Brought to you by the Depression Is Real Coalition, The Down & Up Show is dedicated to the reality of depression. Our hosts will talk with some of the world's top experts on depression, as well as people who have been impacted by this illness. The reality of depression is that it is a debilitating and potentially deadly medical condition that affects more than 15 million Americans every year. The other reality of depression is that there is hope.

Andrew Solomon

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 now pursuing a PhD at Cambridge in Social and Political Studies (psychology), working on the relation between biological and psychosocial models of early attachment between mothers and infants. In 1988, he began his study of Russian artists, which culminated with the publication of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost (Knopf, 1991). He was asked in 1993 to consult with members of the National Security Council on Russian affairs and wrote parts of Clinton's first Russia speeches; that year he was also named a Contributing Writer of The New York Times Magazine, a position he held until 2001. His recently reissued first novel, A Stone Boat (Faber, 1994), was a runner up for the LA Times First Fiction prize and was a national bestseller; it has now been published in 5 languages.

Mr. Solomon's most recent book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, has won him fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and is being published in 24 languages. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It has been on the New York Times bestseller list in both hardback and paperback; it has also been a bestseller in seven foreign countries.

He is currently writing a book, to be published in 2008, called A Dozen Kinds of Love: Raising Traumatic Children which deals with how families accommodate children who are deaf, who are autistic, who are prodigies, who have committed crimes, and so on, for which he has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio. He is also working on a comic novel.

He has joined the board of the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign and of the Depression Center of the University of Michigan. He maintains residences in London and New York and is a dual national.