Dinesh's photos with the keyword: The Noonday Demon

The insistence on normality, the belief in an inner logic in the face of unmistakably abnormality, is endemic to depression. It is the everyman story of this book, one I have encountered time after time. The shape of each person’s normality, however, is unique: normality is perhaps as even more private idea than weirdness. . . . .~ ‘Normal’ is a word that haunts depressives. It depression normal? I read of normal groups and depressive groups in studies; of medication that could “normalize” depression; of “normal” and “atypical” clusters of symptoms. One of the people I met during this research said to me< “At first when these symptoms began, I thought I was going crazy. It was a big relief to find out that it was just a clinical depression and that it was basically normal”. It was, of course, basically the normal way to go crazy; depression is a mental illness, and when you are in its throes, you’re crazy as a loon, a bit balmy, a few sandwiches short of a picnic, bats in the belfry.

Internal and external reality exist on a continuum. What happens and how you understand it to have happened and how you respond to it’s happening are usually linked, but no one is predictive of others. If reality itself is often a relative thing, and the self is n a state of permanent flux, the passage from slight mood to extreme mood is a glissando. Illness, the, is an extreme state of emotion, and one might reasonably describe emotion as a mile form of illness. If we all felt up and great (but not delusionally manic) all the time, we could get more done and might have a happier time on earth, but that idea is creepy and terrifying (though, of course, if we felt up and great all the time we might forget all about creepiness and terror).