking about it and hiding it is one of the worst ways to handle mental illness. For sure. Yes, it is definitely one of the worst ways to handle it. And I think, as I said earlier in the program, that that burden of secrecy adds to the burden of the disease, and that the burden of dealing with both of them at the same time

is utterly overwhelming. I always think about the gay activist Harvey Milk, who, when he was asked by a younger gay mom what he could do to help the calls, Harvey Milk said, go out and tell someone. And I think there has been, in general, a great deal more openness about mental illness, and that as more and more people speak about it more and more openly, the stigma

associated with it gets less. As I said, lessening the stigma doesn't take away the pain of the condition, but not having to deal with the sense of inadequacy that often comes with having depression is definitely astride forward. Definitely. It's it's that Buddhist idea of there's going to be pain, but we layer all these level layers of suffering on top of it. Those the suffering being I shouldn't be having this, there's something wrong with me for having this,

and versus just the actual pain is plenty. If you just leave it at then you have a few different lines that I'm going to read that sort of get to making the best out of these situations. You you say, at one point, we all have our darkness, and the trick is making something exalted out of it. You also say it takes an active will to grow from loss. The disruption provides the opportunity for growth, not the growth itself. And then you also say, if you banish the dragons,

you banish the heroes. Can you talk a little bit about that as a as a way to wrap the show up. Well, I think that people, I say, if you banish the dragons, you manage the heroes, and people become attached to the heroic strain and their own lives.

At least that's more or less. I think that there's something this is, and I think there is the feeling that while none of us choose our specific adversities, that the experience of surviving whenever the adversities are that comes along, that come along give us a sense of resilience and give us a sense of power that living through happy

and joyful experiences on its own can't bring. And there's a lot of intimacy with others and the experience of adversity and in managing to live through the experience of adversity. So there are many people who, for example, faced with having children with these differences and disabilities that I've written about, um really find that they become more attached to those children by virtue of the time they've been with them.

There's a sociologist who once said that we not only care for our children because we love them, but also love them because we care for them, and that that process of taking care of our children is in fact immensely bombed, and our experience of difficulty altogether is where we come to know ourselves. UM. A life that is only luxury and pleasure tends to feel rather hollow and empty. UM. So, as I say, you want to get away from often

from the specific adversity you're conquering. But I certainly feel when I look at my own children and think about what I want for them, that in any single instance I would spare them from an adversity or a painful experience. I try all the time to give them the best life I could, and yet I feel if I were able to protect them entirely from adversity, and if they never had a painful experience, I would not be doing

a good job as a father. Because part of the job as a parent is to teach them resilience, and they can only learn resilience through the experience of difficulty. So you constantly want, in your own life and in the lives of your children to protect them, but also to engage with those difficult moments and to find whatever meaning there is buried in them, and to grow from them. Is there anything you'd like to add on the topic. Of the parable before we wrap up. I think it's

a very powerful and very beautiful um parable. And I've talked a lot in this program about choices, a choice that we make about how to experience our own lives, and I think those choices are choices about which wolf you feed. And I think we have those choices all the time. And I think often in some strange sense,

one wolf feeds the other. That the the encounter with the things that are dark and that are terrible and that are difficult, um is just exactly the thing that gives when the energy to feed the wolf who represents goodness and kindness and virtue excellent. That is a great way to end. Well, thank you very much Andrew for for being on the show. Congrats on your recent success with some of the awards that Far from the Tree has won. And uh, I thank you for the books

my out there. They've been personally valuable to me. So thanks, thank you so much for a pleasure to be with you. Okay, bye bye. You can learn more about Andrew Solomon and this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Andrew. For more information, You can also text the word wolf to four four one four four