If my life had been more difficult, I would understand my depression very differently.

In fact, I had a reasonably happy childhood with two parents who loved me generously, and a younger brother whom they also loved and with whom I got on well.

It was a family sufficiently intact that I never even imagined a real battle between my parents, who loved each other very much indeed; though they argued from time to time, they never questioned their absolute devotion to each other and to my brother and me.

And then in August 1989, when I was 25, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and my world began to crumble.

If she had not fallen ill, if that story had been a little bit less tragic, then perhaps I would have gone through life with depressive tendencies but no breakdown; or perhaps I would have had a breakdown later on as part of a midlife crisis; or perhaps I would have had one just when and as I did.

I will not detail how everything fell apart because to those who have known wasting sickness this will be clear and to those who have not it remains perhaps as inexplicable as it was to me when I was 25.

Suffice it to say that in 1991, my mother died. She was 58. I was paralytically sad. Despite tears and sorrow, despite the disappearance of the person I had depended on so constantly and for so long, I did OK in the period after her death.

I was sad and I was angry, but I was not crazy.

Depression dawns as gradually as adulthood.

It was not until June 1994 that I began to notice I was constantly bored. My first novel had been published in England and yet its favourable reception did little for me. I read the reviews indifferently and felt tired all the time.

I found myself burdened by social events, even by conversation. It all seemed like more effort than it was worth. I began to feel that no one could love me and that I would never be in a relationship again.

I had no sexual feelings at all. I began eating irregularly because I seldom felt hungry. My analyst said it was depression.

A loss of feeling, a numbness, infected all my human relations. I didn't care about love, my work, family, friends.

My writing slowed, then stopped. 'I know nothing,' the painter Gerhard Richter once wrote. 'I can do nothing. I understand nothing. I know nothing. Nothing. And all this misery does not even make me particularly unhappy.'

I was losing my self and that scared me. I made a point of scheduling pleasures into my life.

I went to parties and tried and failed to have fun; I saw friends and tried and failed to connect; I bought expensive things I'd wanted in the past and had no satisfaction from them.

Your senses slowly abandon you in depression. 'There's a sudden point when you can feel the chemistry going,' Mark Weiss, a depressive friend, once said to me. 'My breathing changes and my breath stinks. My piss smells disgusting. My face comes apart in the mirror. I know when it's there.'

For me, this point coincided with the publication of my first novel. A good friend had volunteered to throw a book party for me on 11 October.

I love parties and I love books and I knew I should have been ecstatic, but in fact I was too lacklustre to invite many people and too tired to stand up much during the party.

I remember that party only in ghostly outlines and washed-out colours: grey food, beige people, muddy light in the rooms.

I do remember that I was sweating horribly during it, and that I was dying to leave. No one seemed to notice anything strange. I got through the evening.

When I got home, I began to feel frightened. I lay in bed, not sleeping, hugging my pillow for comfort. Over the next two-and-a-half weeks things got worse. Shortly before my thirty-first birthday, I went to pieces.

My whole system seemed to be caving in. I was not going out with anyone at the time. My father had volunteered to organise a birthday party for me, but I couldn't bear the idea and we agreed to go to a favourite restaurant with four of my closest friends.

On the day before my birthday, I left the house only once, to buy some groceries. On the way home, I suddenly lost control of my lower intestine and soiled myself. I could feel the stain spreading as I hastened home.

When I got in, I dropped the grocery bag, rushed to the bathroom, got undressed and went to bed. I did not sleep much that night and I could not get up the following day. I knew I could not go to any restaurant.

I wanted to call my friends and cancel, but I couldn't. I lay very still and thought about speaking, trying to figure out how to do it. I moved my tongue but there were no sounds.

I had forgotten how to talk. Then I began to cry, but there were no tears, only a heaving incoherence. I was on my back. I wanted to turn over, but I couldn't remember how to do that either.

I tried to think about it, but the task seemed colossal. I thought that perhaps I'd had a stroke and then I cried again for a while.

At about three that afternoon, I managed to go to the bathroom. I returned to bed shivering. Fortunately, my father called. 'You have to cancel tonight,' I said, my voice shaky. 'What's wrong?' he kept asking, but I didn't know.

There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror.

I felt that way hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre.

You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there's a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.

With the depression, your vision narrows and begins to close down. It is like trying to watch TV through terrible static, where you can sort of see the picture but not really; where you cannot ever see people's faces, except almost if there is a close-up; where nothing has edges.

The air seems thick and resistant, as though it were full of mushed-up bread. Becoming depressed is like going blind, the darkness at first gradual, then encompassing; it is like going deaf, hearing less and less until a terrible silence is all around you, until you cannot make any sound of your own to penetrate the quiet.

