Support for On Being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the

spiritual foundation for a loving world. Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding

principle and animating force for our lives. A powerful love that helps us live in sacred

relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world. Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

We're increasingly attentive in our culture to the many faces of depression and its cousin

anxiety and we're fluent in the languages of psychology and medication. But depression is

profound spiritual territory and that is much harder to speak about and can only be traced

years onward. It is the shadow side of human vitality and as such teaches us about vitality.

Depression may be possible as Andrew Solomon says for the same reason that love is possible.

This is important reflection for our common life. Like many millions of people, depression is an

essential threat of the life that is mine. And I think depression may be one of the most inadequate

words in our vocabulary. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on Being.

The voices of this hour span rare, brave, and helpful perspective on depression and life.

I spoke with them all more than a decade ago and they feel resonant and important to resurface now.

Anita Barrow is a psychologist and poet. Parker Palmer is a Quaker author and educator. Andrew Solomon

is my first guest. He's a journalist and author of Epic Books. His book The Noon Day Demon,

An Atlas of Depression, Received the National Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

And when I was going through the depression, I had the sense that many of the qualities by which I

defined myself were abandoning me and that I was no longer the person who might previously been.

And yet there was something within me that seemed to stay the same. Something essential remained

at the core and I thought, what is that essential thing?

Andrew Solomon first went public, writing about his depression in the New Yorker magazine in 1998.

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