My father came down to my apartment with a friend of mine, trailing my brother and his fiancée. I had had nothing to eat in almost two days, and they tried to get me to eat a little smoked salmon.

Everyone thought I must have some kind of virus. I ate a few bites, then threw up all over myself. I couldn't stop crying. The next day, I managed, somehow, to get to my analyst's office.

'I think I'm going to have to start taking medication,' I said, diving deep for the words. 'I'm sorry,' she said, and called the psychopharmacologist, who agreed to see me in an hour.

The psychopharmacologist seemed to have come out of some movie about shrinks. His office had fading mustard-coloured silk wallpaper and was piled high with books with titles such as Addicted to Misery and Suicidal Behaviour: the Search for Psychic Economy.

He was in his seventies, smoked cigars, had a Central European accent and wore carpet slippers. He had elegant, prewar manners and a kindly smile.'Well, well,' he said calmly as I trotted out my horrors. 'Very classic symptoms indeed. Don't you worry, we'll soon have you well.'

He wrote out a prescription for Xanax, then burrowed around to find a starter kit of Zoloft. He gave me detailed instructions on how to begin taking it. 'You'll come back tomorrow,' he said with a smile.

'The Zoloft will not work for some time. The Xanax will alleviate your anxiety immediately. Do not worry about its addictive qualities and so on, as these are not your problems at the moment.

Once we have lifted the anxiety somewhat, we will be able to see the depression more clearly and take care of that.'

On my first day on medication, I moved into my father's apartment. My father was almost 70 and most men of that age cannot easily tolerate complete shifts in their lives.

My father is to be praised not only for his generous devotion, but also for the flexibility that allowed him to understand how he could be my mainstay through rough times, and for the courage that helped him to be that mainstay.

He picked me up at the doctor's and took me home with him. I had not brought clean clothes with me, but I didn't really need them as I was hardly to get out of bed for the next week. Panic was my only sensation.

The days were like this: I would wake up, knowing 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.

Killing myself, like dressing myself, was much too elaborate an agenda to enter my mind; I did not spend hours imagining how I would do such a thing. All I wanted was for 'it' to stop. I could not have managed even to be so specific as to say what 'it' was.

Depression, like love, trades in clichés, and it is difficult to speak of it without lapsing into the rhetoric of saccharine pop tunes; it is so vivid when it is experienced that the notion that others have known anything similar seems altogether implausible.

Depression minutes are like dog years, based on some artificial notion of time. I can remember lying frozen in bed, crying because I was too frightened to take a shower, and at the same time knowing that showers are not scary.

I kept running through the individual steps in my mind: you turn and put your feet on the floor; you stand; you walk from here to the bathroom; you open the bathroom door; you walk to the edge of the tub; you turn on the water; you step under the water; you rub yourself with soap; you rinse; you step out; you dry yourself; you walk back to the bed.

Twelve steps, which sounded then as onerous as the Stations of the Cross. But I knew, logically, that showers were easy, that for years I had taken a shower every day and that I had done it so quickly and so matter of factly that it had not even warranted comment. I knew that those 12 steps were really quite manageable.

So with all the force in my body I would sit up; I would turn and put my feet on the floor; then I would feel so incapacitated and so frightened that I would roll over and lie face down.

All over the world people were taking showers. Why, oh why, could I not be one of them?

And then I would reflect that those people also had families and jobs and bank accounts and passports and dinner plans and problems, real problems, cancer and hunger and the death of their children and isolating loneliness and failure; and I had so few problems by comparison, except that I couldn't turn over again, until a few hours later, when my father or a friend would come in and help to hoist my feet back up onto the bed.

I would lie in the safety of the bed and feel ridiculous. And sometimes in some quiet part of me there was a little bit of laughter at that ridiculousness, and my ability to see that, is, I think, what got me through.

Always at the back of my mind there was a voice, calm and clear, that said: don't be so maudlin; don't do anything melodramatic.

Take off your clothes, put on your pyjamas, go to bed; in the morning, get up, get dressed, and do whatever it is that you're supposed to do.

Continued in longer article:  I'm Not Mad. Or Am I?

on the site for his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

Andrew Solomon is interviewed in the PBS documentary
Depression: Out of the Shadows [dvd]

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Andrew Solomon studied at Yale University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1985, and then at Jesus College Cambridge, where he received the top first-class degree in English in his year, the only foreign student ever to be so-honored, as well as the University writing prize.

He is the author of several books, including The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, for which he won a Lambda Literary Award and a National Book Award in 2001, and was a finalist for a 2002 Pulitzer Prize.

He is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He has lectured on depression around the world at various institutions, including Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress.

    > More articles by Andrew Solomon.

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